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Thursday, May 11, 2006

Cafferty on Fire

Posted by on May 11 at 17:15 PM

On CNN, regarding today’s domestic spying revelations. Watch the video here (hat tip to Americablog).

CNN’s WOLF BLITZER: …[some wisdom] from Jack Cafferty in New York.

CNN’s JACK CAFFERTY: I don’t know about wisdom but you’ll get a bit of outrage. We better hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Judiciary Committee, because he might be all that’s standing between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. He’s vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records and yours, and tens of millions of other Americans.

Shortly after 9-11, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth began providing the super secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the war on terror, President Bush says.

Why don’t you go find Osama Bin Laden and seal the country’s borders and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?

The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and he declared the government’s doing nothing wrong and all of this is just fine.

Is it? Is it legal?

Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens? Because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn’t have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation.

Read that sentence again.

A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it’s not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says okay and drops the whole thing.

We’re in some serious trouble here boys and girls.

Here’s the question.

“Does it concern you that your phone company may be voluntarily providing your phone records to the government without your knowledge or permission?”

If it doesn’t it sure as hell ought to.


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After reading that from Jack I half expected a Howard Beale moment.

"'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Then we'll figure out what to do about the depression and the inflation and the oil crisis. But first get up out of your chairs, open the window, stick your head out, and yell, and say it:"

now what would happen if the used this data to charge someone with a crime? terrorism or dealing cocaine, whatever. this information wouldn't be admissable in court, i would assume.

also, i can't wait to see what dahlia lithwick writes about this. she is my goddess.

If only. If only I were in a position to make a stink that people would hear. One of the things that bugs me so much about this are all of the potential misuses of the data. The f'ers in the administration can claim they're not doing anything improper with it, but that's missing the point. I know that the phrase "slippery slope" is, but that's part of what scares the hell out of me.

That, and the possibility that people will discover my affair with a crusty old politician.

The illegal records, and any evidence derived from the illegally obtained records would be excluded in an old fashioned American court of law (they call this the "fruit of the poisonous tree" doctrine), but I rather suspect that anyone the government wanted to investigate on the basis of the records would be hauled off as an enemy combatant and holed up in God knows what forsaken prison. We've been letting them erode our rights for some time now-is it really a big surprise that this is the end result?

Plus, being convicted in court isn't the only bad thing that can happen. There are a lot of ways someone can be harmed by people collecting call data.

Words applicable to administration activities:

Illegal. Unacceptable. Outrageous. Corrupt. Shocking. Egegrious. Disgraceful.

Unconstitutional.

BUSH MUST GO. EVERY...CORRUPT...REPUBLICAN IN CONGRESS MUST GO!

Including Dave Reichert, who says we should "just trust the President".

http://www.nwprogressive.org/weblog/2006/05/nsa-now-spying-on-americans.html

lol. nothing will be done about it. we'll bitch and complain but thats about it.

who's going to volunteer to be the 'tip of the spear' and risk incarceration?

not me.

and neither will any of you.

because we believe in the value of nonviolent protest.

and thats why they get away with it.

-k.

One way centralized data can be misused that doesn't always get enough play is nothing related to snoops in the government getting at it -- it's other people getting at it. Government data security isn't always the greatest, and even if the stuff is behind a genius-hacker-proof firewall all it takes is one bozo getting his laptop stolen at the airport.

Field day for political dirty-tricksters, too.

Simmer down.

It's just phone records of numbers and calls made, not content. If this data had been available before 9/11 and we knew the number of one of the terrorists, we could have ascertained his whereabouts, all without spying on private conversations. This is all public data anyway. Rest assured, your private words arranging a pot deal are not being recorded.

As for the slippery slope, what do you want? No flexiblity whatsoever? Persue your ideology at the expense of catching someone with a dirty bomb? I think not. We have to be practical in the war on terror.

Bite me, Mapleleaf. I'm not worried that someone's going to overhear a pot deal.

The dirty bom example is thrown around way too often, and usually isn't a good metaphor. And I'm sorry (actually, I'm not sorry), but I don't buy the explanation that they could have stopped 9/11 if they had that info. Hindsight is 20/20, and I think it's a lot easier to say that after the fact. Plus, there was info out there that the government could have legally had, without invading our privacy, and it didn't matter.

What do you mean when you say "this is all public data anyway"?

I should have said that it's not your private data. Your phone number is owned by the phone company, and when you use it it's not your private data. No more private than any other business transaction.

This ruckus now is so silly, because the New York Times reported this story last December.

Mapleleaf, I don't think you get the point. No amount of information could've got W off his sorry ass and made him do what it takes to protect this country. The right-wingers are fond of saying "9/11 changed everything", but what really changed everything is Katrina. That's when everyone started seeing for real that these people aren't concerned with our safety. They have no credibility. They simply aren't interested in protecting the country. We can speculate all we want on what their actual motives may be, but our safety & security sure as hell ain't among them.

I heard some intelligence expert say that when the FBI gets "tips" from NSA's surveillance, they were so consistently unreliable, that the FBI agents figured they were more likely to be following up on a call for pizza then a suspicious call.

Mapleleaf: Not only is that information protected, phone companies are legally obligated to keep it secret.

As for why it is important: It is inevitable that the information will be abused for political or personal advantage - especially given the total freedom from any oversight demanded by the Bush administration. And the improper focus on these 'quick fixes' has seemingly resulted in a total lack of attention on other critical areas.

Rest assured, your private words arranging a pot deal are not being recorded.

O RLY?

But Cafferty? Don't tell me you are even watching that idiot?

slowly losing our constitution and our country bit by bit ... like a frog in a pot of water slowly brought to a boil ... soon it may be too late; let us hope it is not already.

Mapleleaf: I'm really curious to know what your motivation is to ask the readers here to 'simmer down'.

Our most powerful police agencies are flouting the law and our representatives in government aren't doing anything about it. It seems to me that it's only if the public 'boils over', like during the post-watergate/post-vietnam period, that we might elect a new batch of representatives with the motivation to restore the protections of due process we are guaranteed under the US constitution.

Qwest apparently asked to see a writ from a FISA court judge authorizing the request for call records, but this was too much legal procedure for the NSA (under then-Chief Admiral Hayden). The NSA apparently dropped their request of Qwest and just went with databases from companies that didn't speak up about a court order.


Meanwhile, we know that several of the 9/11 suicide-killers were under FBI surveillance just before the attack but that various breakdowns between FBI field staff and their superiors prevented a broad mobilization of police resources. Add to this a brand-new regime that largely dismissed the previous adminstration's insistence that the Al-Qa'eda network was the nation's primary security threat.

My point is that lawless, unsupervised secret police agencies and imperial executive powers, do less to bring the nation closer to preventing the next "9/11" than the kind of basic adminstrative competence that follows from public accountability and the rule of law.

At this unprecedented moment of national corruption, criminality and bankruptcy, 'Simmer down' strikes me as just about the most dangerous and unpatriotic advice one could give.

The monster is right in your own town.


Go ask Microsoft how they cooperate with National Security.

Then ask yourself how cool it is that your friends and neighbors work at a corporation making these unsupervised secret police agencies and and imperial executive powers more insidious and efficent?

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