The Washington Post’s Ellen Nakashima is sure to give the nutroots the vapors with this one:
When FBI investigators probing New York prostitution rings, Boston organized crime or potential terrorist plots anywhere want access to a suspect’s telephone contacts, technicians at a telecommunications carrier served with a government order can, with the click of a mouse, instantly transfer key data along a computer circuit to an FBI technology office in Quantico.
***
Recently, three Democrats on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, including Chairman John D. Dingell (Mich.), sent a letter to colleagues citing privacy concerns over one of the Quantico circuits and demanding more information about it. Anxieties about whether such electronic links are too intrusive form a backdrop to the continuing congressional debate over modifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs federal surveillance.
The story arises out of this:
In an affidavit circulated on Capitol Hill, security consultant Babak Pasdar alleged that a telecom carrier he had worked for maintained a high-speed DS-3 digital line that co-workers referred to as “the Quantico Circuit.” He said it allowed a third party “unfettered” access to the carrier’s wireless network, including billing records and customer data transmitted wirelessly.
FBI officials said a circuit of the type described by Pasdar does not exist. AJ Strata addressed the Pasdar affidavit last month, to which I would only add, “Ouch.”
Nakashima’s story fuels the Democrats’ attempt to use Pasdar’s affidavit to conflate surveillance under the Clinton-era Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act with the FISA controversy, which Wired’s Threat Level blog was waving people away from doing last month. Not that such will stop paranoids like Rick Ellensburg and Scott Horton from rolling out another dystopian conspiracy fantasy for their gullible readers.
(h/t Memeorandum.)
I’ve never reconciled the idea that these paranoids are also the same people who want the government to have all of your medical records, and if they thought they could get away with it, the phone companies themselves.
How is “privacy” even possible in a socialist society?
Shouldn’t that be djinning up?
Open, sez you.
But, but, but, but, Karl, they are using that circuit to transmit pieces of the shredded Constitution. I knows it!!!!
Nobody controls access to systems or data using firewall ACLs alone. At least, not according to any access control model I’ve ever heard of.
If you read the affidavit, his final bullet point pretty much admits that point, and then suggests that what the carrier is doing is to allow the FBI access via exploit or something.
I like Wired’s “update”
Update: Democratic leaders in the House are taking Pasdar’s claims seriously. John Dingell, the chairman of the Energy and Commerce committee, wrote a Dear Colleague letter (.pdf) today, addressing the issue.
That’s pretty funny.
Oh, boy. It’s a Presidential election year and there’s a massive outbreak of teh stoopid.
Breakfast of Neo-Theo-Neocons!
Karl,there are plenty of guys like you in Russia.
“Nothing to worry , nothing to see here, move along.”
Perfect description here:
…the Yoo memoranda and what they spawned are not a big deal because they don’t reflect anything fundamentally wrong and evil with our government, because, in America, we’re immune from anything like that ever happening. So even when …… evidence of those things emerges, there’s no reason to pay attention to it. They’re just isolated matters from the …. past, no reason to act as though there’s anything … wrong here ….. ~ paranoid GG
I’d rather have guys who are suspicious and are worried (in your parlance – paranoid) about the government, then ÿþхуøÑÂÑ‚Ñ‹- who are indifferent enablers of the government regression into the soviet realms…
um, have you been able to show what the memo “spawned” yet?
Quick, someone introduce sashal to the truthers. It’s fine to be wary sasha, in fact we all should be, but you need to evaluate a little better when you are being played for someone else’s profit.
profit?
Newspapers are a business, sashal. Ellensburg writes books, presumably in hopes of selling them.
sashal, the people who are zooming and rotating over this, and dragging you into it with hysterical overreactions, are the same ones who, a decade ago, discovered that Hillary! had the complete income tax returns and dossiers of over five hundred of her political enemies on her desk… and not only shrugged it off, but tried to make it out as a responsible thing for a Government official to do. This despite the fact that “wife of the President” is NOT a “Government official” in our system.
What they want is political power, and somebody else has it; there are no other considerations. Most of what they identify as transgressions by the Bush Administration are things they fully intend to do themselves when they get the chance, and therefore darkly suspect are being done to them. They consider it not merely reasonable, but necessary, to have kangaroo courts based on presumption of guilt for “sexual harassment” or “racial discrimination”; they fully intend (and have said so) to use “global warming” as an entering wedge to gain full, detailed, Politburo-style powers of micromanagement of the smallest details of society, from who gets medical care to what kind of car people can drive. They are cynically using your very real and natural concerns as a springboard to gain their ends, and based on past performance they will toss you under the bus with a negligent chuckle when your usefulness has come to an end.
