All phone calls in the US are recorded and accessible to the government, claims former FBI agent

UK Daily Mail ^ | May 5, 2013 | DAILY MAIL reporter

[S.O.S121.500]

Maybe they have me down as a harmless crackpot.

---

Is a good disguise.

[Slyfox]

The only thing I have ever bombed has been good jokes.

[S.O.S121.500]

That is an even better disguise......”Once you have them by the funny bone, their hearts and minds soon follow.”

Personal slogan.
<(”)

[Slyfox]

Cool.

[cuban leaf]

Besides, anything broadcast can be intercepted by a third party.

---

Yep. However, that simple fact does not give the phone company permission to record your voice communication.

The big problem with this is that if they record, law enforcement can do “subpoena” time travel. Everything you’ve ever said on a private phone call could be used at some future date against you. Even what may have been, at the time, playful joking around, could be used at some future date to impeach your character.

I’m also amazed that companies are required by law to save all emails but not watercooler conversations or meeting contents.

It absolutely smacks of totalitarianism. Does it help law enforcement? You bet. But then, the USSR and Nazi Germany did that sort of stuff to help “law enforcement” too. It doesn’t mean its broad impact on the culture and individual freedom is worth it though.

[Fresh Wind]

I need to include “bless his heart” whenever speaking of hussein.

"Peace be upon him" is more appropriate.

[The Working Man]

Well, if it’s true that they record everything, the data storage must be... nearly unimaginable. I wonder where they keep it all?

[FreedomPoster]

>>Just convert the speech to text and assign it to phone numbers and times.

How much have you played with Siri or the TTS in Google Voice?

[Daffynition]

[Spartan302]

Watch the social networks adopt a new style of terminology, calling your best friend a “bomber”, replacing terms with terrorist watch words.

matter of fact I would dearly love to record a message, put it on a recording, place cell phone in an isolated area with a hidden camera nearby and then have it make an innocent call but it spends 5 minutes paraphrasing every terrorist code word.

[null and void]

You nearly exactly captured what I'm trying to say.

By "anything broadcast can be intercepted by a third party", I mean the the phone company need have no involvement whatsoever in monitoring cellphone, cordless phone, or any communication that gets transmitted at any point via satellite or microwave link.

You did do me one better: Even what may have been, at the time, playful joking around, could be used at some future date to impeach your character.

Fatty Arbuckle.

[null and void]

So if the feds have been doing this on a grand scale for years, why have they never foiled any plots?

I wouldn't assume that there were no plots foiled.

Rather that panic the sheep, or alert the hyenas, I'd bet a lot of would-be jihadis are in jail on other charges or died in "traffic accidents"...

[null and void]

Yep.

Republicans create the tools of oppression and Democrats use them. Gun confiscation enables tyranny.

[null and void]

If this is the case and such monitoring was negotiated through a treaty with the Brits, this would be an abuse of federal government power to negotiate treaties imo.

I rather doubt it is anything so formal and as well documented as a treaty, it's just an understanding...

[null and void]

Even if they can record all phone calls then what? What are they doing with all that info on everybody? they're certainly not using it for anything even if they know how to utilize the information they might have.

"The chase continues north in the city! Police helicopters are converging on Avenue 87 and Elm Grove Park!"

Granger nodded. "They're faking. You threw them off at the river. They can't admit it.

They know they can hold their audience only so long. The show's got to have a snap ending, quick! If they started searching the whole damn river it might take all night.

So they're sniffing for a scape-goat to end things with a bang. Watch. They'll catch Montag in the next five minutes!

"But how--"

"Watch."

The camera, hovering in the belly of a helicopter, now swung down at an empty street.

"See that?" whispered Granger. "It'll be you; right up at the end of that street is our victim. See how our camera is coming in? Building the scene. Suspense. Long shot.

Right now, some poor fellow is out for a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very usable indeed. It saves face. Oh, God, look there!"

The men at the fire bent forward.

On the screen, a man turned a corner. The Mechanical Hound rushed forward into the viewer, suddenly. The helicopter light shot down a dozen brilliant pillars that built a cage all about the man.

A voice cried, "There's Montag! The search is done!"

The innocent man stood bewildered, a cigarette burning in his hand. He stared at the Hound, not knowing what it was. He probably never knew. He glanced up at the sky and the wailing sirens. The cameras rushed down. The Hound leapt up into the air with a rhythm and a sense of timing that was incredibly beautiful. Its needle shot out.

