Reply
Sat 13 May, 2006 08:52 am
Three cheers for my phone company, Quest!---BBB
Several polls indicate that many people are not that concerned by the NSA's program. I was more than just surprised about this, since in my homecountry similar would lead to a big government crisis. At least.
Government has long history of abusing personal information
Posted on Fri, May. 12, 2006
Government has long history of abusing personal information
By Ron Hutcheson
Knight Ridder Newspapers
WASHINGTON - President Bush has assured Americans that their government isn't spying on them, but history explains why many remain uneasy about this week's news that their phone records have been turned over to federal agents.
The government has a long track record of abusing personal information that's gathered in the name of national security. From the Red Scare in the 1920s to illegal wiretaps during the Nixon era, Americans have struggled to find the right balance between individual rights and collective security.
"The potential for abuse is awesome," a Senate investigation committee concluded in a 1976 report detailing illegal wiretaps, break-ins and other abuses that government agents committed in the 1960s and `70s.
The Senate panel, known as the "Church committee" after its chairman, Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, warned that technological advances would make it even harder for the government to stay within acceptable limits of respecting privacy rights, especially when the nation is at risk of attack.
"In time of crisis, the government will exercise its power to conduct domestic intelligence activities to the fullest extent. The distinction between legal dissent and criminal conduct is easily forgotten," the committee wrote. "In an era where the technological capability of government relentlessly increases, we must be wary about the drift toward `big brother government.'''
The government has been collecting and storing information on its citizens since at least 1912, when the Bureau of Investigation, the forerunner to the FBI, recruited waiters, socialites and other well-placed individuals to eavesdrop on conversations and report any suspicious talk.
By the Red Scare in the 1920s, when the government made large-scale arrests of radicals and leftists in the wake of communists taking power in Russia, the bureau had assembled a rapidly expanding database of more than 150,000 names.
Abuses over the years cross party lines and political ideologies. Franklin Roosevelt wanted a file on Americans who sent him critical telegrams. Lyndon Johnson asked the FBI to get him the phone records of Republican vice presidential candidate Spiro Agnew.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy, remembered today as a champion of the underdog, approved wiretaps on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Nearly every recent president has ordered questionable "name checks" - a search of FBI files for any damaging information - on political opponents.
During the Nixon administration, a name check on journalist Daniel Schorr backfired when the FBI misunderstood its instructions and conducted a full background investigation, including interviews with Schorr's associates. White House officials, desperate for a cover story to explain the FBI probe, made the improbable claim that Schorr had been under consideration for a government appointment.
The Church committee concluded that few politicians can resist the chance to gather information on their enemies, and few intelligence-gatherers can resist pressure to please the president. There has been no evidence so far that any phone records the government has collected recently in its search for terrorists have been misused, but that's small comfort to civil libertarians.
"It's about human failings, human failings amplified by technology," said Lee Tien, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil liberties group. "Men are not angels. Our Constitution was written by people who understood that human nature has many flaws."
In some cases, intelligence-gatherers try to use the information they collect against their enemies. In one of the most notorious examples, FBI director J. Edgar Hoover launched a campaign to discredit King that included an attempt to get him to commit suicide.
After gathering evidence of King's extramarital affairs, the agency sent a compilation of incriminating audiotapes to King's wife and sent him a note suggesting that he take his own life.
"King, there is only one thing left for you to do. You know what it is. ... You are done. There is but one way out for you. You better take it before your filthy fraudulent self is bared to the nation," the note said.
Bush's defenders say the current controversy bears no resemblance to past abuses and is being blown out of proportion.
"Let's talk about this in a rational way. We're in a war with terror and there are people out there that want to kill us," said Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala. "I don't think this action is nearly as troublesome as it's being made out. They're not tapping our phones and getting our conversations."
The government is using the phone records for data mining, the process of searching through a large volume of information to find useful patterns, in this case, evidence of terrorist communications.
"The problem isn't data mining. It's the people who do it," said Daniel Larose, a statistics professor at Central Connecticut State University and the author of "Data Mining Methods and Models." "It's easy to do badly. Humans tend to see patterns where no patterns exist. They might classify someone as suspicious who doesn't deserve suspicion."
Larose, who has written two other books on the subject, said data mining was like a knife. "You can use it to cut your birthday cake," he said. Or "you can use it to murder somebody in an alley."
BBB, i've noticed that cell phone records are not specifically mentioned, although AT&T & Verizon have cellular networks. does this mean that the goverment didn't request cell phone records?
It could be the way the questions were worded.
Quote:A Washington Post/ABC News poll on the National Security Agency (NSA) program to collect phone call records of tens of millions of United States residents -- conducted on May 11, the same day the program was first publicly disclosed -- asked respondents: "It's been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?" According to the poll, 63 percent of respondents found the program acceptable.
However, the poll question affirmatively claimed that the NSA is not "listening to or recording the conversations" captured by the data collection program. This statement suggests -- falsely, according to the Post itself -- that the data collection program is separate from the NSA's warrantless domestic eavesdropping program, first publicly revealed by The New York Times in December 2005. In fact, according to a May 12 Post article, the two programs are directly linked: "Government access to call records is related to the previously disclosed eavesdropping program, sources said, because it helps the NSA choose its targets for listening. The mathematical techniques known as 'link analysis' and 'pattern analysis,' they said, give grounds for suspicion that can result in further investigation." In other words, according to The Washington Post itself -- and contrary to the poll question -- the NSA might well be "listening to or recording the conversations" of at least some Americans as a direct result of its analysis of the phone record data the NSA is collecting.
Moreover, as Media Matters for America has noted, the Post reported on February 5 that according to "current and former government officials and private-sector sources," intelligence officers used the program to eavesdrop "on thousands of Americans in overseas calls" but "dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat."
Both the Post and ABC News posted the results of the poll online (here and here, respectively). A May 12 ABC News online article on the poll reported that it lends "support to the administration's defense of its anti-terrorism intelligence efforts," and the May 12 edition of ABC News' online political newsletter, The Note, proclaimed:
Senators [Arlen] Specter [R-PA] and [Olympia] Snowe [R-ME], Sunday morning pundits, reporters from the Nation's Newspaper and the nation's newspapers, and all MOCs [members of Congress] with "(D)"s after their names want to know more about the domestic telephone record harvesting that the Bush Administration apparently has engaged in.
The American people and [White House press secretary] Tony Snow, however, just might know as much as they want to know about it.
On the May 12 edition of MSNBC News Live, Washington Post polling director Richard Morin, when asked to compare the results of this poll to polling conducted in December 2005 on the domestic surveillance program, responded:
MORIN: Actually, these are a little more positive in favor of the program than the survey we first did on the NSA eavesdropping investigation. Americans seem to be more willing to accept this because it doesn't involve people reading their e-mails or listening in to their telephone calls. Just collecting their phone records.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200605120005
But even if they do support it, it don't make it right. We have laws in this country regarding our privacy and the president is going around them which isn't right. We shouldn't have to just trust the government is not going to abuse our rights.
For what its worth; an update on a poll of what Americans think of the NSA spying.
Quote:May 13, 2006 - Has the Bush administration gone too far in expanding the powers of the President to fight terrorism? Yes, say a majority of Americans, following this week's revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA's surveillance program "goes too far in invading people's privacy," while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12771821/site/newsweek/
I hope this stays on top of the news for many more months, because it will bring down Bush's performance rating further south. Nothing could be better right now; the worst president in US history ended with a approval rating of 9 percent - all fundamentalist christians/neocons.
Stumble It!
Tweet This
Bookmark on Delicious
Share on Facebook
Share on MySpace