Reach Out And Touch...Everyone
It's now impossible to escape the sensation that, so far, we've only seen the tiny tip of the iceberg when it comes to the government's phone-spying activities.
Those who claim that the NSA's scanning of numbers --supposedly disconnected from names and ID's-- is harmless and non-intrusive take the cake for disingenuousness. Anyone web-literate enough to find and read this blog lnows that you can type in just about any phone number into any one of a number of readily-available and free search engines and come up with the poop on its owners.
Why wouldn't the NSA be doing this? What use would the computer matches be if there were not further follow-up as to who the callers actually are? And how do you know which hits are real and which are false positives unless you connect them up with real people? And given the administration's brazen disregard for seeking warrants in the earlier-revealed program tracking calls made to or from overseas, why on earth would we believe that warrants are being sought in the domestic program?
Now comes this related news...The FBI acknowledging it is increasingly seeking the phone records of working journalists. This is no laughing matter. I know the disdain in which some hold reporters and the media. But only fools can believe that undermining the independence of news operations can somehow further democracy. If you're chuckling over the predicament that some reporters now find themselves in, be careful you don't laugh yourself right out of the First and Fourth amendments...two of the ten sacred promises we're supposed to be defedning in the War on Terrer.
Meanwhile, The Washington Post's superb military affairs blogger, Bill Arkin, blows a hole in what he calls the "urban legend" that only pansy-reporters are worried about the NSA revelations while the rest of the country is supposedly non-chalant about Big Brother compiling millions of personal phone records. Warning of a "seamless surveillance culture," Arkin points to a new USA Today/Gallup poll showing that a clear majority of Americans disapprove of the massibe government phone database abd that two-thirds of those polled say they are "concerned" about the domestic intel gathering programs (at least the ones we know about up till now).
Tom Regan, at the ChriSci Monitor's blog has a comprehensive and deeply unsettling round-up of all the news on the still-emerging phone-spying stories.
As Bill Arkin pointed out, this is one issue that most Americans don't take lightly. No one wants to cripple the government in effectively fighting those who threaten us. But when push comes to shove, give Americans some credit for not easily surrendering their privacy.
These rolling revelations --of the sort that convince you that even paranoids have real enemies-- can't help but further erode already plummeting public confidence in the administration. Wednesday's WashPo reveal yet another poll's rather dramatic findings:
Public confidence in GOP governance has plunged to the lowest levels of the Bush presidency, with Americans saying by wide margins that they now trust Democrats more than Republicans to deal with Iraq, the economy, immigration and other issues, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll that underscores the GOP's fragile grip on power six months before the midterm elections.
Dissatisfaction with the administration's policies in Iraq has overwhelmed other issues as the source of problems for President Bush and the Republicans. The survey suggests that pessimism about the direction of the country -- 69 percent said the nation is now off track -- and disaffection with Republicans have dramatically improved Democrats' chances to make gains in November.
Democrats are now favored to handle all 10 issues measured in the Post-ABC News poll. The survey shows a majority of the public, 56 percent, saying they would prefer to see Democrats in control of Congress after the elections.
And we all know that this tidal shift has absolutely nothing to do with anything the Democrats have done. They just have to stand there and benefit from the ongoing suicide of the Bush administration. For the umpteenth time I can only wonder aloud how GW Bush will be treated by history. Truth is, I don't have to wonder at all. His presidency, by contrast, will make the already-forgotten tenure of his Poppy look like one of the great administrations in the history of the republic. Dubya has already condemned himself to ignominy.Â
May 17th, 2006 at 7:43 am
Glad you’re talking about it, Marc.
Sunday’s Bob Herbert in the NY Times had strong words on this subject and all it suggests. (Am pasting the column in its totality because of the Times’ annoying pay-to-read policies.)
Op-Ed Columnist
America the Fearful
By BOB HERBERT
In the dark days of the Depression, Franklin Roosevelt counseled Americans to avoid fear. George W. Bush is his polar opposite. The public’s fear is this president’s most potent political asset. Perhaps his only asset.
Mr. Bush wants ordinary Americans to remain in a perpetual state of fear — so terrified, in fact, that they will not object to the steady erosion of their rights and liberties, and will not notice the many ways in which their fear is being manipulated to feed an unconscionable expansion of presidential power.
If voters can be kept frightened enough of terrorism, they might even overlook the monumental incompetence of one of the worst administrations the nation has ever known.
