Thread: Telecom Immunity

Originally Posted by AFDavis11

I think the 4th amendment says you are protected from searches and seizures of your "person, house, papers, and effects".

Not electronic communications you pay someone else to transmit for you. When I send a secure communication I have to pay a lot more for it then a cell phone bill.

If you expect your communications to be "secure" than you are being very unrealistic. I'm not saying your wrong, just unrealistic. I think gravity is unfair too, but I don't complain about it, I work around it.

Why don't more people think like this?

Originally Posted by AFDavis11

If you expect your communications to be "secure" than you are being very unrealistic. I'm not saying your wrong, just unrealistic. I think gravity is unfair too, but I don't complain about it, I work around it.

Hmmm, not sure about that analogy. Gravity treats everything and everyone with the same principle. Black, white, yellow, live, dead, inanimate... it's all the same to gravity. PLUS, it's a universal principle (well, apart from at the subatomic level but I really wouldn't know about that) and there's no avoiding it.

Prying and spying into our lives by tapping our communications. Well, that's highly discrimatory (WHO do they spy on, hmm?), man-made, and entirely preventable. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect our general communications to be secure. Don't agree? Well in that case what the hell are we all doing buying and selling each other stuff over this forum, via Paypal, VISA, AMEX, you name it! We verify our Paypal accounts with our own private bank details, we happily type in all our metadata into online forms for buying stuff, and we debate about which politicians are crooks... If we didn't expect a level of privacy and non-snooping (I'm talking from the governments here) then we're total idiots for our behaviour online right here at SRP!

But bottom line, the reason why I don't think it's unrealistic to expect the sanctity of privacy in the absence of warrants etc. is because, at my individual level, I know the government has neither the resources nor the capability to monitor my communications. Who'd've thought I'd be thankful to governmental incompetence?

I haven't done a whole lot of research on this, but if I'm not mistaken, the government is focusing their limited resources on international calls going to - shall we say- sensative areas. So, unless you're calling people in Waziristan or an Islamic trianing acadamy in Egypt, you probably don't have anything to worry about.

During most of our wars (and yes, everyone can mock the term "war on terror" until the next "9/11") our government played a little loose with the constitution. FDR and Abraham Lincoln - two of our most praised leaders did this too. As long as there are some checks in place, I see this as one of the sacrifices we have to make to help our security.

Jordan

Most of us probably have no idea how many potential threats occur to our security on a daily basis... but I'll bet it's much higher than we would imagine. Thankfully, most turn out to be idle threats.

I'm pretty sure that the US Gov't has been secretly (ie, w/o a court order) monitoring some conversations since the days of J Edgar Hoover. The NSA is the agency with the most covert capability for that today. The FISA bill makes the whole process legal so they don't have to get the court order and expose the depth of their tentacles into our communication systems.

I don't have a security clearance, but I knew something of the nature of the computer horsepower at Ft. Meade when I supplied them with some custom hardware to enable processing of huge data streams 30-years ago. It was awesome then and, assuming they've continued to keep up with the increases in traffic, I'd doubt there is any radio communication in the world that they don't intercept, as well as most domestic land-line stuff (I'd guess mostly above the Central Office level in the telephone hierarchy?) and the internet. I suspect the cooperation of companies like AT&T makes it easier to quickly ascertain the identity of both ends of telephone calls and/or internet IPs in case there is a need to act quickly, but for all I know they've enlisted them in some pre-processing of the data, as well.

At the data rates NSA is dealing with, I suspect all they can do is run it through computer filters which look for keywords... if they pick up on something (eg, words like "president" and "shoot" used in the same communique) then it will be looked at more closely and if suspect it's eventually referred to human ears/eyes, otherwise it's discarded... it would simply be impossible to store all the data for even a few hours.

So, while the NSA has the ability to abuse their power, I'd doubt many of us have anything to worry about other than on principle. But principle counts for a lot, sometimes.

There are already provisions covering them for any associated civil penalties. Now, the move for full immunity is really just so they can keep their mouths shut so we'll never find out what they did. It's protecting folks like Gonzales, not the industry.

This should be handled just like any other immunity case. They should be offered immunity for complete and honest testimony in a sealed session of Congress. Noncompliance would result in lost immunity.

Originally Posted by jnich67

I haven't done a whole lot of research on this, but if I'm not mistaken, the government is focusing their limited resources on international calls going to - shall we say- sensative areas. So, unless you're calling people in Waziristan or an Islamic trianing acadamy in Egypt, you probably don't have anything to worry about.

Without testimony, theres no way to know who has what to worry about. There are some folks that "trust me" would work for, and we're well beyond that stage now.