Re: [privacy] U.S. Government to Ask Courts to Toss Phone

["Brian Loe" <knobdy () gmail com>]

On 6/12/06, coderman <coderman () gmail com> wrote:

> here's a different question: are there different types of "at war" to
> consider?  the war on terrorism is like the war on drugs; it will
> never be "won", only mitigated to varying degree.
>
> how comfortable are you with a continued "state of war" where the
> battlefield is the american homeland (and the resulting military
> intelligence directed at domestic targets)?
>
> this is really the crux of the debate: how much legal authority was
> granted to the executive in this situation when we formally entered a
> "war on terrorism".

I believe we've been "at war" longer than that...and the executive
branch's powers have been growing since Lincoln.

Still, it surprises me how pissed off this minority of folks is about
this level of snooping, but how silent you were before when the war
was on drugs - that was probably the single largest power grab by the
government since the civil war and until the "war on terror".

> call data records and endpoint analysis are probably here to stay.
> there is precedent for dialed numbers / pen registers.  i was a little
> confused over the daytona / carrier CDR's deal since this is much less
> interesting than the deep inspection by the narus equipment for
> example.

I don't know that I'm "comfortable" with any of it, buts its easy to
see the value. Even if they're only collecting and storing the data -
once they catch a bad guy that have contact numbers to search that
data for...and watch the web grow. Just as the did earlier this month
with the 17 terrorists arrested in Canada. You have to know they
immediately started searching all of their data collections for all
numbers found to be associated with those people.

> agreed.  and this hints at another problem: how much privacy invasion
> has been offloaded to commercial data providers.  ChoicePoint and
> Acxiom and the smaller (often more shady) companies get some heat now
> and then, but not nearly as much as deserved.

Other companies, what about other countries? For all we know, the US
is spying on the UK for the UK - and vice-versa - as an attempt to
bypass domestic spying laws. I think this theory has been floated
thousands of times before and usually in conjunction with an old,
non-existent spy program.

> as far as the list goes, i think most of the concern is about keeping
> the proper oversight and accountability in place when surveillance is
> used.

Who is supposed to provide that oversight, elected criminals? In the
day of professional politicians, do you honestly believe you can trust
some kind of "oversight committee" not to got along to get along (or
to get something, anyway)?

Unless everything is done in the open, transparently, there isn't any
real oversight and I'm not sure what value such programs would have if
they were transparent.

> for example trying to find terrorists with profiling (the TIA
> programs) is theoretically and empirically ineffective and counter
> productive, as evidenced by the flood of worthless leads turned over
> to the FBI by this program and the inherent limits of such statistical
> profiling to identify such a small subset of the population (the
> terrorists).

Would you argue against profiling in at least airport security? I
mean, does granny and granddaughter really need to be cavity searched?
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