Four marines drowned Thursday when their 60-ton tank rolled off a bridge and sank in a canal about 50 miles west of Baghdad. Three American soldiers in Iraq were killed by roadside bombs the same day. But those tragic and wholly unnecessary deaths were not the big news. The big news was the latest leak of yet another presidential power grab: the administration’s collection of the telephone records of tens of millions of American citizens.
The Bush crowd, which gets together each morning to participate in a highly secret ritual of formalized ineptitude, is trying to get its creepy hands on all the telephone records of everybody in the entire country. It supposedly wants these records, which contain crucial documentation of calls for Chinese takeout in Terre Haute, Ind., and birthday greetings to Grandma in Talladega, Ala., to help in the search for Osama bin Laden.
Hey, the president has made it clear that when Al Qaeda is calling, he wants to be listening, and you never know where that lead may turn up.
The problem (besides the fact that the president has been as effective hunting bin Laden as Dick Cheney was in hunting quail) is that in its fearmongering and power-grabbing the Bush administration has trampled all over the Constitution, the democratic process and the hallowed American tradition of government checks and balances.
Short of having them taken away from us, there is probably no way to fully appreciate the wonder and the glory of our rights and liberties here in the United States, including the right to privacy.
The Constitution and the elaborate system of checks and balances were meant to protect us against the possibility of a clownish gang of small men and women amassing excessive power and behaving like tyrants or kings. But the normal safeguards have not been working since the Bush crowd came to power, starting with the hijacked presidential election in 2000.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, all bets were off. John Kennedy once said, “The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war.” But George W. Bush, employing an outrageous propaganda campaign (”Shock and awe,” “We don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud”), started an utterly pointless war in Iraq that he still doesn’t know how to win or how to end.
If you listen to the Bush version of reality, the president is all powerful. In that version, we are fighting a war against terrorism, which is a war that will never end. And as long as we are at war (forever), there is no limit to the war-fighting powers the president can claim as commander in chief.
So we’ve kidnapped people and sent them off to be tortured in the extraordinary rendition program; and we’ve incarcerated people at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere without trial or even the right to know the charges against them; and we’re allowing the C.I.A. to operate super-secret prisons where God-knows-what-all is going on; and we’re listening in on the phone calls and reading the e-mail of innocent Americans without warrants; and on and on and on.
The Bushies will tell you that it is dangerous and even against the law to inquire into these nefarious activities. We just have to trust the king.
Well, I give you fair warning. This is a road map to totalitarianism. Hallmarks of totalitarian regimes have always included an excessive reliance on secrecy, the deliberate stoking of fear in the general population, a preference for military rather than diplomatic solutions in foreign policy, the promotion of blind patriotism, the denial of human rights, the curtailment of the rule of law, hostility to a free press and the systematic invasion of the privacy of ordinary people.
There are not enough pretty words in all the world to cover up the damage that George W. Bush has done to his country. If the United States could look at itself in a mirror, it would be both alarmed and ashamed at what it saw.
May 17th, 2006 at 8:42 am
Daniel Schorr, who’s still on NPR, was doing great reports on problems in the Nixon administration before Watergate, and Nixon’s people had the FBI investigate him, telling the bureau it was for consideration for a job when it was, of course, an effort to smear him. So, Bush may think he’s parroting Reagan, but he’s really Nixon without the intelligence. I was going to say without the brains, but the reference to intelligence is so punny, I had to stick with it.
May 17th, 2006 at 9:18 am
The defenders of the NSA and domestic spying are full of it. However, it’s likely that they are trying to use this stuff to prevent another attack and not just for political purposes. So maybe their intentions are good.
(The Pentagon was just forced to release 9-11 footage of a plane skimming along the ground slamming into the side of the Pentagon. Obviously, that would have sucked being a flight attendant or passenger on that plane or, say, a janitor in the Pentagon.
http://articles.news.aol.com/news/article.adp?id=20060516130609990009 )
However, obviously, once this stuff gets entrenched future administrations will surely abuse it.
The interesting thing for me was that USA Today reported that three of the major telecom companies cooperated with the government’s requests. One, Qwest, told the government to piss off. (Rarely do I find myself cheering a private corporation). Now Verizon and BellSouth said they were never asked. AT&T said it cooperated. But if it cooperated and Qwest didn’t, would that mean the other two were probably asked? These stories aren’t adding up.
May 17th, 2006 at 9:28 am
Thanks for reminding us, Marc, that there is no reason to believe ANYTHING these people tell us about what they are doing or not doing. In fact, we can assume that they are FOS on any issue of importance because they don’t believe we deserve to be told the truth and have said so repeatedly.
