Hmmm…how would someone like George Washington or James Madison react to this phone records fiasco? Food for thought…
HH
[quote]Headhunter wrote:
Hmmm…how would someone like George Washington or James Madison react to this phone records fiasco? Food for thought…
HH[/quote]
They would poke the telephone with a stick a couple of times, then decry it as “black magic” and have it burned at the stake.
[quote]harris447 wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
Hmmm…how would someone like George Washington or James Madison react to this phone records fiasco? Food for thought…
HH
They would poke the telephone with a stick a couple of times, then decry it as “black magic” and have it burned at the stake.[/quote]
Well, these were highly educated men so I don’t think they would anything of that sort.
You know, of course, that I was referring to how they’d react to recording phone numbers they’d called. Would they have protested vehemently or regarded it as acceptable for the purpose of protecting the republic? Maybe there’s an historian on here who’d like to take give us their take.
[quote]harris447 wrote:
Headhunter wrote:
Hmmm…how would someone like George Washington or James Madison react to this phone records fiasco? Food for thought…
HH
They would poke the telephone with a stick a couple of times, then decry it as “black magic” and have it burned at the stake.[/quote]
That was funny. Nice
Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: May 14, 2006
WASHINGTON, May 13 ? In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.
But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency’s strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.
The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear.
As the program’s overseer and chief salesman, General Hayden is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing next week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Criticism of the surveillance program, which some lawmakers say is illegal, flared again this week with the disclosure that the N.S.A. had collected the phone records of millions of Americans in an effort to track terrorism suspects.
By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.
On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.
On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970’s and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.
As in other areas of intelligence collection, including interrogation methods for terrorism suspects, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington took an aggressive view of what was permissible under the Constitution, the two intelligence officials said.
If people suspected of links to Al Qaeda made calls inside the United States, the vice president and Mr. Addington thought eavesdropping without warrants “could be done and should be done,” one of them said.
He added: “That’s not what the N.S.A. lawyers think.”
The other official said there was “a very healthy debate” over the issue. The vice president’s staff was “pushing and pushing, and it was up to the N.S.A. lawyers to draw a line and say absolutely not.”
Both officials said they were speaking about the internal discussions because of the significant national security and civil liberty issues involved and because they thought it was important for citizens to understand the interplay between Mr. Cheney’s office and the N.S.A. Both spoke favorably of General Hayden; one expressed no view on his nomination for the C.I.A. job, and the other was interviewed by The New York Times weeks before President Bush selected the general.
Mr. Cheney’s spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, declined to discuss the deliberations about the classified program. “As the administration, including the vice president, has said, this is terrorist surveillance, not domestic surveillance,” she said. “The vice president has explained this wartime measure is limited in scope and conducted in a lawful way that safeguards our civil liberties.”
Representatives for the N.S.A. and for the general declined to comment.
Even with the N.S.A. lawyers’ reported success in limiting its scope, the program represents a fundamental expansion of the agency’s practices, one that critics say is illegal. For the first time since 1978, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed and began requiring court approval for all eavesdropping on United States soil, the N.S.A. is intentionally listening in on Americans’ calls without warrants.
The spying that would become such a divisive issue for the White House and for General Hayden grew out of a meeting days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush gathered his senior intelligence aides to brainstorm about ways to head off another attack.
“Is there anything more we could be doing, given the current laws?” the president later recalled asking.
General Hayden stepped forward. “There is,” he said, according to Mr. Bush’s recounting of the conversation in March during a town-hall-style meeting in Cleveland.
By all accounts, General Hayden was the principal architect of the plan. He saw the opportunity to use the N.S.A.'s enormous technological capabilities by loosening restrictions on the agency’s operations inside the United States.
For his part, Mr. Cheney helped justify the program with an expansive theory of presidential power, which he explained to traveling reporters a few days after The Times first reported on the program last December.
Mr. Cheney traced his views to his service as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford in the 1970’s, when post-Watergate changes, which included the FISA law, “served to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in a national security area.”