It was suspended for a moment in their gaze, as if to give the vast audience time to appreciate everything, the raw look of the victim's face, the empty street, the steel animal a bullet nosing the target.

"Montag, don't move!" said a voice from the sky.

The camera fell upon the victim, even as did the Hound. Both reached him simultaneously. The victim was seized by Hound and camera in a great spidering, clenching grip. He screamed. He screamed. He screamed!

Blackout.

Silence.

Darkness.

[Amendment10]

I rather doubt it is anything so formal and as well documented as a treaty, it's just an understanding...

And maybe its just a rumor.

[null and void]

And maybe its just a rumor.

[brent13a]

Right now, some poor fellow is out for a walk. A rarity. An odd one. Don't think the police don't know the habits of queer ducks like that, men who walk mornings for the hell of it, or for reasons of insomnia Anyway, the police have had him charted for months, years. Never know when that sort of information might be handy. And today, it turns out, it's very usable indeed. It saves face. Oh, God, look there!"

Great. So which is it?
1. As is expounded daily upon here and many other forums and sites, the police are inept and can never do a good job at anything.
or
2. When it suits the alarmists and conspiracists all of the sudden all the police in the USA turn into some sort of super-turbo-hyper perfect force where they do everything so magnificently that they work as a hive-mind and are to be feared in totality.

So it's either/or one of those because it can't be both and then have the same outcome of the conspiracy theories.

Then, of course, is the fact that there is the massive separation of cooperation between those (the boogiemen-in-black) who have all the petabytes of information on everyone, and the police forces of the USA whom have no perfect computer networks that work together agency-to-ageny nor state-to-state with some barely having interconnect-ability. Then also there's the fact that many police agencies are woefully behind modern standards for computing and information storage themselves.

Then, of course, there's the fact that things like Coast-to-Coast AM and a whole myriad of forums and websites exist full of alarmist and conspiracy theories of which none are forced off the air by the boogiemen-in-black and the people on the radio shows and tv shows and web forums don't mysteriously disappear. They continue to exist and broadcast.

The logic and practicality of such a vast conspiracy & the reality of what all the pieces have to do to become a whole, tells me that they're no closer to what the alarmists and conspiracists have been howling about than they were 100 years ago or 200 years ago.
The magnitude of what it would take to make all the pieces into a cohesive whole is infinitely impossible in the world we live in.

[null and void]

Which is it?

Right now we have a system that keeps the honest citizen under control, but can't do anything about a criminal.

Right now we have a system that can know how many times you buy Rice Crispies, but has no idea how much dope you smoke.

Right now we have a system that tracks every penny in your paycheck, but doesn't know anything about the cash payments an illegal alien gets, so it gives him/her food stamps, Section 8 housing and free medical care.

Right now we have a system that depends on a few things being tracked electronically, and most things tracked by people and little bits of paper.

As long as anything is tracked by people and their petty fiefdoms and file cabinets full of paper documents a person is relatively safe, unless they do something stupid to become a target.

Once electronic records, video cameras, and electronic monitoring of all forms of communications become pervasive, and all that data becomes searchable with a few key strokes, mouse clicks or gestures, no detail of anyone's life is private.

That passage I quoted is from Fahrenheit 451, set in just such a future.

So which is it?

Right now, it's mostly mass confusion, rank incompetence and selective enforcement or neglect. The criminal skates and the honest man gets screwed.

In the foreseeable future, it's every move is known or knowable, every petty crime an honest man commits is punished harshly, the ones in charge and their surrogates skate.

Today, speaking out is not a crime, but if you get a following, suddenly no potentially embarrassing detail of your life, from a drunk driving arrest as a college student to having a girl friend on the side is too small for public exposure and discussion.

In the foreseeable future a Dan Ra^ther will have unquestionably "authentic" documents for any crime real or imagined that an enemy of the state needs to be said to have committed.

And no one will dare question them.

So which is it?

Right now, we have no idea who is going to set of a bomb in a crowd.

But with a few blurry cell phone photos, within a mater of days, we can ID them and determine which terrorists they were associating with, which countries they visited, how many times they beat their wife, which countries warned us about them, what the warnings were, where they bought cooking supplies, building supplies, and their morning coffee.

Heck, a dozen years ago we could name all 19 hijackers before the flames were even out.

We still can't quite figure out what theses two incidents have in common, though...