Nothing To Hide?

[Lightning Rod]

Nothing To Hide?
for release 05-12-06
Washington D.C.

According to a Washington Post-ABC News poll nearly two-thirds of Americans see nothing wrong with the NSA domestic telephone surveillance program. These suckers prove that there is one born every minute.

Idiots and sheep will tell you, "I don't care if they spy on me, I have nothing to hide." Children, that's not the point. The point is that the government mafia is building the world's largest database containing every phone call or email that you have made in the past four years unless you are lucky enough to have Qwest as your phone provider. The president and his spy boys assure you that they are not actually listening you your calls or reading your emails, only listing them. If you believe that, then I have some beach-front property in Colorado to sell you.

Despite all the protests to the contrary, the government is conducting domestic spying operations. This is both against the law and against the spirit of our Constitution as expressed in the Fourth Amendment.

Suppose you want to call your bookie or your pimp or your dope dealer? Suppose your emails get a bit risque or that you like to dial 1-900 numbers? Well, now you have an audience. Doesn't that make you feel safer and more secure?

The question is not if you have anything to hide, the question is just how far do you want the government up your asshole?

I happen to have friends in Afghanistan, Israel, India, Germany, England, Canada and Mexico. We exchange international calls and emails. Does this put me on the watch-list? We talk about subversive subjects like poetry and music and current events, not about how to improvise explosive devices or hijack a guided missile or import a dirty polygamy bomb. We have nothing to hide, but I still don't want government in my business. Information is power.

So, what is this vast database containing the phone and email records of millions of our citizens to be used for? Oh right, they are going to use it to protect us from terror. Sure. If Osama bin Laden wants to use his AT&T cell phone to call one of his boys at Logan Airport, we want to know about it. Wake up people! They are spying on you, not on Osama bin Laden.

For those of us with memories that go back to the 1960's COINTELPRO comes to mind. This episode is testimony to how the use of information gathered from domestic spying can be used for the most perverse political purposes. The FBI used the product of domestic surveillance to discredit individuals and disrupt organizations that they saw as a political threat -- organizations like the NAACP, the SCLC and individuals like Martin Luther King.

It is not as if the government hasn't long had access to the information in question. The FBI has been tapping phones for years and planting microphones and going through people's trash and all they had to do in order to know what your phone records were was to steal your phone bill from your mailbox. But now it's much simpler for them. All they have to do is key you into the database. No muss, no fuss, no warrants, no court orders, just a click of the mouse and they can look into the soul of your telephone and into the private parts of your emails.

True to the corporo-bureaucratic tradition favored by our government, the NSA has outsourced its information gathering to private industry. In this case AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth and a company called ChoicePoint. In more innocent days the government would have had to use subpoenas and court orders and warrants and other boring procedures to obtain this type of information from a phone company. But as the fear mongers in the Bush government love to remind us, this is the post 9-11 world. The rules have changed and minor things like the Fourth Amendment and due process of law have gone out the window. It is also the post computer world where everything is remembered and recorded.

The Poet's Eye is dripping a tear. How can we preach evangelical democracy to the rest of the world when we don't practice it in our own country? The government shouldn't be listening to our phone calls, we should be listening to theirs.

Every single day
And every word you say
Every game you play, every night you stay
I'll be watching you
--Police

[Dave The Dov]

Ahhhh this will all end come 1-21-2009!!!! It was like this back then and it ended as well!!!! Qwest hmmmm yeah this corperation and the goverment not seeing eye to eye. I doubt that they told them off. They and they have been working together like this ever since they and they first took notice of their power!!!! That and the goverment has eyes out in orbit looking down on us. I think I'll just wave back at them and say watch this if you would please!!!!
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Honda VFR750R

[stilltrucking]

Oh I got plenty to hide. BUt I know I can run but I can't~

Now about that property in Colorado, how much you want for it?

Thanks for the eye balls clay, like a nice hot cup of joe, you always kick start my brain .