Senior intelligence officials outside the N.S.A. who discussed the matter in late 2001 with General Hayden said he accepted the White House and Justice Department argument that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to approve such eavesdropping on international calls.
“Hayden was no cowboy on this,” said another former intelligence official who was granted anonymity because it was the only way he would talk about a program that remains classified. “He was a stickler for staying within the framework laid out and making sure it was legal, and I think he believed that it was.”
The official said General Hayden appeared particularly concerned about ensuring that one end of each conversation was outside the United States. For his employees at the N.S.A., whose mission is foreign intelligence, avoiding purely domestic eavesdropping appears to have been crucial.
But critics of the program say the law does not allow spying on a caller in the United States without a warrant, period ? no matter whether the call is domestic or international.
“Both would violate FISA,” said Nancy Libin, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group.
Ms. Libin said limiting the intercepts without warrants to international calls “may have been a political calculation, because it sounds more reassuring.”
One indication that the restriction to international communications was dictated by more than legal considerations came at a House hearing last month. Asked whether the president had the authority to order eavesdropping without a warrant on purely domestic communications, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales replied, “I’m not going to rule it out.”
Despite the decision to focus on only international calls and e-mail messages, some domestic traffic was inadvertently picked up because of difficulties posed by cellphone and e-mail technology in determining whether a person was on American soil, as The Times reported last year.
And one government official, who had access to intelligence from the intercepts that he said he would discuss only if granted anonymity, believes that some of the purely domestic eavesdropping in the program’s early phase was intentional. No other officials have made that claim.
A White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said Saturday, “N.S.A. has not intentionally listened in on domestic-to-domestic calls without a court order.”
President Bush and other officials have denied that the program monitors domestic calls. They have, however, generally stated their comments in the present tense, leaving open the question of whether domestic calls may have been captured before the program’s rules were fully established.
After the program started, General Hayden was the one who briefed members of Congress on it and who later tried to dissuade The Times from reporting its existence.
When the newspaper published its first article on the program in December, the general found himself on the defensive. He had often insisted in interviews and public testimony that the N.S.A. always followed laws protecting Americans’ privacy. As the program’s disclosure provoked an outcry, he had to square those assurances with the fact that the program sidestepped the FISA statute.
Nonetheless, General Hayden took on a prominent role in explaining and defending the program. He appeared at the White House alongside Mr. Gonzales, spoke on television and gave an impassioned speech at the National Press Club in January.
Some of the program’s critics have found his visibility in defending a controversial presidential policy inappropriate for an intelligence professional. “There’s some unhappiness at N.S.A. with Hayden taking such an upfront role,” said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and former N.S.A. analyst who keeps in touch with some employees. “If the White House got them into this, why is Hayden the one taking the flak?”
But General Hayden seems determined to stand up for the agency’s conduct ? and his own. In the press club speech, General Hayden recounted remarks he made to N.S.A. employees two days after the Sept. 11 attacks: “We are going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again.”
He said that the standards for what represented a “reasonable” intrusion into Americans’ privacy had changed “as smoke billowed from two American cities and a Pennsylvania farm field.”
“We acted accordingly,” he said.
In the speech, General Hayden hinted at the internal discussion of the proper limits of the N.S.A. program. Although he did not mention Mr. Cheney or his staff, he said the decision to limit the eavesdropping to international phone calls and e-mail messages was “one of the decisions that had been made collectively.”
“Certainly, I personally support it,” General Hayden said.
I’ll say this one more time: How can anyone get upset that the NSA knows what phone numbers they’ve called, given the amount and extent of information we’re forced to give to the IRS?
Not to mention that in the case of the phone numbers, it’s information that you put into the public sphere by providing it to the phone companies, whereas much of the IRS’s information is not public.
