This Call May Be Monitored ...

New York Times
December 18, 2005

Editorial
This Call May Be Monitored ...

On Oct. 17, 2002, the head of the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen.
Michael Hayden, made an eloquent plea to a joint House-Senate inquiry
on intelligence for a sober national discussion about whether the line
between liberty and security should be shifted after the 9/11 attacks,
and if so, precisely how far. He reminded the lawmakers that the rules
against his agency's spying on Americans, carefully written decades
earlier, were based on protecting fundamental constitutional rights.

If they were to be changed, General Hayden said, "We need to get it
right. We have to find the right balance between protecting our
security and protecting our liberty." General Hayden spoke of having a
"national dialogue" and added: "What I really need you to do is talk to
your constituents and find out where the American people want that line
between security and liberty to be."

General Hayden was right. The mass murders of 9/11 revealed deadly gaps
in United States intelligence that needed to be closed. Most of those
involved failure of performance, not legal barriers. Nevertheless,
Americans expected some reasonable and carefully measured trade-offs
between security and civil liberties. They trusted their elected
leaders to follow long-established democratic and legal principles and
to make any changes in the light of day. But President Bush had other
ideas. He secretly and recklessly expanded the government's powers in
dangerous and unnecessary ways that eroded civil liberties and may also
have violated the law.

In Friday's Times, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported that
sometime in 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order
scrapping a painfully reached, 25-year-old national consensus: spying
on Americans by their government should generally be prohibited, and
when it is allowed, it should be regulated and supervised by the
courts. The laws and executive orders governing electronic
eavesdropping by the intelligence agency were specifically devised to
uphold the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and
seizures.

But Mr. Bush secretly decided that he was going to allow the agency to
spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant - just as he had
earlier decided to scrap the Geneva Conventions, American law and Army
regulations when it came to handling prisoners in the war on terror.
Indeed, the same Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who helped write
the twisted memo on legalizing torture, wrote briefs supporting the
idea that the president could ignore the law once again when it came to
the intelligence agency's eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mail
messages.

"The government may be justified in taking measures which in less
troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual
liberties," he wrote.

Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a
violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or
not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution
would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National
Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the
government had made lists of people it considered national security
threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective
intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the
Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.

This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The
intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your
e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was
obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The
burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11,
but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.

The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say
that they sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone
numbers even faster than that, and that those numbers might include
some of American citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush's
order, and that is nonsense. The existing law already recognizes that
American citizens' communications may be intercepted by chance. It says
that those records may be retained and used if they amount to actual
foreign intelligence or counterintelligence material. Otherwise, they
must be thrown out.

President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving
lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and
the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's
existence. We don't know if he was right on the first count; this White
House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security
threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard
way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of
the law, much less respect them.

Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the
illegal spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it.
Perhaps the Congressional leaders who were told about the program could
get the ball rolling.

===============================================================================

---

› See More: This Call May Be Monitored ...

Keep in mind that if you have 250 million Americans making phone calls, you
would need another 250 million people to listen in on all those calls!

So I should think that there would be a limit to how many calls they could
listen in on.

In article <[email protected]>,
[email protected] says...
> Keep in mind that if you have 250 million Americans making phone calls, you
> would need another 250 million people to listen in on all those calls!
>
> So I should think that there would be a limit to how many calls they could
> listen in on.


You don't necessarily need a human. The spooks can
have the phone companies feed all calls through a voice
recognition system, looking for keywords.

Also, calls *to* a specific number can be automatically
flagged for special attention. So, if you regularly
use a certain payphone to call your co-conspirator,
that payphone can be designated for human monitoring.
If you use your home phone to call your local mosque to
innocently inquire about their schedule, your line
could be flagged for finer-than-usual filtering. If
you make a lot of calls to suspicious areas (e.g.
drug-source countries), you could be flagged.

If your name appears on a watch-list, or is even
similar to a name listed, you could be flagged for more
attention. A computer doesn't necessarily know that a
random Bob Jones is or isn't the particular Bob Jones
who is a suspect.

Other calls could be filtered out, based on number
called (e.g. to a business customer service 800 line),
unless originating from a suspect.

