Liability of phone companies [perhaps off-topic]

[David Farber <dave () farber net>]

Begin forwarded message:

From: John Young <jya () PIPELINE COM>
Date: May 14, 2006 8:40:31 PM EDT
To: CYBERIA-L () LISTSERV AOL COM
Subject: Re: [CYBERIA] Liability of phone companies [perhaps off-topic]
Reply-To: Law & Policy of Computer Communications <CYBERIA- 
L () LISTSERV AOL COM>

One type of activity NSA needs to trace above all else, perhaps more
than military threats, are financial transactions, and it is these
types most fiercely protected against government access, whether
business to business, person to person, org to org, and most especially
financial op to financial op, the latter not limited to regulated banks.

And no type of enterprise has the resources to giver NSA a run for
its money in long-time, maybe forever, in concealing where the
money is and where it is going and so the struggle goes between
the two biggest consumers of comsec products, hardware and talent,
along with and outpouring of dire threats and assured security.

Deception in financial transcriptions is a given, as with spying, no  
matter
the huge effort to trace them by the revenuers, competitors, and  
governmental
and private spies.

Off the radar, off the grid, off the earth, financial transactions  
worldwide
are larger and more resourceful than all the governments combined.
It is far easier to track military developments than where the money
flows or is stashed or obscured by encryption and false tracking
data.

The steady promulgations of DoJ and the slew of financial crimes
task forces indicate the visible tip of the iceberg; what is exceedingly
hard to penetrate is the underside side of it.

To be sure, if it was admitted that NSA was most interested in tracing
financial transaction data, say to hand over to IRS, FBI and Justice,
that might scare Americans, particularly American businesses with
global customers good and evil, more than diddly-squat mining of
phone data (although some of the consumer chatter might reveal
clues about lesser known ways to transfer money, say, coded signals
sent to order what to do for who).

If NSA was to be confirme as a money cop far more adept and armed
than IRS and FBI the wealth flight to more lenient havens might shake
the foundations of democracy far more than knowing who is calling who.

It was not for a petty protection of US Persons that NSA was formerly
banned from telling other parts of the government what it was  
collecting.
That was the consumer cover story.

Wonderfully strange about the dramatic increase of FBI investigation
of official corruption following the dropping of the ban on sharing  
intel
data. Whether any of that was part of the flood of NSA data the FBI
bitched about being worthless is thrilling to consider.

If the PATRIOT Act leads to cleaning up government and business
that would be justice.

In contrast, other nations are deeply concerned, as with Echelon, that
using the terrorist rationale NSA has boosted its collection financial
data on business, persons and governments, pushing the frightened
toward US financial sanctuary, while public attention is diverted with
wails about invasion of personal privacy -- which to these nations means
nothing more important than financial secrecy about cheating, lying,
robbing, sweetheart government contracts, evasion of taxes. With
the Swiss armtwisted into ratting on its banking customers, where
can an evildoer or goodheart find a trusworthy ATM which does not
databank everyone.

We learned today of the Journalist Visa required by the US from
one who has just come here from Italy, more restrictive than for
an ordinary citizen on a visit. With this prejudicial practice the US
joins the select freedom of speech rascals Russia and China.
Is that special visa legit, and if so, what regulates the practice
to demonize the press as if spies.


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