May 17th, 2006 at 11:00 am
For the record, here’s the “not insane” explanation for how this program might serve some purpose that tries to make at least a modicum investigative sense. Of course, the Bushies have completely ignored the law and act like that’s no biggie.
I’m an absolute believer in holding the administration at least to the procedural niceties of court orders from (totally compliant) courts if they’re going to engage in surveillance, but my head tells me that - in the bigger picture - Americans have already essentially surrendered most of their personal privacy in the interest of commercial convenience and using an easily identifiable source point to access godnozwut on the World Wide Web, leaving cookies and Google searches and email addresses and electronic invoices and credit card info, etc, etc. to be stashed and cross-referenced by increasingly smart and invasive data banks with near-infinite memories.
Most of this takes place in the interest of various forms of aggressive marketing, not national security. Consumption Uber Alles. Nothing creeps me out like those emails from Amazon telling me what I would like to buy next, based on their careful analysis of my tastes. And that’s just the tip of a huge iceberg. Basically, we innocent rubes have chosen to be fucked twelve ways to Tuesday when it comes to individual privacy…and, of course, anyone who is serious about doing bad stuff (like terrorism, as opposed to swimming in internet porn) has made figuring out ways of evading or jamming or scrambling mass digital tracing a priority and will more than likely be successful at it.
There are high school kids who can figure out increasingly complex ways of screwing with these systems, so I presume al Qaeda can recruit or hire somebody. Anyway, here’s one rationale for how they supposedly get useful information from trillions of bits of data. Seems like it boils down to dealing with the problem of keeping track of easily swappable cel phones. Although, true to the competence/credulity level of our would-be heroes, it presumes that one phone is being swapped, while the rest stay in place to maintain a “pattern”. I’m a total idiot when it comes to this stuff and even I can see that’s not gonna happen.
http://tinyurl.com/mykde
May 17th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Incidentally, I’ve now read/heard two “experts” shilling for the administration on this NSA “total information awareness” phone logs program - one on Newshour and one op-eding in the Washington Post - who have both made the completely false, insulting-to-a-grade-schooler’s-intelligence claim that these phone numbers had been “anonymized” because they weren’t paired with names or addresses. “Anonymized” - like phone numbers aren’t one of the most easily identifiable bits of personal information. Of course you’d need pretty advanced technology - something like Windows 98 running on an Intel Pentium III - to access the data. It takes an “expert” - with national security resumes in this administration, of course - to come up with crap piled quite this high.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
Regarding Bush’s “popularity” and place in history - everyone’s presumably already gotten their jollies from Bush’s #1 Fan, Stephen Colbert’s tribute (pronounced “trib-yoo”) at the Correspondents Dinner, but I can’t help but roughly quote his rejoinder to those of little faith: “Pundits say the President is rearranging the deck chairs on the Titantic. Not true. This administration is soaring. If anything, they are rearranging the deck chairs on the Hindenburg.”
May 17th, 2006 at 1:49 pm
Privacy, schmivacy — ever hear of a Form 1040? Ever fill one out? Like, on April 15?
The IRS is not a peaceful, nor private, agency.
Perhaps a lot of AQ guys haven’t done so, and prolly not so many illegal immigrants, but all the legal folk in the USA are already well known to many gov’t agencies.
What the Dems should be doing is keeping better track on how that info is used, not in the collecting of it.
Tracking who, at what agency, asks what questions, about what piece of info, when. The gov’t needs to be tracking gov’t workers more closely, and what the FBI or CIA goons do, every little computer DB search, should be recorded. With some automatic reviews, and lots of automatic back-ups and off-site storage.
All the evidence that would be needed to prove bad behavior by the spies, if there is a trial because of abuse.
Wasn’t it just last year the Lefties were complaining Bush didn’t “do enough” before 9/11, wasn’t that what all the Bush-hate junk from the 9/11 Commission was all about? Well, he’s doing it … and it seems to be working.
Hasn’t stop the leaks of secrets to the press though; I wonder if those leaks are being investigated. Maybe the phone records will come in handy.
May 17th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Spoken like a true totalitarian. And living in Slovakia no less, sheesh.