While it would be impossible to have humans listen to
every word of every call, I believe that it *is*
possible to have all calls pass through automated
filtering, looking for interesting data points or
patterns.


--
Get Credit Where Credit Is Due
http://www.cardreport.com/
Credit Tools, Reference, and Forum

"Bill" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> Keep in mind that if you have 250 million Americans making phone calls,
> you would need another 250 million people to listen in on all those calls!
>
> So I should think that there would be a limit to how many calls they could
> listen in on.
>
>
This is SO simple and NOT a big deal by any means!
By having a blanket order like this they will no longer need a court order
or warrant to listen in on the "bad guys". Before this law
enforcement/government needed a court order ON EACH LINE.LE/GOV'T have a lot
of restrictions on monitoring as it is right now.
Telephone carriers and cellular companies DO NOT allow any monitoring
without a judge signed court order as of this time. It takes time to get one
and you cant use ANY of information gleened before said order. In fact the
LE agent will get burned for doing so.
What it boils down to, if you are not involved in terrorist acts or crime,
you have nothing to hide and nothing to worry about. I seriously doubt they
will listen to people randomly. The ones they will listen in on are already
targeted.
GOV'T/Police/Sheriff couldnt care less and don't have the time to listen in
or investigate your regular personal lives.

Mortimer Schnurd wrote:
> "Bill" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
> > Keep in mind that if you have 250 million Americans making phone calls,
> > you would need another 250 million people to listen in on all those calls!
> >
> > So I should think that there would be a limit to how many calls they could
> > listen in on.
> >
> >
> This is SO simple and NOT a big deal by any means!
> By having a blanket order like this they will no longer need a court order
> or warrant to listen in on the "bad guys". Before this law
> enforcement/government needed a court order ON EACH LINE.LE/GOV'T have a lot
> of restrictions on monitoring as it is right now.
> Telephone carriers and cellular companies DO NOT allow any monitoring
> without a judge signed court order as of this time. It takes time to get one
> and you cant use ANY of information gleened before said order. In fact the
> LE agent will get burned for doing so.
> What it boils down to, if you are not involved in terrorist acts or crime,
> you have nothing to hide and nothing to worry about. I seriously doubt they
> will listen to people randomly. The ones they will listen in on are already
> targeted.
> GOV'T/Police/Sheriff couldnt care less and don't have the time to listen in
> or investigate your regular personal lives.

yeah if you're a registered republican who regularly contributes to the
party and respects your party leaders and has no objections to the
illegal and unconstitutional activities committed by the party, then
you have nothing to worry about...

the problem is warrantless spying on u.s. citizens is illegal... it's
ok in china or russia, but this is america.

If I was listening in on calls, I would want a list of everyone who has
appeared on the Jerry Springer show!

I would think these calls would be the most interesting to listen to....

(I'm afraid my calls would be quite boring to listen in on.)

Antipodean Bucket Farmer <[email protected]> wrote in
news:[email protected]:

> The spooks can
> have the phone companies feed all calls through a voice
> recognition system, looking for keywords.
>

Bingo. FBI is reading emails with Carnivore looking for keywords and
known cryptos with massive computers you paid for.
http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9595_22-522071.html

Phone calls have had similar keyword word recognition software for
decades.

Don't forget cellular isn't independent. Every transmitter in every
country is LICENSED by the same governments that run the monitoring
agencies. Cellphone companies will be good boys and do exactly as their
are told because of this powerful leash. They'll do nothing to kill the
revenue stream, like a license revocation for failure to comply.

Bet on it.

Govt isn't listening to your phone calls and could care less about what
you say....unless what you say matches a voiceprint and keywords of the
group of interest. The computer doesn't care what you are telling your
girlfriend you are going to do to her later tonight...(c;

http://www.voiceprintonline.com/call...g-software.asp
http://www.retellrecorders.co.uk/rec...sories/933.htm
http://www.ahernstore.com/phonphon2pcc.html
http://www.spyarsenal.com/
http://www.hansensoftware.com/
http://www.monitoringmadeeasy.com/
http://www.ccl.co.uk/cellmaster.html

Don't call her on your COMPANY cellphone, though....

Just don't use eyebrow-arching keywords. Pick a generic synonym
instead.