And this is beside the real point – I find it difficult to countenance the intellectual dishonesty required to get all worked up about the government collecting phone numbers while simultaneously wanting to empower the government (or applauding the fact that it has been empowered) to make laws concerning things like private clubs, or whether an owner of a building can allow people to smoke inside. Principles matter.
Zeb - and probably nephorm - are the only ones who have any credence to be complaining about phone numbers, because they actually want, to some extent, a federal government with fewer powers, and have supported that with some consistency.
Me - I’ve become something of a pragmatist. We’re not going back to limited government powers anytime soon – too many people want goodies and want to hear that the government is going to string up Ken Lay (look into the enforcement of insider trading laws if you want to worry about governmental abuse of power w/r/t the laws that are passed). So I’ll just ignore the phone numbers and the aggregation of public information because I think it’s inevitable – but I’ll keep fighting for free speech and railing against the IRS and hoping for tax reform.
Good luck with the phone numbers… Politically it’s a losing issue [ Note for clarification: a losing issue to protest against ] and technologically it’s inevitable.
I see that Mark Steyn has made the point better, and in a more entertaining fashion, than I could:
BTW, as to my point on this being a political winner:
[quote]lothario1132 wrote:
I managed to read all the way down to the last line of doogie’s post.
Do I get a cookie? :)[/quote]
The knowledge is your true reward
Zeb,
I don’t have time to waste on a compulsive liar who changes his arguement each time he is proven to be ignorant of the facts. I’m just going take 10 minutes to make a list from this thread of your lies and places where you changed your arguement. Maybe you’ll read it, get down on your knees, and pray to the mighty apparition in the sky to forgive you for your hypocrisy and dishonestly.
From your first post in this thread:
[quote]President Bush and the NSA have indeed overstepped their bounds regarding the protection of American citizens.
Compiling a data base of millions of Americans phone calls is a BLATANT violation of privacy. [/quote]
False. BB pointed out to you that in Smith v. Maryland the Supreme Court already held that you don’t have legitimate expectation of privacy under the 4th amendment in the phone numbers you dial:
“When petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the phone company and “exposed” that information to its equipment in the normal course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal the information.”
Faced with the fact that you were talking out of your ass, you switched your arguement.
[quote]ZEB wrote:
I don’t know enough about the law to absolutely be confident that there was a violation. However, there was certainly a violation of the public trust!
Sometimes what matters more than the law is the public trust. In other words, what is expected and not expected by the citizenry.
[/quote]
It didn’t take long for bigflamer to point out that, in fact, a solid majority of Americans supported the program:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/12/AR2006051200375.html
Having been shown that the program did not constitute any type of violatin of privacy (much less a BLANTANT one) and that a solid majority of Americans supported the program and didn’t see it as a violation of public trust,you turned to arguement number three: the “Joe Average” arguement.
This is the beginning of your slippery-slope arguements, and can be fairly summarized as: No rights are directly violated by this program, but it could possibly be USED wrongly and end up smearing some innocent guy’s reputation. Of course you ignore the fact that this just makes it like EVERY other criminal law we have.
You wrapped up your “Joe Average and the pizza place” fantasy with:
[quote]I fully understand that in the war on terror we as Americans have to make certain sacrifices.[/quote] However, one of those sacrifices should not be the right of privacy.[quote] Nor, should a good man have to sacrifice his good reputation, or peace of mind.
While we hardly live in a police state. Make no mistake about it. This is turning ugly right before our eyes. That Joe Average cannot see the danger yet, is of little solace.[/quote]
Of course, you’d already been shown that nobody is sacrificing any privacy as a result of this law. And now, despite earlier trying to argue against the program by saying it violated what was[quote] expected by the citizenry [/quote], you now decide your fellow citizens aren’t that bright and [quote]that Joe Average cannot see the danger yet, is of little solace[/quote].
So while we aren’t yet in a police state this is turning ugly right before our eyes. That’s because if this program is misused it could ruin someones reputation (or he could be subjected to a full trial by an overzealous prosecutor). Again, just like EVERY other criminal law we have.
