^^ Good informative post Opus, thanks.

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quote:

Originally posted by donnybrasco You're all suffering from "Chicken-Little Syndrome". You never stop to consider; A.) This IS a necessary tool for fighting terrorism in the communication age.

Obtaining phone records of 50 million Americans helps fight terrorism? Are 50 million Americans somehow related to al Qaeda? See, according to this President:

quote:

"The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval," said Bush, without confirming the program of the National Security Agency. "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans." http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060511...HNlYwN5bmNhdA--

But according to our AG Gonzales' testimony:

quote:

In response to a question from Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) during an appearance before the House Judiciary Committee, Gonzales said the government would have to determine if a conversation was related to al-Qaeda and crucial to fighting terrorism before deciding whether to listen in without court supervision. "I'm not going to rule it out," Gonzales said, referring to the possibility of monitoring purely domestic communications. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6040600764.html

According to Bush:

quote:

"Our intelligence activities strictly target al-Qaida and their known affiliates," Bush said. "We are not mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans." http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/05...s.ap/index.html

So 50 million Americans must somehow be tied to al Qaeda then, right?

But let's also not forget what Bush's new CIA pick, General Hayden once said:

quote:

I have met personally with prominent corporate executive officers. (One senior executive confided that the data management needs we outlined to him were larger than any he had previously seen). [...] And last week we cemented a deal with another corporate giant to jointly develop a system to mine data that helps us learn about our targets. http://www.nsa.gov/releases/relea00072.html

So is this data mining or isn't it, dear fearless leader?

quote:

B.) Why the hell could the government possibly care about your personal phone calls if you're not a terrorist?

Why the hell does Bush believe his greatest moment as the President was catching a 9 lb trout? Who the fuck knows what this dipshit is thinking, but it is truly the 64 million $ question as to what our Admin. is up to here.

quote:

They may know about them,

Know about them? They fucking requested them.

quote:

but do you really think they're going to follow up on who you're calling and why? MILLIONS of Americans? Making calls EVERY DAY!?

That's the idea behind data mining, yes.

quote:

They're only interested in terrorists calling patterns. They aren't going to do anything about the vast majority of your calls, even if you did make calls to "976-I-LIKE-BIG-BUTTS".

Straw man. If it violates FISA laws or any current communications laws that I outlined previously, then it's irrelevant as to what exactly they are searching for or why. It's still wrong.

But to take the argument to the point of absurdity, surely you wouldn't mind having a U.S. Marshall in your house to watch and listen to everything you do, do you? I mean, you're not violating any laws, right? Then I know you wouldn't object to having a physical presence of our government intruding on every action you make.

Because they are after terrorists, so no worries.

quote:

It's absurd and idioctic to worry about things which like this "prying" in to your "privacy". The government can barely keep up with what the terorists are doing.

That lies solely on the utter and complete failures of this Administration not knowing the first fucking thing about national security and how to aptly protect American citizens without violating our inherent Constitutional rights and liberties.

quote:

Do you really think they care what you're doing, no matter how weird or perverted it is?

I honestly don't know, and therein lies the problem - not one fucking person knows because this fucking GOP Congress along with this Administration has stonewalled the crap out of any investigation in the matter. We know jack shit about it because Senator Roberts and other compliant GOP Congressmen have failed to examine the legal ramifications into all NSA domestic spying matters.

So forgive me for asking the exact same question as you, but only directing it at the source of the problem (this Administration), rather than the public which has not one fucking thing to do with the problem in the first place.

___________________
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quote:

Originally posted by donnybrasco GH Boy; I'm actually very big on civil liberties.

Everything you have said up to this point has clearly demonstrated otherwise.

quote:

But there is nothing here that is being trampled.

If you were actually as big on civil liberties as you claim, you would at least want more information on the program rather than immediately cowtow to the Bush apologists' points on the matter. The slightest possibility of civil liberties being compromised sets off more civil libertarians than I can count, and you certainly do not demonstrate such behavior as of yet.

quote:

They have to keep records in case they get a hit on someone and have to go back to find out who that person called. And I don't care HOW many degrees of seperation you think there are, but I can assure you that if anyone has terrorists for friends or any friends who would be friends with terrorists, then that person needs to be checked out!