May 17th, 2006 at 3:25 pm
half the time most of you folks are like a bunch of kids sitting around the fire trying to tell scary stories to each other. bogeyman this and bogeyman that. as our first chocolate president famously said “i feel your pain”. hearing karl rove’s voice in your head at all hours has got to be painful. just think your national nightmare will be over in two years and seven months!
little prediction–the bush admin will not be found guilty of any law breaking in regards to anything they have done in the war on terror–from phones, to spying, to warrantless searches etc. it’s just all huff and puff from the adolescents.
May 17th, 2006 at 3:28 pm
Am I the only person that simply assumes the US government has been doing this uninterrupted since the Nixon era, and the Bush people’s incompetency is the only reason we know about it officially. I mean, its terrible, and should be fought - but it is nothing new.
May 17th, 2006 at 3:37 pm
you mean since lincoln and the civil war…….
May 17th, 2006 at 4:20 pm
So according to Marc Cooper, The Bush Administration’s “spying” actions are “harmful,” “intrusive,” a “brazen disregard” to the law,….yet they are actions that Bush should not be impeached or censured for, because Democrats should do what is politically advantageous. A typical Marc Cooper recipe for how the Democrats will stop appearing “weak.”
Wow. George W. Bush looks positively well-reasoned and thoughtful compared to this logic.
May 17th, 2006 at 4:39 pm
Patrick and Tom,
Even if you guys aren’t worried about the privacy issues, doesn’t it bother you the least bit that the president went about doing this without even informing the congress? Is there no such thing as due process when you’ve got a Republican president? Secrecy is easier, but it isn’t the least bit American. What a coward.
May 17th, 2006 at 5:04 pm
I would say hte program has a new twist to it if one actually looks at the history of the program. Ramped up to defcon 3. Greg Palast sees a whole lot more though.
May 17th, 2006 at 6:00 pm
mavis,
your concerns are well placed. where i differ with you is bush et al have been notifying congress as had been done in all prior admins’. in fact all the committee heads, as had been custom, were in the loop. the secrecy in question wasn’t about keeping it from us, it was keeping it from the bad guys. now if a person doesn’t think there are any bad guys then the program is not necessary.
on the larger point, i would give up most of my civil liberties with a sunset provision if it expedites the war effort. previous generations have done as much when necessary. i actually completely trust our system of checks and balances. oh for sure, tricky ‘dicks’ get to run around for a while–but they get caught and things are made right. meanwhile the grassy knollers and roswell types provide entertainment value.
May 17th, 2006 at 6:22 pm
It raises a quesiton I have posed to myself and here again and again: At what point do you say that substantive democracy ceases to exist no matter what our cherised notions? Is it when the president offers interpretaions on bills signalling that he feels he need not enforce them, regardelss of what the Constitution says? Is it when he brazenly breaks the law by condoning domestic spying, and then goes on to defend it? Is it when the FBI captures phone numbers under the guise of stopping leaks? There must come a point when although we can buy a million flavors of toothpaste, and hop over to Santa Cruz for the weekend unmolested, that political freedom is gone (or at least seriously eroded) and only the appearance remains.
But most worrisome I fear, is that technology makes this sort of spying easy, and impossible to stop. Any TCP/IP traffic (including growing voip telephone traffic) can rather trivially be capured and reconstructed.
That means all voip traffic, email, web surfing, purchases, IMs, and so on are available for perusal. Encryption is your only defense and who knows how good that is? Anyone see how some agencies are using gps data from cell phones to keep track of people? I try hard not to throw my hands up, but this stuff is nearly impossible to stop, and without whistleblowers (see why the current mania about leaks?) we will never know about it.
Patrick: the fact that some leaders in Congress are cowards and weasles hardly makes this practice acceptable. You can go right ahead and “temporarily” give up your civil liberties. Leave mine alone please, thank you very much.
May 17th, 2006 at 7:05 pm
Dan O - as I implied earlier, I think that in our current environment of digital hyper-linked communications - where everything from daily purchases to political discourse to perusal of porn are taking place in an external space totally out of our control and fully documented in some form or fashion - the concept of privacy is an anachronism.
I’m not justifying anything or anybody - just commenting on reality.
I also believe that it’s unlikely these mega-data mining programs are going to turn up anything consequential that serious “malefactors” really want to conceal.
Maybe I watch too much “24″ but I assume the NSA can pick us Joe Schmoes out of the sky in a minute if they put Chloe on the case and that the first-tier bad guys have got a dozen Black Box ways to scramble shit to confuse random data-mining programs.
Examples based on what could or should have been done prior to 9/11 are undoubtedly now irrelevant because everyone has upped the communcations/surveillance ante and this has been assumed by anyone who worries about such things long before the media blew the whistle on Bush.