You also agreed with FightinIrish when he made his own slippery-slope arguement:
[quote]FightinIrish26 wrote:
It happens slowly, and the rights are eroded over time. That is happening now.
ZEB wrote:
That is the most insightful comment on this thread!
[/quote]
and later added to yours:
A small leap from asking companies to voluntarily turn over lists of all the phone numbers called to completely bypassing the phone companies (who don’t have the capability to record every call made), secretely setting up a system of their own to actually record all of these calls, and then to actually recording them?
Small step? Sure.
Up to here, you’ve changed your reasons for opposing the act twice.
When I asked you or FightinIrish to name a single right you had lost, you responded with:
[quote]Under the current Patriot Act the government can hold someone if they think that that person is a terrorist, or has anything to do with a terrorist. In addition to that the person has no right to contact a lawyer, or even tell his family that he is being held.
You wanted to know what right that we have lost? Well how about the right to call a lawyer if you are being held by a law enforcement agency?
There’s one down.
[/quote]
Those were lies. I pointed out to you that there is no provision of the Patriot Act that just allowed Americans suspected to be terrorists to be held without the right to contact an attorney. The right to hold American citizens as “enemy combatants” stemmed from a 1942 Supreme Court decision.
The next lie you made was a denial of ever using a slippery-slope arguement to say gay marriage might lead to beastiality:
[quote]Now you’re lying, or very mistaken. Please find even one sentence in the many that I have written on gay marriage where I said that gay marriage leads to beastiality.
You won’t find any, so why would you lie. That’s not like you. [/quote]
[I stated that I was going to apologize before I decided to do a quick search, and you responded with, “Don’t be silly, people with your sized ego don’t apologize.” For the record I apologized 24hrs earlier in this thread:
http://www.T-Nation.com/readTopic.do?id=1056969&pageNo=1#1061617
I just like to argue.]
It’s not like me to lie, but it seems to be a lot like you, as you did make the comparison between gay marriage and beastiality three different times in a thread only two months ago.
You soon were combining the tactics of lying and switching arguements in the same post. This was after I showed you the patriot act doesn’t allow Americans to be held just because someone thinks they are a terrorist, nor does it allow Americans to be denied the right to an attorney.
Instead of admitting you were wrong, you pretended you had never even made those lies and went on to make MORE:
[quote]The Patriot Act gives the government the power to access to your medical records, tax records, information about the books you buy or borrow without probable cause, and the power to break into your home and conduct secret searches without telling you for weeks, months, or [/quote]indefinitely.
In response I showed you that the government does have to have probable cause to get a delayed notification search warrant. I also showed you that the government already had the right to use these warrants against drug dealers and the mob, and that the Patriot Act just extended that right to terrorist suspects.
I also showed you that notice is ALWAYS provided, but the REASONABLE delay gives law enforcement time to identify the criminal’s associates, eliminate immediate threats to our communities, and coordinate the arrests of multiple individuals without tipping them off beforehand.
Were you man enough to admit you were wrong? Of course not.
You chose to add even more lies to your growing list:
[quote]It appears that you have a bit of a comprehension problem here (among your anger and ego issues as well).
I stated:
“..the government breaking into your home without notice and in fact not even telling you.”
Meaning that they would not tell you WHEN they did it.
I never stated that they would NEVER tell you.[/quote]
Yes, you did.
Despite your attempt to change your words and meaning, what you actually had said was:
[quote]…and the power to break into your home and conduct secret searches without telling you for weeks, months, or [/quote]indefinitely.
You don’t know what the word “indefinitely” means, but I have the comprehension problem?
You acted offended when I called you lazy for not actually reading the Patriot Act before opposing it. Then you can’t even be bothered to cut and paste what what you actually said.
You are lazy and you are a liar.
I was going to let this last one go, but what the hell. In your first post you wrote:
I’m willing to bet this is a lie, also.