W : )

"Mortimer Schnurd" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
>
> "Bill" <[email protected]> wrote in message
> news:[email protected]...
> > Keep in mind that if you have 250 million Americans making phone calls,
> > you would need another 250 million people to listen in on all those
calls!
> >
> > So I should think that there would be a limit to how many calls they
could
> > listen in on.
> >
> >
> This is SO simple and NOT a big deal by any means!
> By having a blanket order like this they will no longer need a court order
> or warrant to listen in on the "bad guys". Before this law
> enforcement/government needed a court order ON EACH LINE.LE/GOV'T have a
lot
> of restrictions on monitoring as it is right now.
> Telephone carriers and cellular companies DO NOT allow any monitoring
> without a judge signed court order as of this time. It takes time to get
one
> and you cant use ANY of information gleened before said order. In fact the
> LE agent will get burned for doing so.
> What it boils down to, if you are not involved in terrorist acts or crime,
> you have nothing to hide and nothing to worry about.
(Snip)
You just don't get it, do you?

I have nothing to hide, have security clearances up the wazoo, actually work
for the government, and I STILL don't want them to have the power to listen
in whenever the whim suits them. The government needs to be kept on a very
short leash, to keep them out of mischief.

I would refer you to Mr. Franklin's famous quote:
Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security
will deserve neither and lose both.

aem sends...

Williams wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> the problem is warrantless spying on u.s. citizens is illegal... it's
> ok in china or russia, but this is america.

This *was* America.

Notan

If a cop knocked on your door and asked all nice and friendly, "Hi. I
don't have a search warrant, but would you consent to allow me to
search your home anyway?,"
would you let him? No? Why not? You don't have anything to *hide*,
do you? Got dope in the kitchen drawer? Kiddie porn under the
mattress? A bomb in the garage? You demented sicko!


W ; )

ameijers wrote:
> I would refer you to Mr. Franklin's famous quote:
> Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security
> will deserve neither and lose both.

Rewritten to suit your purposes, of course.

Bartleby gives:

Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little
temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

Bartleby also notes that a plaque on the Statue of Liberty gives a
slightly modified version:

They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little safety
deserve neither liberty nor safety.

Variations appear, but always include "ESSENTIAL liberty" (emphasis mine)
and "TEMPORARY safety".

Thanks again for the leftist spin rewrite.

--
If John McCain gets the 2008 Republican Presidential nomination,
my vote for President will be a write-in for Jiang Zemin.

"Bill" <[email protected]> wrote:

>Keep in mind that if you have 250 million Americans making phone calls, you
>would need another 250 million people to listen in on all those calls!
>
>So I should think that there would be a limit to how many calls they could
>listen in on.

Looked at voice recognition technology lately? Anything the NSA is using will be
lightyears better than commercially available stuff, and that isn't half bad.
Furthurmore, you don't need to listent to all calls - just ones to or from
'interesting' numbers, people, businesses or geographic locations.

If you are not a terrorist or a criminal, who cares?

