RE: [privacy] Frank Rich: Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?

["Henderson, Dennis K." <Dennis.Henderson () umb com>]

Moved this to funsec instead of privacy:

Fergie reported on someone who said:


Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're
in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure
out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under
existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a
warrant (which is almost always granted).



All you have to do is watch  al-Zarqawi try to fire a weapon and then
watch his dufus assistant burn his hand on the hot barrel to wonder just
how smart they are.

Its all the assumptions that these armchair quarterbacking reporters
make about the enemy that will be the downfall of the US.

Neither you nor I know precisely how secure these terrorists think they
are using the telephone. For all we know, they may think they can use
the phone for mere seconds and not get detected..

Now that they know that it doesn't matter how long they use the phone,
but rather the mere use of the phone gives them away, they stop doing
it. 

Anyone who's been read-in to national security programs and has worked
covert operations knows that getting intelligence out of the enemy is
nowhere as black and white as the media would have you think.
Heisenbergs uncertainty theory plays a large role in getting subtle
intelligence. 

A good example would be during the Vietnam war when the enemy was
intercepting our wireline communications to see what we were up to. Once
we got wind of that, we started encrypting the data. This stopped
letting the VC know what we were saying, but they since the data only
transmitted when a message was being sent, the VC could know that
something was up and correlate that with other intelligence to know that
the US was up to something. Once the US figured that out, they kept the
data pipes full even when they werent sending traffic.

In a time of war, leaks like this that really aren't telling the public
anything new(CALEA is a 90's thing), and are only published to make the
current administration look bad. The real damage to us all is telling
the terrorist something they may have not considered
previously(remember, we're not dealing with a bunch of tactical geniuses
here).


Ugly corporate disclaimer to follow.

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