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Just Because You're Paranoid Doesn't Mean You're Not Being Watched
One night not long ago, I had a disturbing dream in which I had moved to Washington DC and kept running into GW Bush. He had no Security and no one seemed to recognize him but me. I'd be in a "safe" location like a library and there he would be, tapping me on the shoulder and making some "cute" little remark and smirking. When I woke up, I chalked it up to a combination of his being in office for so long and things I had read recently about surveillance and invasion of privacy.
FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) allows our intelligence agencies to listen in on conversations between terrorists overseas. National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell believes that the government needs more expansive powers to examine web searches, internet activity and email. He considers FISA to be an outdated obstacle to doing so and believes that lawmakers are dragging their feet. McConnell convinced Bush of his position by hypothesizing about a cyberattack on a US bank. In his opinion, security will only come at the expense of personal privacy. His CyberSecurity Plan is still in draft, but would give the government authority to examine the content of any email, file transfer or Web search. Google records would be fair game.
AT&T Whistleblower Mark Klein claims that the infrastructure for monitoring our emails and calls is already in place. (Hear radio broadcast at the link)
Part of Klein's report:
"My job was to connect circuits into the splitter device which was hard-wired to the secret room. And effectively, the splitter copied the entire data stream of those Internet cables into the secret room -- and we're talking about phone conversations, email web browsing, everything that goes across the Internet. As a technician, I had the engineering wiring documents, which told me how the splitter was wired to the secret room. And so I know that whatever went across those cables was copied and the entire data stream was copied. We're talking about domestic traffic as well as international traffic. It involves millions of communications, a lot of it domestic communications that they're copying wholesale."
Meanwhile, Privacy International (UK) and Electronic Privacy Information Well (US) have both given US the lowest possible rating ("endemic surveillance society"), along with UK, China and Russia. These features helped us get our rating: increased surveillance with poor oversight, increased border control, plans for national ID cards including biometrics, security breaches, and invasion of privacy. Surveillance technology is now capable of advancing more rapidly than government safeguards for privacy.
Last week, The US Senate rejected an attempt to expand a secret court's oversight of government eavesdropping, sticking instead with a surveillance bill favored by the White House." The New York Times Editorial Board, on the debate over re-authorization of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, wrote: "The Senate (reportedly still under Democratic control) seems determined to help President Bush violate Americans' civil liberties and undermine the constitutional separation of powers." There is more voting today, and word was that Clinton and Obama will both return to the Senate to vote "no" against the Bush version of the FISA bill, though he may still veto.
A couple of final things:
Michael Mukasey, top law enforcement officer for the USA, keeps a framed photograph of George Orwell in his office. He says that he admires him for his "clarity of thought." Even FOX News reported that the FBI can listen to you using your cell phone even when it's off, unless you take the battery out. (see video below)
According to the Pew Research Group, Americans are worried more that businesses rather than government are snooping into their lives. About three-in-four (74%) say they are concerned that business corporations are collecting too much personal information while 58% express the same concern about the government. Given the powerful influence corporations have on government, it's hard to be comfortable with either.
Even in the short term, we need to be vigilant and proactive. We are juggling several big and inter-related civil liberties issues at the same time that we need to apply pressure to our Legislators on!
When I was in Graduate School, the atmosphere could become competitive and negative. I remember someone putting up a sign that said, "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're not being watched." That sign comes to mind now.
(Photo: D. Grieser)
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This is written by a friend of mine & related to the above ..
Ari Melber | Telecom Immunity Should Be a Campaign Issue
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/012808N.shtml
Ari Melber writes for The Nation: "President Bush is now daring Congress to defy his demand for more unchecked power to spy on Americans without warrants, vowing to veto temporary surveillance legislation and politicize his last State of the Union address for an attack on Democrats. Last week, Democratic leaders were considering a bill to grant a one-month extension of the administration's spying powers, a 'compromise' tilted in Bush's favor, but Republican tactics have finally tried the patience of Majority Leader Harry Reid. He had been managing floor votes to advance the Republican bill and squash opposition from the majority of Democrats within his caucus, but that may change this week."
This stuff is now to the point of making my head hurt.
There's always been a fine line between the public good and privacy. 9-11 didn't change things. They had credible information prior to 9-11 that was legally obtained that they failed to act upon!
My opinion is that this isn't about safety anymore. It's about politics and covering their own a$$es.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marty-kaplan/state-of-the-outrage_b_83455.html
State of the Outrage
Because Barbara Bush taught him to "use your words, George," her son the president, rather than actually mooning some Senate Democrats at the joint session of Congress on Monday night as he would like to do, will instead call them terrorist-lovers for refusing to give retroactive immunity to lawbreaking telecoms in the FISA bill, and he will call them partisan obstructionists for wanting to extend unemployment benefits in the economic stimulus bill now pending.