I doubt that al Qaeda believes that Great Satan worries much about the Constitution, FISA, etc. And of course they’re right.
May 17th, 2006 at 11:35 pm
dan,
everything you said is opinion not fact. as i said before the bush admin will not be found guilty of breaking any laws. congress is upset because only the main principles were included in the oversight briefings.
what laws have been broken? sure you can find attorney’s who say there were some but an equal if not greater number say none were. in fact virtually every senator and rep want all the programs to continue they just want to be in the loop. whoopy do!
as far as your civil rights go–you are one of the folks sitting around the fire trying to tell scary stories. i would never touch your civil rights but again they can have mine, with a sunset provision if it helps. i want them checking every single piece of data that they feel like. like i said before, i trust our system of checks and balances–obviously you don’t.
when hillary is doing the same i have a feeling you will understand better–like you may have when all the raw fbi files of her opponents were found in the white house basement. now i didn’t say you did, i said you may have! and we were not at war then…………
thank god the adults are in charge………
May 18th, 2006 at 3:54 am
“thank god the adults are in charge”
Somebody’s still using that one ? What a hoot !
May 18th, 2006 at 4:02 am
“The Adults” : http://tinyurl.com/kf9su
May 18th, 2006 at 8:46 am
Mavis, please read the 5th Amendment: not required to testify against yourself.
Then try to say you don’t want to “voluntarily” fill out a 1040. Your “Constitutional Rights” to financial privacy, long gone.
I don’t believe most Americans have privacy from any gov’t agency that wants to track them. The point is, who are the potential terrorists who should be tracked?
As said, the general program was already being told to Congress, who was keeping it non-public in hopes that the killers wouldn’t be protecting against it.
The checks I want to see are MUCH more protection, inside the system, for whistleblowers.
“and without whistleblowers (see why the current mania about leaks?) we will never know about it.”
The Dems don’t really seem to be interested in improving the oversight record. [What about the FBI person who claimed her supervisor wouldn't forward suspicions, or some story?]
What *I* want is a very clear audit trail of every person who asks for data mined information, and how it is analyzed. And I want nearly full records automatically after 2-4 years, with it very very difficult to erase or cover up. [So not even a Dem like Sandy Berger can go into archives and steal possibly incriminating memos.]
But the Dems want to have a Gorelick wall, to hamstring intel gathering — and then blame inaction on bad intel; and if a Rep is Pres., personally blame the prior Dem problems on the Rep.
May 18th, 2006 at 11:16 am
Sandy Berger wasn’t alone: http://www.slate.com/id/2141672/
Cowards, cowards, cowards. There is no legitimate reason why a program like this can’t be announced to the American people.
As to the privacy concerns, I know you guys on the right aren’t concerned about the government keeping tabs on you, but over on the left we’ve seen far to many instances of the government keeping tabs on left wing and liberal dissenters. Maybe you can’t imagine the government would abuse it’s powers and go after you, but we can. And since we can back up our concerns with evidence, it’d be nice if you took the freedoms of your fellow citizens seriously.
http://www.yesweekly.com/main.asp?SectionID=1&SubSectionID=1&ArticleID=235&TM=52540.06
http://www.darrenweeks.net/news/2006/04/pentagon-admits-more-spying-on.html
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032706C.shtml
May 18th, 2006 at 11:18 am
Patrick:
This is the law I refer to:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
It’s not that complicated. And in any modern society I would make the claim that all rights stem from a fundamental right to privacy. Once that is gone, you’ve crossed the Rubicon, and once crossed we’re likely never to return. You can call that a scary story if you like, but democracy and freedom are fragile creatures, and you seem very much to prefer a kind of cozy Hegelian authoritarianism. I don’t trust power that much whether wielded by this bunch of lunatics, or by Hilary or whomever.
And Reg: You’re right on about the connected world now, and I wonder how it’s all going to turn out, politically that is.
July 2nd, 2006 at 8:53 am
beautiful online information center. greatest work… thanks
August 22nd, 2007 at 1:59 am
[...] exalted site now disserte this examination http://marccooper.com/reach-out-and-toucheveryone and give comments [...]
August 22nd, 2007 at 2:00 am
[...] intimidating site now double take this write up http://marccooper.com/reach-out-and-toucheveryone and give comments [...] virgin phone [...]
February 12th, 2008 at 3:31 am
asset gps tracking…
umm it really depends….