That’s right, the content of calls. Without the specific and targeted warrant we all assumed under FISA was required to obtain said content.
Meaning that either the President knew about the NSA’s ability to cull the content of calls without a warrant and condoned it, then lied to the American people in the most brazen way imaginable; or else he didn’t know, is overseeing yet another corrupt agency violating the constitutional protections of a free people, and should be asked specifically which is the case: were you lying, Mr President? Or were you so uninterested in the specifics of the scandal (receiving plenty of GOP cover) and so unconcerned about the fallout that, save for a few perfunctory reassurances that had no basis in fact, you were content to try to bullshit your way through this, not knowing for sure just what the NSA was up to?
But then, such questions require a mainstream press whose job it is to investigate and report the news. And what we have instead is largely a house organ of big government progressivism, trained to protect its favored candidates and skewer those who might do those favored candidates — or the movement’s favored causes (in this case, as with most progressive cases, the ends being more centralized control over the individual) — any kind of damage.
That is, propagandists and narrative gatekeepers for the cause of leftist Utopianism.
So I guess it’s left up to people like me to ask: which is it, Mr President? Were you yet again showing your contempt for the American people by lying through your teeth and assuming we’d take your phony reassurances as gospel? Or are you just totally incompetent and so disconnected from the daily realities of your office that you had no idea that your bullshitting could be so readily debunked?
(thanks to bh)
It’s confusing to this extent: leaning on Jerrold Nadler was a highly dependable sort of thing back aways, since at 5’4″ and 330 he was stoutly firm as a leftist NY Democrat. But then he went and reduced his intake machine, losing gobs of fundament as a consequence, and comes here taking on the appearance of a truth teller. Which, impossible, law degree or no.
Most of the people who illegally download MP3s and videos would never in a million years boost a CD or DVD from a brick-and-mortar.
Likewise, it’s so much easier to hear a phone call by clicking a mouse than by physically attaching a tap line.
It doesn’t FEEL wrong.
So they do it.
Parsing what Nadler said first.
and second.
Brings one to the conclusion that he is saying that they can without a warrant listen to the content, which would also mean emails, text messages, etc. of anyone who they believe in not an “American.” This glosses over several things among which are. That they do, they have to, store all calls by everyone since they would not know at the time they store the call if an “American” was the one on the call. What exactly is an “American” for these purposes? How is it determined since the name and address data is supposed to not be given out with the “metadata”?
Once you store all this data then Ric Locke’s Rule 3 comes into effect. “The ants find the sugar.”
All this data is a huge pile of sugar. So many uses can be found for it. So much power will flow into the hands of those who can access it, that access to it will be had and had by more and more people over time. It is inevitable as long as it exists.
I was listening to a small snippet of Bob Brinker’s “Moneytalk” last night, and one of his panelists (apologists) pointed out that anyone who misused the NSA information for fishing expeditions would be “breaking the law”. That show needs a laugh track.
I’m guessing the guests on that show are all heavily sedated, as none of them were awake enough to reply “like the way the IRS was ‘breaking the law'”? “How many IRS people are going to jail for that, again”?
To which the correct response would have been, “Uh-huh. And…?”
Does anybody remember Zacharias Moussaoui? Arrested Aug. 16th, 2001 (captured, as it turned out too late), action wasn’t taken to discover the contents of his possessions for want of perfectly foreseeing legal language, or a simple sense of urgency in the face of an Islamist boob. But action as such in this circumstance would have constituted the “energy” or “vigor” spoken of in the first of the Federalist Papers. There was a price paid less than a month later.
One driver of this NSA thing is that the NSA uses a word “collection” or “collected” to mean something quite different than most of us do.
To them the data that they get from all the various sources and put on their hard-drives is merely “stored.” It is not “collected” until they do a search, either using a warrant for data pertaining to US persons, or warrant-less for foreign persons, and see the data on their screens. PRISM is the data “collection” system for this use of “collection.” The facility being built in Utah is a “storage” facility in their definitions.
The among programs that grab the data that is “stored” are “Ragtime” for foreign sourced data. Likely grabbed with taps on fiber optic lines overseas or underseas. The Domestic program counterpart is “Ragtime P” part of which is what gets the metadata from the phone companies.
Once this data is stored then it is PRISM which allows them to access aka “collect” all the various data types, run searches through the data based of keywords, format the data in various ways to highlight some correlation between data sets and any other manipulation that can be done to turn the data into information.
I don’t know much about spying but, I assume they have some king of “listening machine” that is a program that listens for keywords in conversations and reports any “patterns”. Not exactly listening to a private conversation like a classic wiretap of a mafioso phone.
dude, just started dating this Iranian girl, she’s the bomb, a killer build. Great cook too, he made me a khoresht stew in a pressure cooker. . .
-Jeff wrote:
But Jeff, you’re ignoring the grand accomplishment of the Mainstream Press. They have pulled-off the impossible: being Court Enuchs at the same time as being Fifth Columnists!
Come on, give credit where it’s due, man.
-Dicentra:
How can it be wrong
If it feels so right?
From the “When the Dictator threatens, sober nations pay attention” file:
*** Syrian President Bashar al-Assad warned Monday that European powers would “pay the price” if they sent weapons to rebel forces seeking to topple him.
“If the Europeans deliver weapons, then Europe’s backyard will become terrorist, and Europe will pay the price for it,” he was quoted as saying by German daily Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung.
Sending weapons to rebels would lead to terrorism in Europe, he said according to an excerpt of an exclusive interview to appear in Tuesday’s edition of the newspaper.
“Terrorists will return, battle-hardened and with an extremist ideology,” he was quoted as saying. ***
Ah, well then, all the more reason to keep Bashy in power, of course.
Any bets that this isn’t in the data storage also?
An interesting late turn around the block seems to go like this:
Barack Obama is Dick Cheney. Dick Cheney is Darth Vader. Darth Vader is your father, Luke. Hence, Barack Obama is your father, Lon by any other name, who says “Come home son, don’t stay in Hong Kong any longer . . . there be demons there. Embrace the dark side — come home.”
A view which has a lot in common with mine.
“In Our Name“
Wouldn’t want to leave Lon out, ‘specially with Barry Obazm playing The Phantom of the Presidency to such applause.
“A view which has a lot in common with mine.”
no mention of “islam”. stating the obvious is verboten in the ruining classes.
And how could that be done unwittingly or inadvertently with data relating to millions of Americans? It couldn’t. Even Clapper’s too-cute-by-half hedge fails. That was perjury.
Until some of these bastards start going to jail, nothing’s going to change.
cheney and baracky sitting a tree
k-i-s-s-i-n-g
Clapper’s hedge was that they, the analysts entered the wrong telephone number by mistake. The right one was in the FISC order, supposedly, but since everything is secret who the fuck knows what goes on, basically.
This whole thing is a discussion that needs to be done publicly at least to set some guidelines that we all agree on. Probably an election or two will have to come and go to get there.
Just storing all this data is wrong because once stored it will be used for more than the purpose for which it was done. See IRS, EPA for examples that are horrible but nowhere near the potential horrors of this database.
there ain’t no more discussion. the fed gov’t @-75% now
The bastards won’t go to jail until and unless going to jail becomes the alternative to hanging from a lamp post.
It’s that bad.
Agreed. They should go to jail for their own safety. Until someone pays off the screws, of course.