Posted on 01/22/2009 6:17:20 AM PST by steve-b
Here's a chilling interview of former NSA analyst Russell Tice conducted by Keith Olbermann. While I'm not the biggest Olbermann fan in the world, he asked some important questions about how far the NSA went during the Bush administration. It's a chilling interview. Hopefully restraining the NSA to 4th Amendment boundaries will be a priority for the Obama administration.
And while we are talking about privacy, we also need to keep the government out of the panties of our 13-year-old daughters and our private health records, too.
“Consider the source.”
If you don’t want to consider the source of the information, then consider the source of the reporting medium.
Dubious combined with dubious equals dubious squared.
Total BS from the fevered swamp of Olbermann.
And that, ladies and germs, is the precise issue. There is a balance between liberty and security. Virtually any policy, idea, or change in the law move this equilibrium to either side of this sliding scale. Most of our policy-makers, and most American voters, seem to be very intent on increasing security, at the cost of "just a little liberty here and there". Drip, drip, drip... every day, it drips away. =^(
What are you, crazy?
I use velcro.
If they were monitoring a few democrat party propagandists who were helping terrorists I don’t care. The idea that they have the time, inclination or even computing/database power to track all of us is ridiculous. Can they feed all of the calls, emails etc they have access to through filters to screen for key words and phrases? Yep, but there is no database or datacenter large enough to do much else. People are not listening in or viewing all of that traffic, computers are and if the data stream does not contain any of the words and phrases they are interested in then the data stream is discarded, NOT STORED. Even the data of interest that is sent on for further screening is discarded if nothing is found. There are not enough employees in the entire federal government to actively and personally track even a fraction of the data streams.
I wish they were a fraction as "evil" as the idiot population believes, then we might have known the USSR was about to collapse and, oh, yeah...radical Islam had declared war on us.
It’s not infantile anything. Nobody really knows what the hell the NSA does, their very mission statement was classified for a long time, that right there should creep you out. We know they sniff communications, we don’t know how, we don’t know which, we just know that they specialized in intercepted communications and we’re told their SUPPOSED to not monitor domestic communications but that every few some story comes out that indeed the do monitor domestic communications.
If that doesn’t scare you, you’re not thinking. Remember the government is not your friend, and the more secretive the section of the government in question is the more not your friend it is.
Oh, pulease. What a load of garbage. Like I said, I wish our intelligence agencies were as super scary as people like you think they are.
No garbage in there at all. And may your wish never ever come true. That’s probably the single most dangerous wish anybody has ever wished.
Sorry, but calls to/from military installation have always been subject to monitoring and not by the NSA. The Army even has an MOS/job classification for it - 05G/97G, which is SIGSEC/COMSEC specialist. Guys commonly known within the MI field as buddyfu*****
It is really quite amazing just how little that American conservatives know about this. Had Clinton or Obama done this, they'd be (properly) up in arms. You are mistaken about the NSA. Under the Bush, administration its power has expanded to monitoring personal calls of U.S. soldiers to their families (as well as non-soldiers) and the snoopers have been cracking jokes about the phone sex they have heard. Heare are some excerpts from a well-publicized story in October:
"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.
Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism." She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States.
"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News. ....
Listening to Aid Workers NSA awarded Adrienne Kinne a NSA Joint Service Achievement Medal in 2003 at the same time she says she was listening to hundreds of private conversations between Americans, including many from the International Red Cross and Doctors without Borders.
I guess I didn’t make my point clearly enough.
If you are in the military and are calling someone while on a military base or are receiving a call from someone while you are on a military base, your call is subject to monitoring. Doesn’t have to be the NSA it could be the military. Point is expect no privacy while on base.
Depending on the circumstances that monitoring may last long enough to ascertain the parties are US citizens. Once that is done the monitoring is supposed to cease.
I saw nothing in that article you pointed me to that indicates anything other than childish behavior on behalf of a few military members doing their jobs poorly. They should have been reprimanded or court-martialed for their behavior.
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