Posted on 06/07/2013 4:54:40 AM PDT by Kaslin
The U.S. government is trying "to create a database of every [phone] call ever made."
That's how one informed person described the National Security Agency's effort to USA Today. That newspaper also confirmed that not only is the government collecting every phone record from Verizon -- as first reported by the British newspaper The Guardian -- it's also collecting similar data from other phone companies.
It's important to emphasize that the NSA isn't listening to the content of these calls. Indeed, it couldn't if it wanted to, given the sheer volume of conversations. It'd be like one person trying to eavesdrop on every single conversation in a packed football stadium.
The revelation has caused some giddiness among President Obama's critics. This news is just the latest example of how so much of Obama's "change we can believe in" has really been "continuity kept secret from us." As a senator and presidential candidate, Obama routinely tore into the Patriot Act as if it was worse than the Espionage Act of 1917. Now, not only is he using the Patriot Act to spy on, well, pretty much everyone, his Justice Department actually used the Espionage Act to label a journalist a possible co-conspirator in espionage.
But after the schadenfreude wears off, the question remains: Is this bad policy? Just because Obama might be a hypocrite for employing the tactics he decried when his predecessor used them, it doesn't mean he's wrong. One can flip-flop from the wrong position to the right one.
Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor (he put away the "Blind Sheikh" who masterminded the first World Trade Center bombing), makes a strong case that the NSA program is not only legal, important and necessary, but also that the outrage over these revelations is overblown. Phone records -- as opposed to the content of phone conversations -- are not private under the Fourth Amendment. Moreover, the "metadata" collected by the NSA is essential for tracking terrorists' patterns before they attack.
After every terrorist attack, everyone always asks, "Why didn't the government connect the dots?" Well, what the NSA is doing is connecting dots. Moreover, McCarthy notes in his National Review Online article, this is no rogue operation. It's true, every branch of government was kept in the loop. Congressional leadership was briefed. The administration sought these warrants from a judge. This isn't a scandal so much as it is a controversy over a legal policy -- to which I say, fair enough.
For McCarthy, the "problem here is not government power. It is the government officials we've elected to wield it." In the wake of the still-unfolding IRS scandal, the Benghazi debacle, and the myriad failures of the hapless Eric Holder Justice Department, Americans rightly don't trust these guys to color within the lines, as it were.
Still, I think McCarthy's missing something. No, I don't have much confidence in this administration. But I don't have an abundance of confidence in government generally. That's one of the things I love about America: The default position is to be skeptical of government, no matter who's in charge.
Necessity may be the mother of invention, but sometimes it can work the other way around. Invention -- i.e., new technologies and techniques --creates obligations and opportunities that never existed before. Fifty years ago, nobody needed to charge their cell phones, because they didn't have cell phones. Before the smallpox vaccine was invented, it would never have occurred to someone in government to require that all children be inoculated for smallpox. I'm not against mandatory inoculations; my point is to illustrate that invention often creates new necessities.
The arrival of "big data" -- the ability to crunch massive amounts of information to find patterns and, ultimately, to manipulate human behavior -- creates opportunities for government (and corporations) that were literally unimaginable not long ago. Behavioral economists, neuroscientists and liberal policy wonks have already fallen in love with the idea of using these new technologies and insights to "nudge" Americans into making "better" decisions. No doubt some of these decisions really are better, but the scare quotes are necessary because the final arbiters of what constitutes the right choice are the would-be social engineers.
Until recently there was great anonymity in crowds, but the near-magic of math has changed that equation. Given a big enough data set, data-crunchers can figure out a great deal about every face in the crowd.
I'm no Luddite. Just because government could, in theory, poison people doesn't mean it shouldn't, in practice, inoculate people. But we're in uncharted territory, and a healthy dose of old-fashioned American skepticism seems warranted, no matter who's in charge.
They have LEFT the border open,
and They have WEAPONIZED the enemy from FAST&FURIOUS
to MANPADS to lawyers for their LAWFARE.
And they INVITE the enemy to come in by the millions.
The ENEMY of DHS and FBI and DO”J” under the corrupt
Obama-Holder-DNC-al Qaeda Administration is the
American people.
While these morons were listening to me order from Little Caesars 2 muslim terrorists in Boston, whom they were warned about, killed people. Makes me wonder why listening in on me is so important to them.
Because the bombers were their compatriots. YOU are their enemy.
“It’s important to emphasize that the NSA isn’t listening to the content of these calls. Indeed, it couldn’t if it wanted to, given the sheer volume of conversations. It’d be like ...”
It’d be like the government installing a micro camera in every room in your house, Jonah. You wouldn’t know when it’s on or exactly where it is.
It’d be like the government sending someone over to your house at any time of their choosing, and you have to let them in to record whatever they want, with no warrant, for no good reason.
It’d be like you have to give the government a house key so they can come in when you’re not home.
It’d be like tearing the Fourth Amendment out of the Constitution.
You ok with that, Mr. Safety-In-Numbers?
Hey Jonah, you can bet with this administration this is only the tip of the iceberg regarding this surveillance.
For now, you can shut your pie hole.
Collecting and storing call “metadata” is almost trivial today. A record containing date-time, the originating number, the terminating number, location information on originating cell phone (where available) would not take more than 100 bytes. This implies 100 Gigabytes of storage for one day’s worth of call records. A 3 Terabyte drive, enough to store this data for a month costs less than $200.
