Posted on 05/15/2006 8:33:11 AM PDT by jmc1969
A senior federal law enforcement official tells us the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.
The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.abcnews.com ...
There is a saying among war historians that the losers of wars were fighting the prior war, and the winners were fighting the new war. In other words, the losers were using the old, established tactics of the past while the winners were innovating.
I believe that "doing a better job with the dots you already have" is fighting with the tactics of the prior war. We need to be innovative with fighting this new war, especially since the enemy is a new kind of enemy.
-PJ
And we fight that fight while still retaining some semblences of a constitutionally limited government.
I agree with this opinion wholeheartedly.
-PJ
I'd need to know more about the mining part. Are they just mining the data for patterns willy-nilly, or are they assembling a warehouse of data to be mined once a starting point is provided? You can't assume that it's just a phone number and one generation from that. You have to look at all the calls to the number, all the calls from the number, all the calls to and from those called numbers, etc, until the paths reach an end. Then you have to look at time of day, durations of those calls, names of the accountholders, were they businesses, what kind, etc.
Actual mining for intelligence (beyond tracing a particular number) would go like this: once you had a specific profile of a terrorist cell (like what I described in the prior paragraph), you would then analyze all the other numbers to see if they exhibited the same profiles, such as is there a cluster of calls to a pivotal number, where one or more of the numbers called a hardware store, another called a gun shop, and the calls were under 2 minutes in duration and occured at night?
By comparison, in the financial world, for example, you would use data mining to analze who were your platinum card holders, then you would analyze the transaction history of your platinum card holders to see what they looked like 5-10 years ago, then you would look for green card holders today who matched what platinum card holders looked like 10 years ago, assume they would become platinum card holders and target them for marketing.
That's data mining.
-PJ
But how is your freedom in any way compromised by the government having a list of who you called? If they used that information to harrass you, that would effect your freedom. But it they aren't using it to harrass you, what's the harm?
The 4th amendment was not a license to commit crimes in secret. It was protection against being harassed without cause. If your phone calls have a pattern suggesting illegal activity, and those records can be collected without harassing you, that's not a violation of your freedom.
I think my freedom is much more effected by having to submit to searches of my body and effects just to fly from one place to another.
And then they use the database to track down someone who reveals that a given government contract was rife with corruption. You really think it would stop where you want it to? The history of government programs shows otherwise.
Gawd, you have it backwards. The 4th Amendment is a constraint on government power. The government can still track crime within those constraints.
I think his point was that, just as the government can pay an informant to talk to you, and bring back the information from that "private" conversation, the government can ask to see, or to purchase, the phone company information.
The record of your phone calls does not belong to you, it is not your property, it belongs to the phone company.
The contents of the calls belong to you. But in a time of war, govenment has asserted the right to monitor communications, especially out-of-country communications.
Benedict Arnold was discovered because the government was intercepting messages going out-of-country.
That program, while I support it, was to me a greater invasion of privacy than this trivial phone collection project.
The NSA has been doing a lot worse than this, for it's entire existance. You don't know about THOSE things because leaking them wouldn't hurt George Bush. The people leaking aren't trying to save your freedom, they are trying to destroy a president and win back power for the democrats.
That is in violation of the Verizon Privacy Policy - and also just is not a good idea to have the government get ALL data, not just data with some other reference point to trigger an investigation.
I worked in the credit card industry for a stretch. Part of my job was to ensure adherence to federal privacy policies. So I'm well aware of both how data mining works and the federal limitations on such - there is a firewall between companies that mine the data and the credit card companies to prevent abuses - even though I worked for the bank in question, I could not legally see our customer data.
I see no such firewall when the feds get the entire Verizon file.
How is that different from police walking down a street, knocking on doors and asking people who answer questions? No probable cause is needed because the streets and the doors are considered public, so as long as the police don't forcibly enter the houses it's OK.
Your post explained why I don't have a problem with this program. The phone lists don't identify me. They are "data mined", and then ONLY if the results of that work show probable cause is the information linked back to what would now be a suspect.
Your position seems to be that you'd rather have planes fly into the world trade center than give up your "freedom" from having your phone number in a government database.
Now, I would rather have an occasional plane fly into a building than have millions of americans spend hours each year in security lines at the airport that most likely won't catch anybody anyway. That is a REAL impact on my freedom to use my time as my own.
Isn't that an extreme way of stating the case? Is anyone suggesting that the government can have whatever data it wants and use it however it wants?
I'm not sure where the limits should be, but I AM sure that we need to define "victory" in the "war on terror". I am aware of the open-endedness of the WOT as a plausible if not valid justification for all sorts of stuff.
But there IS currently a war, and wars call for, well, bad stuff.
Perhaps because someone has the right to not answer questions? Whereas if Verizon sends my data to the feds, I had no say in the matter?
Your position seems to be that you'd rather have planes fly into the world trade center than give up your "freedom" from having your phone number in a government database.
No, my position is the feds can't even handle the data they have - they need to figure out how to handle their existing data stream before doing this. And second, the Bill of Rights exists for a purpose - to keep government under control. Compare the number of people killed by terrorists over the last 100 years to the number of people killed by their own governments. No comparison.
So while I recognize that wartime does call for the rules to be bent, if you allow the government to ignore the constraints completely, you are inviting the potential for totalitarianism into this country. And history shows we should be just as concerned about that as we are about al Qaeda.
I just read the Verizon privacy policy, and nowhere does it give you a privacy right to your phone number information.
And in fact, it does not require a subpoena to hand out your account information (which would include your name and address). It will release all that information if it is "lawful" to do so.
You should probably see if you can get QWest to do your phones.
the government is engaging in far more intrusive data collection - to determine that people are buying cigarettes mail order to avoid taxation. getting credit card records, records from all the shipping companies (UPS has been scared away from even accepting the packages). yes, I guess they are using court orders for that. but from a "privacy" perspective - tracking what I buy and have shipped to my house, is far more intrusive then what numbers I dial.
Not really. I see people on FR who would have had kittens if the Clinton Admin did something like this downplay the government getting this kind of data now.
Is anyone suggesting that the government can have whatever data it wants and use it however it wants?
I am asking, if the standard for the government is "they need this data to fight the war on terror", when what constraints ARE there on federal power during that time if people assent?
I'm not sure where the limits should be, but I AM sure that we need to define "victory" in the "war on terror". I am aware of the open-endedness of the WOT as a plausible if not valid justification for all sorts of stuff.
Well, we agree there. Otherwise the WOT can be an open-ended process to erode constraints on power. This is not about my privacy - this is about making sure the fedgov knows there are limits on its powers.
But there IS currently a war, and wars call for, well, bad stuff.
I agree entirely. I have said repeatedly that in times of war, the rules can be bent. But they cannot be discarded wholesale.
Gee, I guess they're really going to have to change future scripts for future police TV shows such as Law and Order where they constantly get the record of numbers dialed by a suspect from the phone company. Without a warrant.
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