I'm glad you can assure me of this. I sure feel better with your assurance.

Thanks for assuring me.

quote:

Did you forget that prior to 9-11 the Intel Community had a number of the hijackers on their watch lists, but they missed a chance to do anything about them...and why? Because they are so over-loaded with intel that they can barely keep up with watching who they are supposed to watch...let alone prying in to the private lives of ordinary citizens when there is no sign of terrorist activity going on anyway.

Funny, I didn't forget that. In fact, I didn't know it. In fact, neither did the NSA:

http://www.epic.org/privacy/wiretap...fisa_stats.html

You see, the NSA already had the ability to read our mail/emails and listen to our phone conversations prior to 9/11 - they simply needed to obtain a FISA warrant to do so. Although the burden of proof was relaxed post-9/11 to obtain those warrants, the FISA court rarely if ever rejected such requests. Between the years 1979-2002, the FISA courts issued 15,264 surveillance warrants and NOT ONE REQUEST WAS REJECTED. Nothing in pre-9/11 times prevented our government from conducting surveillance ops on terrorists.

Let's also keep something else in mind:

quote:

“The law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the program had uncovered no active Qaeda networks inside the United States planning attacks. ‘There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States,’ the former F.B.I. official said.” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/p...agewanted=print

And let's also keep in mind on that argument you Bush apologists make about how this domestic spying program spies only on those with clear links to al Qaeda:

quote:

“F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs said intelligence officials turning over the tips ‘would always say that we had information whose source we can’t share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Qaeda operative.’ He said, ‘I would always wonder, what does “suspected” mean?’ ‘The information was so thin,’ he said, ‘and the connections were so remote, that they never led to anything, and I never heard any follow-up.’” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/p...agewanted=print

Sure sounds like some great links to al Qaeda, don't it? It sure was a limited and concentrated effort on terrorists, wasn't it?:

quote:

“In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. […] ‘We’d chase a number, find it’s a schoolteacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed,’ said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. ‘After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.’” http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/17/p...agewanted=print

Got any more bullshit you want to shovel for this Administration? Keep 'em comin........

quote:

This is a an attempt to make something out of nothing. *yawn*

Then why stop any and all investigations dead cold into the matter?

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
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I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

Since we seem able to quote the likes of Powerline, I feel that Hunter over at DKos hit a pretty relevant counterpoint to consider in terms of the timeline of events. The reason I say this is because as this NSA scandal unfolds, he nails it to the "T" on those folks here who've defended Bush's actions every step of the way:

quote:

