This Daily Show clip about the NSA’s eavesdropping program, has to be one of the best I’ve ever seen (ignore the bit about soccer in the first minute and 20 seconds, which goes on about a minute too long).
Don’t miss the cameo by Gen. Hayden at about the two minute mark.
NSA Eavesdropping
This is the line that’s done best for me on the radio: “The NSA would like to remind everyone to call their mother’s this Sunday. They need to calibrate their system.”
TPMMuckraker, in post being widely cited elsewhere, echos Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-MS) and Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) in asking Did Gonzales Mislead Congress about NSA Program?
I don’t think this is perjury. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales assured the House Judiciary Committee that the government wasn’t deliberately engaging in warrantless “surveillance” of calls between two Americans.
And, in fact, what we’ve learned today about the NSA is (just barely) consistent with that claim: the surveillance was by telephone companies, and then they voluntarily gave the info — not in real time — to the government. So what we have here is a massive privacy violation by the phone companies (other than Qwest, and good for them), engineered by the NSA. That’s not quite exactly the same thing as ‘surveillance’ in which the government usually does the spying itself, and usually in real time.
It’s a serious matter, of course, if the government tries to blackmail someone into cooperating. USA Today reported that the NSA suggested to Qwest that it might lose government contracts if it didn’t play ball.
That sounds illegal. Of course, it also sounds like the Bush admnistration’s m.o. from the K Street Project right up to the scandal about to take down HUD Secretary Alphonso Jackson.
According to Think Progress | Telcos Could Be Liable For Tens of Billions of Dollars For Illegally Turning Over Phone Records, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth face huge liabilities for turning over millions of American’s call records to the NSA in violation of law. That potentially $1000 for each person whose call records were turned over. Millions and millions of people. Each.
Read USATODAY’s NSA has massive database of Americans’ phone calls, and then ask yourself, are we paranoid enough?
It seems not.
Update: Read Unclaimed Territory by Glenn Greenwald. Now.
Came home via DCA. At the first-line security screening station leading to the gates served by American Airlines (slogan: We Own MIA™), the lady whose job it is to compare ID to tickets was in an officious mood and the short line was moving very slowly (the Brits a few people ahead of me were questioned for about three minutes).
Normally when I present my battered Florida Drivers License, screeners just compare the name to the ticket and wave me through. (See Bruce Schneier on why this whole ID check is pretty silly because it is so easy to bypass). They never even check the expiration date of the license, which shows that it expired several years ago. I travel a lot and you can count on the fingers of one hand the number of US screeners (foreign ones are much better) who have questioned this or bothered to turn it over to see the renewal sticker.
But this lady not only noticed, she complained that I had stuck the sticker on upside down! Although if you think of it, whether it's upside down depends on which axis you rotate …
But that's not all. Having satisfied herself that my license was in fact valid, she proceeded to scrutinize the photo. Admittedly, it's more than a decade old, so I'm not only clean shaven but younger. But did she have to say, accusingly, “you are a lot thinner in this picture”?
Anticlimatically, there were no puffers.
Earlier entry on TSA and puffers (don't miss the great comments).
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