<[email protected]> wrote in message
news:[email protected]...
> New York Times
> December 18, 2005
>
> Editorial
> This Call May Be Monitored ...
>
> On Oct. 17, 2002, the head of the National Security Agency, Lt. Gen.
> Michael Hayden, made an eloquent plea to a joint House-Senate inquiry
> on intelligence for a sober national discussion about whether the line
> between liberty and security should be shifted after the 9/11 attacks,
> and if so, precisely how far. He reminded the lawmakers that the rules
> against his agency's spying on Americans, carefully written decades
> earlier, were based on protecting fundamental constitutional rights.
>
> If they were to be changed, General Hayden said, "We need to get it
> right. We have to find the right balance between protecting our
> security and protecting our liberty." General Hayden spoke of having a
> "national dialogue" and added: "What I really need you to do is talk to
> your constituents and find out where the American people want that line
> between security and liberty to be."
>
> General Hayden was right. The mass murders of 9/11 revealed deadly gaps
> in United States intelligence that needed to be closed. Most of those
> involved failure of performance, not legal barriers. Nevertheless,
> Americans expected some reasonable and carefully measured trade-offs
> between security and civil liberties. They trusted their elected
> leaders to follow long-established democratic and legal principles and
> to make any changes in the light of day. But President Bush had other
> ideas. He secretly and recklessly expanded the government's powers in
> dangerous and unnecessary ways that eroded civil liberties and may also
> have violated the law.
>
> In Friday's Times, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported that
> sometime in 2002, President Bush signed a secret executive order
> scrapping a painfully reached, 25-year-old national consensus: spying
> on Americans by their government should generally be prohibited, and
> when it is allowed, it should be regulated and supervised by the
> courts. The laws and executive orders governing electronic
> eavesdropping by the intelligence agency were specifically devised to
> uphold the Fourth Amendment's prohibition of unreasonable searches and
> seizures.
>
> But Mr. Bush secretly decided that he was going to allow the agency to
> spy on American citizens without obtaining a warrant - just as he had
> earlier decided to scrap the Geneva Conventions, American law and Army
> regulations when it came to handling prisoners in the war on terror.
> Indeed, the same Justice Department lawyer, John Yoo, who helped write
> the twisted memo on legalizing torture, wrote briefs supporting the
> idea that the president could ignore the law once again when it came to
> the intelligence agency's eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mail
> messages.
>
> "The government may be justified in taking measures which in less
> troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual
> liberties," he wrote.
>
> Let's be clear about this: illegal government spying on Americans is a
> violation of individual liberties, whether conditions are troubled or
> not. Nobody with a real regard for the rule of law and the Constitution
> would have difficulty seeing that. The law governing the National
> Security Agency was written after the Vietnam War because the
> government had made lists of people it considered national security
> threats and spied on them. All the same empty points about effective
> intelligence gathering were offered then, just as they are now, and the
> Congress, the courts and the American people rejected them.
>
> This particular end run around civil liberties is also unnecessary. The
> intelligence agency already had the capacity to read your mail and your
> e-mail and listen to your telephone conversations. All it had to do was
> obtain a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The
> burden of proof for obtaining a warrant was relaxed a bit after 9/11,
> but even before the attacks the court hardly ever rejected requests.
>
> The special court can act in hours, but administration officials say
> that they sometimes need to start monitoring large batches of telephone
> numbers even faster than that, and that those numbers might include
> some of American citizens. That is supposed to justify Mr. Bush's
> order, and that is nonsense. The existing law already recognizes that
> American citizens' communications may be intercepted by chance. It says
> that those records may be retained and used if they amount to actual
> foreign intelligence or counterintelligence material. Otherwise, they
> must be thrown out.
>
> President Bush defended the program yesterday, saying it was saving
> lives, hotly insisting that he was working within the Constitution and
> the law, and denouncing The Times for disclosing the program's
> existence. We don't know if he was right on the first count; this White
> House has cried wolf so many times on the urgency of national security
> threats that it has lost all credibility. But we have learned the hard
> way that Mr. Bush's team cannot be trusted to find the boundaries of
> the law, much less respect them.
>
> Mr. Bush said he would not retract his secret directive or halt the
> illegal spying, so Congress should find a way to force him to do it.
> Perhaps the Congressional leaders who were told about the program could
> get the ball rolling.
>
> ===============================================================================
>

> What it boils down to, if you are not involved in terrorist acts or crime,
> you have nothing to hide and nothing to worry about.

Presumably, the people arguing this position have no objection to
having the government listen in on their calls. After all, they're
righteous, upstanding citizens who would never consider doing anything
illegal, so what's the problem?

Well, let's try looking at situations where it might be a problem,
even for those types. I'll start off with one example, feel free to
add others.

Your mother is 94 years old. She has terminal cancer. She wants to
die at home, not at a hospital or hospice. You're her caretaker.
She's had enough of the pain, she's now begging you to assist in her
death. This is an agonizing decision, and you'd like to first discuss
it with your siblings, who unfortunately live several thousand miles
away. Unfortunately, the act would be illegal. Even if you have no
intention of actually doing it, but simply want the comfort of
discussing the situation by phone with people you love, you hesitate -
what if the police decide that in order to prevent a possible crime,
she needs to be immediately removed to a hospital?



--

To avoid situations in which you might make mistakes
may be the biggest mistake of all.

....Peter McWilliams