Posted on 01/14/2008 3:31:36 PM PST by ninonitti
Spychief Mike McConnell is drafting a plan to protect America’s cyberspace that will raise privacy issues and make the current debate over surveillance law look like “a walk in the park,” McConnell tells The New Yorker in the issue set to hit newsstands Monday. “This is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.” At issue, McConnell acknowledges, is that in order to accomplish his plan, the government must have the ability to read all the information crossing the Internet in the United States in order to protect it from abuse. Congressional aides tell The Journal that they, too, are also anticipating a fight over civil liberties that will rival the battles over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. Part of the lawmakers’ ire, they have said, is the paltry information the administration has provided. The cyberspace security initiative was first reported in September by The Baltimore Sun, and some congressional aides say that lawmakers have still learned more from the media than they did from the few Top Secret briefings they have received hours before the administration requested money in November to jump start the program. In a series of interviews that began in July, McConnell also weighs in on the hunt for Osama bin Laden. In the past six years, McConnell says, U.S. intelligence agencies have stopped “many, many” terrorist attacks. But his deputy David Shedd says that in the search for America’s most-wanted terrorist, “the trail is cold.” McConnell says that while bin Laden is believed to be in the tribal region of Pakistan, the U.S. will not invade the country to chase him down. You cannot indiscriminately attack a sovereign nation,” he says, adding, though, that if the U.S.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.wsj.com ...
And they came after the Jews but I did not resist, because I wasn’t a Jew.
And they came after the Catholics and I didn’t resist because I wasn’t a Catholic so by the time that they came after me...there was nobody left to resist...!”
Same with the guns. It may be a bit past 1984 but we are still on track for a despotic state.
LOL thanks the dancing piece threw me off too
Populated by good people who fancy themselves to be great dancers...
No, it MUST not.
Don't abuse me to 'protect' me from abuse. I'm a big boy and don't need your nanny-ing.
Of course we all know this isn't about 'protecting' us anyway....
If I were head of the NSA I’d want this capability too, of course. Frankly, I’d be somewhat disappointed in them if they can’t do it already.
But on a practical level, I wonder if it would be all that useful after all. It’s the ultimate in trying to sip from a firehose. The volume of clutter is so extreme, it seems to me that more ordinary targeted surviellance would be more productive.
It would be more interesting to know on a nuts and bolts level what sort of traffic and information he’s interested in capturing.
Reminds me of the old Steven Wright joke: If you really did have everything... where would you put it?
I'm pretty certain they do it already.......all the Dancing Spychief wants is a cloak of legitimacy.
My point is that the guy is going on the record to be able to say "I told you so" in the wake of another attack......a fancy dancer CYA step.
No more freedoms surrendered. And I want the ones others surrendered for me returned. We’ve got a wide open border that tells me that we don’t care about security.
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