[mnaz]

The government shouldn't be listening to our phone calls, we should be listening to theirs.

Every single day
And every word you say
Every game you play, every night you stay
I'll be watching you
--Police

That is dead-on right, LR.

And you quoted the worst song ever written by the Police-- Sting loathed its lyrics so much that he wrote a "counterpoint" song 2 years later-- that song which went something like... "If you LUVV someone, set them free...".... Yeah.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Very nice column, LR.

And here's a little editorial from the SF Chronicle to go with it:

(paste)

EDITORIAL
A government out of control

Friday, May 12, 2006


"THEY HATE our freedoms,'' is one of President Bush's favored rallying cries in the war on terrorism.

More and more, the question is becoming: Which cherished freedoms, precisely, is Bush referring to? His administration's apparent disrespect for what most of us would regard as one of the most fundamental freedoms of all -- a right to privacy -- raises deep concerns about the self-inflicted erosion of our way of life by wide-scale government tracking of phone calls in the name of fighting terrorism.

Once again, Bush has suggested that law-abiding Americans have nothing to worry about. But he's wrong. Voices in both parties in Washington are rightly furious over this latest overstepping of governmental limits.

His administration's National Security Agency has paid three of the largest phone companies -- Verizon, AT&T and BellSouth -- to turn over phone logs by the millions since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. The idea is to turn computer programs loose on this personal data to discover patterns of terrorist activity. It's a quantum leap in federal snooping.

This plan, outlined in USA Today, has provoked a furor. Bush's nominee as CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, was already facing a tough confirmation hearing for his role in pushing an earlier warrantless eavesdropping project on international calls and e-mails. Now Hayden will be on the hot seat for this much larger policy, as he should be.

In justifying the earlier warrantless surveillance, the president said it was necessary in a fast-moving war. He has done the same thing again, wrapping himself in the cloak of fighting terrorism, as important a battle as there is in the world today. But we must never lose sight of what we are supposed to be defending -- a free society.

Collecting tens of millions of domestic phone records represents a dangerous intrusion into Americans' personal lives. No warrant, no legal justification, no checks and balances -- just a straight dive into your everyday phone records.

This domestic intelligence operation shows an insular, secretive White House at its worst. A system to monitor terrorist communications has existed for years, but the Bush team refuses to use it, saying it abridges executive branch powers. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act requires that anti-terrorist eavesdropping be run by a secret court to obtain warrants. Bush has refused to do this.

There's an added wrinkle to the latest revelation. At the time the program was launched, the three phone companies took part willingly. But a fourth company, Qwest, refused to hand over phone data because of privacy concerns. The companies owe their customers an explanation.

But most of all, Bush owes Americans more than glib assurances that our civil liberties are being "fiercely protected." A government keeping track of whom you call, and when you call them, would seem to define an assault on civil liberties.


(SF Chronicle May 14th, 2006)

[Dave The Dov]

I'll say it again this will be over with by 1-21-2009.
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BMW R75/5

[mtmynd]

Apparently the polls on that subject have changed.

Re: http://www.commondreams.org/headlines06/0514-11.htm

and again -
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/eandp ... 1002502415

From what I've read, the WP had mis-categorized the questioning in favor of approval.

But who the hell knows? Listening to Hardball the other day, some of the conservative talking heads interviewed were against it. That was pretty promising.

[Zlatko Waterman]

One more well-written article for the present goulash ( not gulag).

Yes, mtmynd, polls say no one cares. But we ( and LR in his article) care, don't we?

(paste)

From Hobbes To Your Cell: Hail the Surveillance State
by Danny Schechter

Attention, chickens: You may soon be coming home to roost.

The word has gone out in the windowless buildings that house the switching equipment, and state of the art technology—in what used to be called phone companies before they morphed into communication giants—that a day of reckoning may be on the horizon for Verizon and its mates.

