As we wonder what sort of gonad-enhanced pod people from Uncanny Valley have replaced our beloved House leadership, let’s remind ourselves what this is all about:
- Fact: The National Security Agency (NSA) has data-mined the call records of millions of Americans. These records were handed over to the spying agency without a court order or warrant.
- Fact: Calling your Aunt Susan in Australia? The NSA is listening. No warrant? No problem. What about for international calls made to a lawyer, doctor or priest? No warrant necessary there either.
- Fact: Mobile phones transmit extremely accurate location information back to the wireless carriers. The FBI, DEA and other federal law enforcement agencies routinely get access to this location data without demonstrating “probable cause,” which is typically required before a judge will issue a warrant.
- Fact: Most mobile providers claim that they do not save copies of text messages sent to phones and pagers for extended periods of time. However, up until the point that the messages are deleted, the companies will happily turn them over to the police without a warrant, requiring only that the prosecutors claim that the records are “relevant and material” to an investigation.
- If you are arrested by the police, in addition to searching your body, they are also permitted to search through your mobile phone and look through anything that they can find. Got an iPhone? They may be able to browse through hundreds of emails from your gmail account using the device, all without the pesky requirement that they first get a warrant.
As the debate over FISA and telco immunity has demonstrated, the telecom companies are willing to completely eviscerate consumer privacy in order to help law enforcement and the intelligence community. With the telcos getting handsomely paid for their participation in illegal surveillance programs, its clear that consumers cannot rely upon AT&T and Verizon to protect their privacy.
The first objection to telling the President to fuck himself on this issue is that it limits the ability of the government to spy on suspected terrorists (and terrorism is, I feel I must remind you, the greatest threat Boise has ever faced. I gather you can’t say this too many times.) This is nonsense on any number of grounds, the most glaring of which being that the government can spy on anybody they want to under the regular FISA law, provided one obtains a court order 72 hours later. The objection then becomes that this becomes too much paperwork later on. Yeah. Optional interpretation:
[T]elecom immunity is NOT just about protecting the companies that helped the Administration break the law. It’s about keeping the public in the dark about the extent of that lawbreaking. It’s not just about protecting Bush’s accomplices, but Bush himself. [...]
Part of the process of suing the telecom companies is discovering just what they were promised or led to believe by the Administration. While Congress has been unconscionably slow in enforcing oversight of the Executive Branch and in uncovering the Bush Administration’s illegal and unconstitutional actions, the legal process could potentially provide the people with another way of learning the truth about how our rights were taken from us. And that’s a thought that likely keeps White House lawyers up at night.
White House lawyers, and the millions of psychosexual grotesques who have been mancrushing on Battle Action Bush since before Al Gore first donned his first earthen tone. Their freak show has gone on for a very long time, and cleaning up after them is going to take decades, but granting people immunity for no fucking reason would not be a good first step. I know I’ve said it all before, and others have said it before and better, but you can’t say this too many times, either.
February 21, 2008 at 12:42 pm
Why is it that every winger sounds like that Bill Paxton character in Aliens? Are they really that afraid? Worried that Al Queda will burst through their stomachs? Or that the acid blood of terrorists will eat through their face? We’re toast man!
And yet, since they constantly argue that 4,000 dead Americans in Iraq are a small, almost incomprehensibly insignificant , sacrifice to make in the battle for Civilization, why should a handful of ‘inevitable’ deaths in the US be so chilling and worth eviscerating the Constitution for?
I know, these are koans best left for future generations to pull out of their asses.
February 21, 2008 at 1:38 pm
Duder, if you vote on his little poll, you will see that even in that select audience, Obama trounces McCain.
February 21, 2008 at 2:11 pm
I think I fainted when I heard our democrats had told Bushie to go Cheney himself. I just couldn’t process what had happened.
Can they do it again? Cause it felt really good the first time.
February 21, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Hmm – how difficult would a PGP applicatoon be for an iPhone, preferably one which allowed people to send out their (very large) public key at the touch of a button?
February 21, 2008 at 2:45 pm
Wiretapping without a warrant? But it’ll only be used when really, really necessary. Bush/Cheney have not exactly earned our trust, to make the understatement of the century.
February 21, 2008 at 3:42 pm
More to the point: without oversight, anybody at NSA can wiretap you. The interns can do it. What would stop it?
February 21, 2008 at 7:28 pm
Bu..bu..but if you have nothing to hide….
And I noticed that Reid was one of the senators who voted against their version of the bill (that included immunity). If he didn’t want it, why did he allow it to come up for a vote? Isn’t he like in charge of that sort of thing?
February 21, 2008 at 7:44 pm
“I know, these are koans best left for future generations to pull out of their asses.”
I think the segue from aliens bursting from stomachs to koans being pulled from asses is a tad too abrupt, aesthetically speaking.
February 21, 2008 at 11:12 pm
As to the IPhone element of this discussion, if you use a security code on your phone the police (or anybody else) can not force you to give up your code without at least a court order. This goes also for BIOS passwords on computers, partitions, or other protected areas.
February 22, 2008 at 5:40 am
THE point is- the illegal wiretapping (including the telecoms’ involvement) began BEFORE 9/11, back when Bushco had no interest at all in terrr-ism, when they were in fact ignoring all warnings about Bin Laden. What, then, was the point in illegal spying? The whole defense-against-terrorism excuse is just that, an ex post facto alibi. Who were they spying on and why back when they didn’t believe in the Muslim boogeyman?
February 22, 2008 at 7:26 am
There is a goofy pic of Junior at Washington Post. Please go there and create a caption which will be posted immediately and anonymously.
February 22, 2008 at 8:34 am
I rememeber back in early 2003, listening to this episode of This American Life in which I heard of FISA for the first time (Act Three). Back then it seemed outrageous that the government would hold these hearings in a secret court like some kind of third world dictatorship.
Well, it only took five years, but now the same FISA court with expanded authority seems like the paragon of good judicial oversight. Way to shift the Overton Window.