Thumbing through the usual right-wing media sources as they desperately vow that this, too, is absolutely no big deal and in fact entirely reasonable, I was struck by just how assured they were that massive data mining of the telephone calls of all American citizens was a perfectly normal thing to expect, just like government demands to turn over large numbers of Google searches, or government notions that if an American was accused of consorting with terrorists, the Constitutional protections of representation and evidence no longer applied. We seem to have had four distinct periods to this domestic espionage story: 1) We first were told the U.S. government was spying on al Qaeda. Well, duh. I would hope so. (As far as I'm concerned, the NSA should break into every al Qaeda call with little farting sounds, just to see if we can get them into slapfights with each other. I'd like to hear fake-Osama singing the Monty Python "Spam" song.) This, everyone agreed, was no big deal. Nobody gives two bits: it requires a FISA warrant, and those warrants can even be granted after the fact, and those warrants are in fact always granted, and there is no controversy about it. It is not only necessary for the war on actual terrorists, but is a microscopically limited program. 2) But we then learned that it wasn't al Qaeda, it was "international communications" in general: telephone conversations that began and ended at two foreign points. Using data mining, not just the calls of the suspected terror-connected were being intercepted, but the calls between individuals with no known connections with terrorism, in an effort to look for patterns and words ostensibly indicative of terrorism. And, we were assured, this was no big deal, because FISA law is too cumbersome to be followed when you are talking about intercepting tens of thousands of calls on a giant, worldwide fishing expedition, and after all, the president assured us, they were not spying on Americans, only foreigners. And Constitutional rights do not apply to those foreign types, although some people questioned whether or not such a buckshot approach was causing so many false positives as to be hindering law enforcement efforts. But, after all, this is necessary for the war against supporters of known terrorists, and it is a very limited program. Don't presume this to be a big deal. 3) Then we learned that it wasn't exactly just all phone calls between international sources, but calls beginning or ending in the United States, too. Though in direct conflict to previous assertions, this, we were told, was also just fine; we were told that the only people who had anything to fear were the terrorists. We wouldn't dare conduct searches of the records of U.S. citizens that had nothing to do with terrorism: only the guilty were being spied on. It is necessary for the war on people who might be acquainted with the supporters of possible terrorists, and it is a limited and quite sensitively conducted program. Don't be paranoid, the rest of you aren't being affected. 4) Then we learned that it isn't about foreign vs. international calls at all. It's all calls. Your calls, my calls, the calls of politicians, of reporters, of government officials, by the tens of millions. Purely between Americans. They're all stored by a government agency in an ostensible attempt to "data mine" that information for, it is said again, potential ties between you and the terrorists. But don't worry, the president tells us, the government would never misuse the data files they've collected on tens of millions of Americans. Don't be silly. This frog seems fairly well boiled, at this point, doesn't it? So here's a question for the community. And am I right in assuming that, if we looked, we could find administration officials and right-wing pundits vowing up and down at each stage that the next stage was a complete impossibility, a mere fabrication of paranoid minds? And what will be the next revelation that we're told, by the _exact same government sources and partisan hacks that assured us none of what we now know to be happening was happening? That the White House or other government agencies, say, have been sporadically requesting call data for specific individuals? Say, Christianne Amanpour? Richard Clarke? Dana Priest? Of course not. Don't be silly. This is a very limited program. http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2006/5/11/202649/737

Given our own timeline of events here in this forum, does this not sound about right for how our conversations have unfolded with Powerline/Captain's Quarters supporters?

___________________
Whence September dusk grows crisper still,
with leaves all crimson conquered,
I yearn to shout,
and dance about,
and stick pickles in my honker...

Thank god for Mister Opus1, because after finishing the first page, I thought everyone on this board had gone completely insane.

BTW, you guys are familiar with voice recognition software, right? You know, the stuff that people use to dictate Word documents on their computers and with their cell phones to avoid pressing too many buttons. You don't think that the NSA has much more advanced technology, so that they can completely go through your entire call without any manpower at all. I'm sure it can spit out every instance of not only when someone makes a terror threat, but also when someone bashes the president (or expresses that they wished he were dead, which at this point, a lot of people do), makes a drug deal, etc. depending on what they want to find. Now some of you may say, well, these people want the president dead, so they could kill him, so it's cool with us. Or these people are committing illegal drug trades, so screw them. The problem is that it doesn't have to stop there.

THIS IS A DANGEROUS PRECEDENT to set, which is THE reason I'm so opposed. If you call people/businesses that vocally don't like the president, you could be screwed. What about confidential informants for newspapers? Wouldn't it have been great if Tricky Dick was able to know who Deep Throat was because he could get the NSA database to tell him who had called Woodward and Bernstein's number? Then he could have had them whacked before details were disclosed and no one would have been the wiser. How about the confidential informants shedding light on all these travesties that are being committed now? Wouldn't it be great if they could just track who called the reporter breaking the story and deal with them?

This is an egregious violation of our civil liberties. Why not they just tear certain amendments from the Constitution and declare what corrupt fucks run this nation? Warrants, who the hell needs warrants? We're the government and we can do whatever we want to "fight terrorism" and don't try to stop us, because we won't give you any information to attack what we're doing because you don't have clearance. You people who support this prick's misguided war on terrorism(who noticeably don't even LIVE IN AREAS THAT WOULD BE AFFECTED, like Dallas and VA Beach) make me disgusted, because I know that there are a lot of people out there who think like you. You think, "I don't do anything wrong, so it's not my problem." You fail to realize that it is your problem, because it's just further erosion of principles and precendents and one of these days, it could be you who is targeted by a personal attack. If it's allowed to start, who knows when and with what type of info it'll stop. You do realize that IF this is allowed to become precedent, and DEMOCRATS get into office, they could use the same info at Bush's hands to destroy their opponents, which could be you.