These chickens have been clucking at each other and gobbling each other up for years, silently reestablishing the old monopoly Bell System under the guise of new competitive guidelines. Private industries are once again putting together what the federal courts tore asunder. Oligopoly seems to be the highest expression of "free" market logic and its logical consequence.

At issue now are historically unprecedented and massive violations of privacy that we learned about from a rare occurrence: a newspaper actually doing its job. USA Today of all papers, blew the whistle on a massive government surveillance program run by the National Insecurity Agency tapping millions of phones, cell phones and every manner of communications devices.

It's called "data mining" and it's now the scandal du jour as National Security journalist William Arkin explains, "This NSA dominated program of ingestion, digestion, and distribution of intelligence raises profound questions about the privacy and civil liberties of all Americans."

He warns "an all-seeing domestic surveillance is slowly being established, one that in just a few years time will be able track the activities and "transactions" of any targeted individual in near real time."

Knee jerk supporters of the Bush agenda were backhanded in their support. Here's Neil Cavuto on Fox News implying that all of this spying is needed to protect us: "Yes, it is not great to necessarily hear they're collecting our phone records, but it's a heck of a lot better than collecting our remains."

Since this news broke, the Telco companies went into full PR spin mode as the New York Times reported Saturday: "Those companies insisted that the were vigilant about their customers' privacy, but did not directly address their cooperation with the government effort, which was reported on Thursday by USA Today. Verizon said that it provided customer information to a government agency 'only where authorized by law for appropriately defined and focused purposes' but that it could not comment on any relationship with a national security program that was 'highly classified.'"

"Legal experts said the companies faced the prospect of lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages over cooperation in the program, citing communications privacy legislation stretching back to the 1930's. A federal lawsuit was filed in Manhattan yesterday seeking as much as $50 billion in civil damages against Verizon on behalf of its subscribers.'

Unfortunately, buried in all the reporting on the latest juicy scandal at a time of cascading horror stories is something even worse: These same companies, rip-off artists that they are, have their wallets set and lobbyists targeted in taking over the Internet. This felonious attempt by the telcos to control the most powerful communications medium in the world makes the spy scandal a mere misdemeanor.

Note which story is getting most of the attention!

TV pundit Paul Begala made this point on CNN: "Big government is getting into bed with big business. We're talking about AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. AT&T, by the way, wants to take over the Internet and start charging for access to the Internet, which Internet pioneers desperately oppose.

"So, now, if you are running AT&T, and the president of the United States comes to you and says, hey, why don't I spy, why don't I snoop through your files there, and you want him to give you permission to control the Internet, that's a really lousy alliance politically for the Republicans, to be seen as big government in bed with big business."

This collusion between the corporate world and the Busheviks mirrors the pre-war complicity at the FCC between the news networks and the government. The covert quid pro-quo then had the TV nets telling the regulators essentially "you waive the rules and we will wave the flag."

The blogger Billmon raises an even darker specter, writing, "what makes the program so scary, at least to me, isn't the possibility that it was built to serve some sinister purpose, like subverting what's left of American democracy (which is scary enough) but rather that it may be the end product of a national security bureaucracy running completely out of control -- even more so now than during the worst years of the Cold War.

"Rogue actors can still be voted out of office, even impeached. But a rogue Leviathan is another story. Certainly, the details that have come to light about the program so far smack of what can only be described as bureaucratic megalomania: 'It's the largest database ever assembled in the world,' said one person, who, like the others who agreed to talk about the NSA's activities, declined to be identified by name or affiliation. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, this person added.

"It sounds suspiciously like Robert Klein's old standup routine about the late-night TV ad that promises to send you 'every record evermade.'

"I'm certainly no technical expert, but I find it really hard to believe that collecting such a staggering horde – 2 trillion call records since 2001 – will yield useful intelligence about a relatively small and increasingly amorphous network of clandestine operatives who by now have almost certainly learned not to use the phones…"

This surveillance scenario now has a space component as well with the little known National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGIA) watching us from satellites in space.