What all this comes to is an admission, by a Federal judge, that he/she doesn’t know how an important bit of technology works, added to an ignorant sorehead repeating a company “in-joke” as if it were Gospel. The rest of it is hyperventilation, spin, and misdirection designed to take your eye off the ball.
Regards,
Ric
Sashal, calm yourself. Sometimes a cigar (or a data circuit in this case) is just a cigar. Go read AJ Strata’s post on this. He nails it (and this punk who wrote the original drivel) perfectly. I’m a data network engineer myself, and so am entitled to an opinion on the subject.
Hell, that DS-3 could have belonged to anybody. They didn’t tell him it was a FBI circuit. Or any other federal agency. And that assumes that this conversation between this weenie and the “consultants” even took place. If there’s one thing we all know by now is that the leftie moonbats will lie at the drop of a hat if they think it will advance “The Narrative”…
sashal,
While you were suffering under the yoke of Sovietism, I was living here, listening to the last generation of Greenwalds and Hortons dish up the same sort of steaming loads of hot garbage, always monomaniacally focused on any speck in America’s eye while ignoring the beam sticking out of that of the Soviets. It was garbage then, it’s garbage now. It saddens me that your exerience makes you prone to believe it.
Most of what they identify as transgressions by the Bush Administration are things they fully intend to do themselves when they get the chance, and therefore darkly suspect are being done to them.
Every dog smells his own hole first.
Rick and Karl, i realize that too. And I believe it may be the case in plenty of cases. I , like probably you guys, am EOE(equal opportunity e-basher).
Right at this point of our history we are dealing with the obvious or not to some people transgressions of the Bush administration which happened to be the republican. When democrats and Clinton were in power, my voice was heard also when, in my view, they were complicit oin all kinds of not so clean activities, including the support of the disintegration of the member of UN and boost to muslim terrorism in Europe.
So there…
I do not belong and I am not a supporter/member of any political party, I think I developed allergy for life to any political organization and to any rosy promises from the government how well they are supposed to behave, how they have only our interest as their goal and we should just trust them…
Sashal, while I can understand your ambivalence with regards to governments in general, having grown up under the Soviets, the fact is that there have been no “transgressions” committed by the Bush administration, certainly none of the order you are implying.
Has the administration made some blunders? Oh hell, yes, and spectacularly so in some cases. But all this nefarious “shredding the Constitution/spying on ‘citizens’/etc/ad nauseam” that the Loony Left keeps accusing them of, of that there has been no evidence.
Plenty of wild accusations, sure. But after nearly eight fucking years and more “investigations” than you can shake a samovar at, NOTHING has been found. And God knows that given how many leakers there have been in this administration, if there were a smoking gun somewhere, it would have been found by now.
Of course, this is nothing new for the proggies. They were making exactly the same sort of accusations when Reagan and Bush I were in office. And with the same amount of evidence to back it up; that is, none.
sashal, I think one of the points here is that it’s a good idea to use caution in believing people who appear not to know what they’re talking about. Like this Pasdar character, for example.
Have sashal and nishi dated yet?
That’s one of those things that the director of intel or the FBI looks up from his computer and says “wow, can we do that?” Wishing it were possible. The godlike power they attribute to computers makes me wonder just where they’ve been living. It’s like they take Hollywood’s potrayal of computers and hacking seriously. I saw it on CSI, they can take the reflection off an eyeball bounced off a lamp across the room and get a clear image of a license plate across the street. All they have to do is zoom in and enhance the image!
Most of what they identify as transgressions by the Bush Administration are things they fully intend to do themselves when they get the chance, and therefore darkly suspect are being done to them.
Yes, quite. Read Rules for Radicals some day, 99 times out of 100 when a leftist accuses someone of something, it’s what they are already doing and trying to deflect future criticism.
Let’s not forget that that last generation of Greenwalds and Hortons were dishing up a casserole baked in Moscow, and that it was intended to distract from the beam. Most of the time the useful idiots had no idea who, ultimately, was the source of their talking points, but occasionally one was quite aware of it.
I wonder if the current generation has any idea who they’re playing useful idiots to.
Let’s not forget that that last generation of Greenwalds and Hortons were dishing up a casserole baked in Moscow, and that it was intended to distract from the bea
Last crock pot of Dems said that the people of USSR wouldn’t know what to do with freedom like ours, that they shouldn’t have freedom like ours. (I guess that’s back in the time Democrats thought americans were so good and special! we were the only ones that knew how to “deal” with freedom.)
and NOW after all the places, Dems want freedom in Tibet. Go figure.
Does this mean we have to turn off the secret OC-128 to Mount Doom?…