I bet you can’t find even a SINGLE case where the government used RICO to prosecute abortion protestors. RICO was used in civil cases (meaning between private parties) against Operation Rescue, but in 2001 the Supreme Court ruled that couldn’t be done.
If I’m wrong, if you can find a case where the government used RICO to prosecute abortion protestors, I’ll never post in the politics forum again.
If I’m right, if you can’t find even ONE case, all I want is for you to from this day forth read things before you comment on them and to promise to stop and re-evaluate your stance on any issue in which you find yourself in agreement with Vroom, Harris, Hspder, and FightinIrish.
All right, doogie.
You owe me a fucking cookie this time.
Much ado about nothing.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
Marmadogg wrote:
mmmkay…
You are using the administration’s talking points which is par for the course for you.
Please show me where I invoked the 4th amendment in this discussion.
You didn’t – but you were responding to me, in a thread in which my only point has been on the 4th Amendment. See how that works?
BTW, which administration talking points have I covered here? I haven’t really been following their talking points, but I don’t think the likely involved linking to the controlling USSC precedent.[/quote]
You are in the minority on this one…
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
I’ll say this one more time: How can anyone get upset that the NSA knows what phone numbers they’ve called, given the amount and extent of information we’re forced to give to the IRS?
Not to mention that in the case of the phone numbers, it’s information that you put into the public sphere by providing it to the phone companies, whereas much of the IRS’s information is not public.
And this is beside the real point – I find it difficult to countenance the intellectual dishonesty required to get all worked up about the government collecting phone numbers while simultaneously wanting to empower the government (or applauding the fact that it has been empowered) to make laws concerning things like private clubs, or whether an owner of a building can allow people to smoke inside. Principles matter.
Zeb - and probably nephorm - are the only ones who have any credence to be complaining about phone numbers, because they actually want, to some extent, a federal government with fewer powers, and have supported that with some consistency.
Me - I’ve become something of a pragmatist. We’re not going back to limited government powers anytime soon – too many people want goodies and want to hear that the government is going to string up Ken Lay (look into the enforcement of insider trading laws if you want to worry about governmental abuse of power w/r/t the laws that are passed). So I’ll just ignore the phone numbers and the aggregation of public information because I think it’s inevitable – but I’ll keep fighting for free speech and railing against the IRS and hoping for tax reform.
Good luck with the phone numbers… Politically it’s a losing issue [ Note for clarification: a losing issue to protest against ] and technologically it’s inevitable.[/quote]
I don’t think anyone has, or at least I don’t, issues with data mining telephone numbers per se. It’s the potential for abuse for political or personal gain, which re: Plame this administration seems willing to do.
If it is legal, or at least not illegal by the 4th Amendment, this certainly isn’t impeachable or what have you. The administration has also lied repeatedly about the program to the public, perhaps under oath (AG Gonzales) which is a problem distinct from whether it is legal.
I also think it wouldn’t be terribly hard to reconcile beliefs in bans on smoking in bars with believing in some minimum standard of privacy from government intrustion.
[quote]ExNole wrote:
I don’t think anyone has, or at least I don’t, issues with data mining telephone numbers per se. [/quote]
But this whole program is about data mining per se.
[quote]ExNole wrote:
It’s the potential for abuse for political or personal gain, which re: Plame this administration seems willing to do.[/quote]
How so? What are we worried about in terms of phone numbers? Some sort of extortion if someone called a bunch of porn lines?
In any event, the numbers that the NSA got don’t include other identifying information, so any concern like that is minimized (they would have to first find a random pattern, then, after noting that it did not involve a number on the terrorism watch lists, go through and analyze to see if it were potentially useful in some other way – a much more comprehensive and difficult analysis – then identify who originated the calls and see whether that person could provide something “useful” in exchange (while knowing such a use would be extortion).
I find that highly implausible. Of course, that’s just what popped to mind when you suggested the Administration might use the information for personal gain – did you have something else in mind?