AP reports: "With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

"Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up and stores.…Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite 'snapshot'' from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one-meter level, which is 3.3 feet."

To Billmon, this increasingly permanent scandal and insidious threat recalls the words of Thomas Hobbes in "The Leviathan" written in 1651.

"It appeareth plainly, to my understanding, both from reason and Scripture, that the sovereign power…is as great as possibly men can be imagined to make it. And though of so unlimited a power men may fancy many evil consequences, yet the consequences of the want of it, which is perpetual war of every man against his neighbor, are much worse."

And I, a mere news dissector have been bombarded with other words, suspicious comments favoring the telecos, infiltrated into my own Mediachannel.org. blog suddenly as show show up on others as well. The spinmeisters are out to cover every base.

The convergence between the telcos and the internet, the broadcasters and the broadbanders is birthing a new media world—one I explore in my book The Death of Media. (Melville) But it’s not just the old media that is at risk. Our democracy is imperiled, and not just by the unchecked power of big government.

The corporate world lurks in the shadows here. They are the “men behind the curtain.” It It is our our job as concerned citizens to take crises like the ones now surfacing and deepen them and raise bloody hell before their new technologies take us backwards into the future.

Hobbes’ Leviathan begat Orwell’s 1984 and Huxley’s Brave New World. His worries are still timely, and, as Billmon intimates, it offers a vision of chickens—and chicken hawks-- playing “gobble, gobble” with our freedoms and our lives.

“Having entrusted their security and their liberties to the beast,” he writes, “Leviathan’s subjects will be lucky not to wind up like Jonah, lodged in its belly.”

News Dissector Danny Schechter is “blogger in chief” of Mediachannel.org. His new books and film are listed at www.newsdissector.org/store.htm. Comments to Dissectoir@mediachannel.org

© 2006 MediaChannel.org

###

[Lightning Rod]

Truck and Z-ko,

These are all great articles and a fitting illumination for the subject at hand. You both consistently add pith (no, I didn't lisp) and breadth to these discussions.

I think that this whole eavesdropping and monitoring story is part of a training program in which we are enrolled unwillingly. Its whole purpose is to accustom us to the idea that we are constantly being watched. I refer you to my column on the Panopticon a few weeks ago. I loved your comments on that one, Jack.

[Zlatko Waterman]

Right you are. LR.

Orwell was afraid people in the future would be forcibly prevented from reading history.

Now that measure is decidedly unnecessary.

No one reads history.

No one sees a need to have speech protected or private because no one has anything to say. We are a receptor-consumer society.

As a student of mine unwittingly ( and he had few wits, believe me) summed it up long ago:

"I like watching television. It tells me what to buy . . ."

Yep, ideas, cars, roast beef sandwiches and prescription drugs.

Have you asked your doctor whether KNOWNOTHING is right for you?



Zlatko

[iblieve]

Since the early seventies I have seen many of my freedoms vanish. You know when I was a kid and got pulled over I could refuse to let them search my car until they brought a warrant and they couldn't check the passenger's ID, those days are gone. We use to get stoned, stash our shit in the woods, and ride through town just to get pulled over. The we would act all paranoid and keep looking at the trunk till they sent for a judge to get a court order, see in the south judges go fishin’ on Saturdays. Anyway after bringing the judge in, getting a warrant, and finding nothing they left us alone. Now a days they can search your car and you at will by saying you acted suspicious, hell I have long hair and an attitude, I always look suspicious. Many more of our rights have bit the dust but no one but me seems to mourn their passing. So now they want my phone records, fuck it, I don't care I’ll just write another nasty bush poem and exploit my last freedom, freedom of speech while I still have it. Still waiting for that invading horde to rescue my ass. LMFAO
"C"

[Dave The Dov]

Time to bring back those days!!!!
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Australian Forum