Because the political media's machismo depends on admiring cynicism as realpolitik, when the Clintons claim victory in the Florida primary this Tuesday, the mandarins will pronounce it a brilliant chess move, rather than revealing it as a desperation-borne contempt for the rules of the nomination game they had previously agreed to, and as condescension toward those who still naively care about playing by them.
Because there is no accountability in punditry -- outside, that is, of Jon Stewart and Keith Olbermann -- Rudy Giuliani's flameout in Florida, like Fred Thompson's before him in South Carolina, will occasion no reminders and no regrets for the jock-sniffing musk-addled crushes once harbored toward them by the Chris Matthewses and Bill Kristols of the political locker room.
Because there is nothing like necrophilia and hagiography to prolong our national addiction to historical amnesia, this week's Republican debate at the Reagan Library will prompt no admission that the sub-prime meltdown now dragging Americans into a painful recession, except for the nouveau gazillionaires insulated from it, is the godchild of the Reagan religion of faith-based deregulation, fundamentalist market worship, and a massive government-engineered transfer of wealth from the middle to the top.
Because "the surge is working" -- because, that is, of the indefinitely long presence of more than 150,000 American troops in Iraq, paid for by trillions of dollars that even the Bush administration no longer has the nerve to put in its budget, combined with the absence of any meaningful progress toward the administration's own benchmarks for political success, coupled with the media's inability to cover the war as anything except the kind of occasional traffic fatality story found on local TV news -- a presidential campaign that might have been a referendum on Republican deceit and incompetence, and a frank conversation about America's real security interests in the world, will instead be a moronic barrage of empty slogans about change.
And because the Framers were unable to anticipate the genius at gaming the Constitution possessed by the power-mad viceroys of a future King George named Cheney and Rove, nor could the Founders conceive of a corporate press hooked on revenue-generating junk and intimidated into abandoning its role as Fourth Estate, the year of onanistic Legacy coverage and good-poodle bipartisanship that will be kicked off this week by the State of the Union address will be left unspoiled by erased emails, unmarred by unenforced contempt citations, unsullied by unacknowledged high crimes and demeanors, and unblemished by disgraces that cannot be rectified by pardons for the past and pay packages for the future.
But hey, it's gonna be a great Super Bowl, Romney sure is good-looking, I wonder what kind of cake Jenna and Henry pick, Joe Lieberman really understands how to reach across the aisle, and did you know Obama's middle name is Saddam?
More on the Surveillance Bill cloture vote at 4:30 PM EST
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/005149.php
This is a big issue for me.
Being transgender and having some medical history, there are things in the commercial databases about me that, while not criminal, are not in my best interests to be known to others.
The truth though is that anyone with $20 and my SSN can dig those things up. Most likely it'll be a potential employer, who will use the said data to deny me, illegally, a job I am perfectly qualified for. But thanks to California's at-will employment laws, the employer can just shut up about his illegal reasons, and stay legal.
The at-will employment law is one of many cases where the Orange County conservatives have the brainless Bay Area liberals completely outmaneuvered. Thanks to at-will laws, barbaric Third World immigrant-owned businesses in Los Angeles (that's almost everyone) can disqualify a perfectly good job candidate on such illegal factors as age, marital status, national origin, and religion.
These Democratic Senators voted last week with Republicans to table the version of the FISA bill that excluded telcom amnesty. One of them, Sen. Rockefeller, has already said he'll vote no on cloture on this bill. That means we need to convince three other Democrats on this list to vote against cloture:
Bayh (202) 224-5623
Carper (202) 224-2441
Inouye (202) 224-3934
Johnson (202) 224-5842
Landrieu (202)224-5824
McCaskill (202) 224-6154
Mikulski (202) 224-4654
Nelson (FL) (202) 224-5274
Nelson (NE) (202) 224-6551
Pryor (202) 224-2353
Salazar (202) 224-5852
Senator Chris Dodd is currently fighting for our Constitution and the rule of law.
hit this link:
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/01/critical-senate-vote-surveillance-imminent
Don't let the GOP give huge corporations immunity from the laws they've already broken. Call your senators now as the vote will likely happen within the next 30 minutes.
The most paranoid are those who are regular users of psychotic drugs, including marijuana, OR those who wreak havoc and indescribable and incomprehensible evil upon others. The first group will not concern us. This president GWB and his administration have been taunting the American public for 8 long years..... since before 9/11.... with his ability to get absolutely everything his little heart desires no matter how many innocents will be tortured, incarcerated, maimed and killed. He's high on power. And while the American government doesn't even attempt to stop him, it will continue. At an even greater rate now that his time is running out.
The Psychopathic president is out of control. And no one wants to stop him.
Ralph--
We just had a huge victory. Grassroots action forced the Senate to stop telecom immunity from passing.
Earlier today, DFA members made over 1,000 calls an hour to our Senators. And they heard our voices loud and clear.
Tonight I'll be watching President Bush give his final State of the Union. As usual, he will be fear-mongering and pushing his radical agenda on the American people.
Thanks to your work today, we flipped the vote and forced Senate Democrats to have a backbone.
Jim