[quote]ExNole wrote:
If it is legal, or at least not illegal by the 4th Amendment, this certainly isn’t impeachable or what have you. [/quote]
The only possible illegality that I have seen analyzed would be a possible illegal act by the phone company in turning the numbers over to the government prior to the revisions to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act under the re-enacted Patriot Act. I haven’t seen any analysis implicating the NSA in any illegal activities.
[quote]ExNole wrote:
The administration has also lied repeatedly about the program to the public, perhaps under oath (AG Gonzales) which is a problem distinct from whether it is legal. [/quote]
Please explain – as far as I know, AG Gonazlez referred to two NSA programs in his testimony, of which this is likely the second. And I don’t know the claims that he lied?
[quote]ExNole wrote:
I also think it wouldn’t be terribly hard to reconcile beliefs in bans on smoking in bars with believing in some minimum standard of privacy from government intrustion. [/quote]
I think you could reconcile them as well, provided you’re willing hold that on the one hand, the government should be empowered to step in and tell private parties how to conduct their businesses on property they own, and on the other you don’t think the government should be empowered to collect and aggregate data that’s been put into the public sphere, because that’s just too much power. Perhaps you could work on justification for seatbelt laws, helmet laws, traffic cameras, and empowering bureaucrats to seize all the value of a piece of property by disallowing development under the theory of wetland protection or the Endangered Species Act as well. Though I’d love to see the overarching principle.
[quote]BostonBarrister wrote:
ExNole wrote:
I don’t think anyone has, or at least I don’t, issues with data mining telephone numbers per se.
But this whole program is about data mining per se.
ExNole wrote:
It’s the potential for abuse for political or personal gain, which re: Plame this administration seems willing to do.
How so? What are we worried about in terms of phone numbers? Some sort of extortion if someone called a bunch of porn lines?
In any event, the numbers that the NSA got don’t include other identifying information, so any concern like that is minimized (they would have to first find a random pattern, then, after noting that it did not involve a number on the terrorism watch lists, go through and analyze to see if it were potentially useful in some other way – a much more comprehensive and difficult analysis – then identify who originated the calls and see whether that person could provide something “useful” in exchange (while knowing such a use would be extortion).
I find that highly implausible. Of course, that’s just what popped to mind when you suggested the Administration might use the information for personal gain – did you have something else in mind?
ExNole wrote:
If it is legal, or at least not illegal by the 4th Amendment, this certainly isn’t impeachable or what have you.
The only possible illegality that I have seen analyzed would be a possible illegal act by the phone company in turning the numbers over to the government prior to the revisions to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act under the re-enacted Patriot Act. I haven’t seen any analysis implicating the NSA in any illegal activities.
ExNole wrote:
The administration has also lied repeatedly about the program to the public, perhaps under oath (AG Gonzales) which is a problem distinct from whether it is legal.
Please explain – as far as I know, AG Gonazlez referred to two NSA programs in his testimony, of which this is likely the second. And I don’t know the claims that he lied?
ExNole wrote:
I also think it wouldn’t be terribly hard to reconcile beliefs in bans on smoking in bars with believing in some minimum standard of privacy from government intrustion.
I think you could reconcile them as well, provided you’re willing hold that on the one hand, the government should be empowered to step in and tell private parties how to conduct their businesses on property they own, and on the other you don’t think the government should be empowered to collect and aggregate data that’s been put into the public sphere, because that’s just too much power. Perhaps you could work on justification for seatbelt laws, helmet laws, traffic cameras, and empowering bureaucrats to seize all the value of a piece of property by disallowing development under the theory of wetland protection or the Endangered Species Act as well. Though I’d love to see the overarching principle.
[/quote]
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/federal_source_.html
This link on abc news talks about the government checking reporter’s calls to try to find confidential sources.
Totally unverified, but on a reputable news source (ABC), and an example of how the program could be abused. I’m sure most of big reporter’s phone numbers are known, just plug in their cell # and out comes all the calls associated with it.