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Mr. Opus;

So what is your suggestion? That we keep it "business as usual" when it comes to how we gather intel? Because it worked so well prior to 9-11?

They're not even listening in on calls yet when it comes to this issue. This is simply a matter of looking for suspicious call patterns. THEN they would act on that info.

By your own admission, you don't even know what you're worried about when it comes to this tool of the intel community, which to me, makes your argument pointless.

If the administrations argument is that they need it to fight terrorism (which is 100% completely believable) and you have no real argument at all to refute this claim, then it's kind of a no-brainer as to who I'm going to side with on this one.

I don't want to die for some collegiate, theoretical, liberal idealisms. This is a real world, war-time scenario we have here, and this wouldn't be the first time that peace-time philosophies were usurped during times of strife for the safety of the people as a whole in the long run.

There are times that you just have to put your trust in your government. Who else are you going to put it in? Al Queda?

quote:

Originally posted by donnybrasco Mr. Opus; So what is your suggestion? That we keep it "business as usual" when it comes to how we gather intel? Because it worked so well prior to 9-11?

Apparantly it did since they issued reports about a possible attack for that day.

^^^But it wasn't a strong enough report to have stopped it.

More intel can't hurt, especially if it's more focused and of better quality.

quote:

Originally posted by donnybrasco ^^^But it wasn't a strong enough report to have stopped it. More intel can't hurt, especially if it's more focused and of better quality.

Well, I suppose it wasn't...

More intelligence would be a wonderful thing from what I can see. My major concern is that the United States is moving towards a less free country in the name of security. We've all heard that statement before, but I do not think that many people are aware of how real this could happen. I believe that the changes from freedom to security will be extremely subtle and over a long period of time. I realize that many people are afraid of terrorist activities but do you truly think that having millions of telephone numbers is going to help? Is the increase in security worth losing another inch of your privacy and freedom? I'm truly interested in your response, and would be glad to do some furthur reading on this topic.

I've always taken pride in the fact that the US government, although somewhat corrupt and wasteful, allowed more freedom and privacy than so many other countries. I would deeply disturbed to find out that I could no longer be proud of that.

so much for living in a free country.Where is the democracy now?


god bless canada and for our freedom.

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donny donny donny *shakes head* do you listen to yourself sometimes? here you are, once again bashing so-called \"liberal\" idealisms; do you really know anything about libertarian thought at all? theyre much closer than you seem to think!

you also havent refuted anything opus has said either re the (il)legality of the US government's behaviour.

quote:

Originally posted by donnybrasco I don't want to die for some collegiate, theoretical, liberal idealisms. This is a real world, war-time scenario we have here, and this wouldn't be the first time that peace-time philosophies were usurped during times of strife for the safety of the people as a whole in the long run.

so, what are your troops dying for then? i thought these idealisms were exactly what its worth dying for? freedom of the citizenry is in itself a very problematic ideal, yet its exactly this freedom that sets the western world above and beyond (imo) the rest of the world. yes, theres a delicate balance between security & privacy, but how can you put such faith, as a supposed libertarian, in a government that has been so dishonest in so many of its dealings? not to mention what these activities could mean to future governments- youve got to think about these issues in a much broader scope than just the current political climate.

at the end of the day rights of citizens can and are abused by bad people the world over, but thats the price you pay to protect & allow greater freedoms for those that use them wisely. i dont wish anyone to die from future terror attacks (in any country), but where do you draw the line on how far youre willing to oppress your people in order to protect them?

i wouldve thought, given the US' patchy record when it comes to spying & civil rights, you would be a lot more skeptical of your government's acitivities than you seem to be.

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