The NSA could spend millions attempting to analyze this data, but that is another story. The fact is that collecting and storing this data is trivial in today’s IT environments.
The only way to stop government from abusing our right of privacy is to prevent it from collecting data in the first place. It is just childish to allow government to have the data with the assurance that it won’t look at it unless a judge approves. As we saw with case of the DOJ’s attack on Fox reporter Rosen, they shopped for a judge until they found one who would say yes.
(BTW: A lesson I learned long ago in bidnis: If someone will lie to you they will steal from you too. In the case of politicians sometimes the theft is not in terms of money, but in terms of power. These folks have stolen the power the citizen has over the privacy of their own personal lives. And they are happy to lie to us about the theft.)
Sure they're not. And they aren't monitoring your emails or private instant messages, either.
There are multiple issues being discussed right now. What this Goldberg article is discussing isn’t even wiretapping iit s just keeping track of calls being made - when; what number they went to; how long they occurred for. It is analogous to someone simply watching who arrives at a location; how long they stay…without actually being able to tell what is being said, or who is speaking. Annoying, but not wiretapping.
There are also stories out today about the direct back door links into things like Google, Facebook, etc. These represent a pretty solid invasion of privacy.
This is where the FBI’s request to have software built into every phone and device comes in. They’ll record every call’s metadata (date, time, to whom) and want the ability to listen in at will to every conversation real time, but don’t yet have that ability.
But do they have voice to data software? .... software that can search for phrases like "tea party" or "constitution"?
Oddly, the public will buy such skepticism if portrayed on television in The X-Files. But not real-life examples before their very eyes.
2,000 years ago we were warned about the moment when 3 things come together: technology, participation in the system of commerce, and a test of loyalty to the State. This vision, written when commerce was still barter, and technology was the donkey, is the single most profound stroke of genius in literature.
St. John’s percipience has been drowned beneath stupid speculations about what this symbol of his or that one “stands for”. Christians have spent millenia labeling each other “the whore of Babylon” and fretting that each new technology is the “the mark of the beast”, to the point that they exhausted themselves and prompted deserved ridicule from the world. And everybody forgot the simple, breathtaking assertion buried under the symbols : when technology, commerce, and politics develop to the point when they can connect with each other, then the world WILL (not might, but will) begin to demand loyalty to a single leader in order to buy and sell, will have the technology to enforce it, and will kill everyone who demures. The document seems to believe that this end of the race is embedded in the genetic code and is not avoidable. For John’s viewpoint is not that believers should do something to stop the course of the spirit of antichrist; his point is that the forces inherent in the race will come to this end. He is a prophet, not giver of advice.
I maintain there has been nothing but empirical verification of the Apocalypse ever since it was written, and it matters not whether you believe, like Jefferson did, that the book of Revelation is the “ravings of a lunatic” - what other ancient writing has seen so far in advance and so accurately?
Goldberg is actually right. There are good, even unavoidable reasons that technology will be used to collect all data. The reasons to do it will overwhelm the reasons not to do it, and the resisters will be overcome by moral arguments about how the race must save itself from the evil within us, (I’m not giving advice, just prophecy.) And because the technology, once invented, cannot be not used, the next step will be to require that no commerce can take place off the grid.
Then, the technology which allows commerce will not be available without an act of loyalty to the State. I don’t know what it will be (no man can interpret the symbols actually; they aren’t meant to be interpreted), but I know that it will be somehow offensive to those who believe that Jesus is the king of the universe. These people will not be able to perform the act (interestingly, other religionists of all stripes will be able) - and then comes the end.
Think this is crazy talk? I’m not asking you to believe in plagues of frogs or angels with swords - just to track the trends of history and project the lines of technology, economics, and politics, and notice who, of all writers in the world, first trended the same lines and described their intersection. I defy you to deny that three forces are coming together and that this was described in ominous tones by a writer who claimed to have leaned on Jesus breast right before he was killed.
Go ahead, call us crazy. As you write the words, they are recorded in a government database, for your own safety.
Watch what comes next.
I find it darkly humorous that a liberal arts major, (Goldberg) is trying to tell people that it’s “not possible” to listen to the content of every call.
I, as a EE who used to work in the computer industry, and moreover who worked on network scanning systems that would do “deep packet inspection” for attacks on systems, know for a fact that with enough money (and the NSA gets enough money, thank you Congress) it is entirely possible to listen in to the content of every phone call in the US.
Goldberg and his cohort should STFU about that which they know nothing. And in this matter, he knows nothing.
As for his fellow NRO people who justify this crap: They’re part of the problem we’re in this mess.
It’s time for a split between “conservatives” like Goldberg, and “conservatives who think that the Constitution still matters,” who, for lack of a better term are probably best represented by the term ‘libertarian’ (small ‘l’) today. Goldberg and his ilk have helped bring us to this point.
It is equally important to emphasize that they CAN. The NSA Utah Data Center will record EVERY call. The problem is finding them in all that data. The records database helps them do that.
Once the Utah Data Center is up, they’ll be able to listen to any phone call made since that date. The phone records are the look-up table.
Is TRACKPHONE a publicly traded company?
People are forgetting that this government has identified Tea Partiers, gun control advocates and other conservatives as “terrorists”. When we read that the phone spying efforts were aimed at rooting out terrorists and their networks, I do not think that the government thinks that “terrorist” means what we think it means. I think that they wanted to monitor US calling patterns to identify conservatives and their allies.
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