-Didn’t Gonzales testify that no domestic eavesdropping or warrantless surveilance was taking place? I may be wrong.
First the data isn’t public in any standard sense. Its not private in the sense that medical records are, but its not as if I faxed ATT I could get a call list for any number I’d like. It’s not protected information, so perhaps its not illegal, but it’s not public.
As for the smoking ban part- the debate here I think isn’t about government power as much as the danger of cigarrettes. There is some minimum amount of danger that must be posed for the government to outlaw something, and we just disagree about whether or not cigarettes pass that test. It’s clear drinking and carrying a cocealed weapon in a bar clearly is too risky. g Drinking itself is not. If cigarette smoke over time is risky enough (to employees more than patrons, no?) to warrant a ban is the question.
The two are qualitatively different.
[quote]ExNole wrote:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/federal_source_.html
This link on abc news talks about the government checking reporter’s calls to try to find confidential sources.
Totally unverified, but on a reputable news source (ABC), and an example of how the program could be abused. I’m sure most of big reporter’s phone numbers are known, just plug in their cell # and out comes all the calls associated with it.[/quote]
Thanks, I’ll look at that later.
[quote]ExNole wrote:
-Didn’t Gonzales testify that no domestic eavesdropping or warrantless surveilance was taking place? I may be wrong. [/quote]
He made some such statement, but he’s a good lawyer and, if you look it up, I’m sure it was caveated to include the first NSA program that was leaked. This one isn’t eavesdropping or warrantless surveillance (both those terms have specific legal definitions in this context, and I think it’s safe to assume the AG was using them as such).
[quote]ExNole wrote:
First the data isn’t public in any standard sense. Its not private in the sense that medical records are, but its not as if I faxed ATT I could get a call list for any number I’d like. It’s not protected information, so perhaps its not illegal, but it’s not public. [/quote]
It’s not private, and it’s public under the 4th Amendment test as to reasonable expectation of privacy.
Perhaps the public should think a little more about the information they provide companies. I deal with commercial agreements and terms of service for a lot of consumer companies that state that the Company owns the data customers provide to them and they aggregate. This means, from the point of view of the consumer, the consumer has no more rational expectation of privacy with respect to such data. And again, this is even more true with respect to “non-content” data like phone numbers or websites visited.
[quote]ExNole wrote:
As for the smoking ban part- the debate here I think isn’t about government power as much as the danger of cigarrettes. There is some minimum amount of danger that must be posed for the government to outlaw something, and we just disagree about whether or not cigarettes pass that test. It’s clear drinking and carrying a cocealed weapon in a bar clearly is too risky. g Drinking itself is not. If cigarette smoke over time is risky enough (to employees more than patrons, no?) to warrant a ban is the question.
The two are qualitatively different. [/quote]
The overarching question is whether the government has the power to regulate in the area at all. Under a classical understanding of the police power, the state governments probably do.
The similarity to this is that you have the government taking an action that is most likely within its power, but it may not have traditionally taken. The question is, which is more intrusive, or sets more of a precedent for government exercising its power in the private arena in a manner that could be abused or interfere with your freedom?
[quote]ExNole wrote:
http://blogs.abcnews.com/theblotter/2006/05/federal_source_.html
This link on abc news talks about the government checking reporter’s calls to try to find confidential sources.
Totally unverified, but on a reputable news source (ABC), and an example of how the program could be abused. I’m sure most of big reporter’s phone numbers are known, just plug in their cell # and out comes all the calls associated with it.
[/quote]
Interesting. Definitely a little bit of hearsay involved. Assuming arguendo that it’s true, I suppose the question is whether such use would rise to the level of abuse - particularly if the government were investigating a possible criminal leak. If the information is such that a warrant would not otherwise be required to obtain it, I don’t think the simple fact the government obtains it via datamining is inherently problematic. This is true in this case especially, as reporters can be ordered by the court to turn over “confidential” sources or go to jail for contempt of court. For a recent example, see Judith Miller, formerly of the New York Times.