Telecom Immunity

DANGER: POLITICAL CONTENT

I understand this may upset a few folks. I'm not much into politics. I work for a telecom company. I hate seeing our Constitutional rights raided and eroded under the fear-driven "War on Terror". While it can be said there hasn't been another attack on American soil since 9/11, it has yet to be proven that any information obtained by agencies through illegal means prevented it.

I was appalled when I read the statements and engineering documents made public by Mark Klein, now a former AT&T employee. Klein detailed a secret room at an AT&T Central Office (CO) in California where data was being passed wholesale to the NSA. All major backbone Internet links were passed through fiber-optic splitters, with one lead headed straight for Uncle Sam.
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6//att_klein_wired.pdf

This revelation caused some public outcry, and a few lawsuits.

This week, the US Senate passed a new FISA bill which granted telecom companies (AT&T, Verizon, etc.) retroactive immunity for handing over information to the government without a court order. This bill also expands the government's ability to spy on its own citizens with no judicial oversight whatsoever.

There is currently a FISA bill in the US House which does not grant telco immunity, which President Bush says he will veto.


Folks, I encourage you to contact your Representative in Congress and urge them not to allow telco immunity. Wholesale violation of your 4th amendment rights should not be permitted. The EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) has a website setup to assist you in generating e-mail to your Representative regarding this measure.

https://secure.eff.org/site/Advocacy...rAction&id=363


Oh, and by the way, those fancy spy satellites we have... they can now be used by law enforcement agencies against citizens if they obtain a warrant:
http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5g...ifwNgD8UP4GG03

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Originally Posted by sensei_kyle

While it can be said there hasn't been another attack on American soil since 9/11, it has yet to be proven that any information obtained by agencies through illegal means prevented it.

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There is a joke from a Belgian comedian.
He is throwing powder on the street while he walks.
A cop ask him what he is doing, and he explains that it is to keep away the elephants.
The cop says 'But there are no elephants!'
He says 'Good powder eh'

I think this pretty much sums up my opinion about the current terrorist scare tactics, and all the abuse of power that comes with it.

I've written a couple of emails about this to my represantative over the last few months about this.

Sadly he and I rarely agree, but we do get into some interesting discussions... ok, it's probably his staffers, but the last time I saw him he definately already knew my name.

Already have...

Personally as far as the telecom immunity thing goes. I do think the companies deserve some protection, at least for past actions, because they are being bullied by the government. And now they are getting their asses sued off because of it.

What we should be reacting to is what the government is doing. Not just the wiretapping but also the way they have gone about it. To me the style of execution is more tyrannical in this instance than the goal.

I guess the electronic age equalivlent of listening to a conversation in a restaurant or outside a window is less scary than the thought of the honest proprietor being beat up in order to make it happen.

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Originally Posted by Nickelking

I've written a couple of emails about this to my represantative over the last few months about this.

Sadly he and I rarely agree, but we do get into some interesting discussions... ok, it's probably his staffers, but the last time I saw him he definately already knew my name.

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How many times do you have to mail them before they get to know who you are?

I've sent countless letters and e-mails and never even once gotten a response.

At this point, what the government is doing does not bother me. I'd rather law enforcement have the ability to follow up on a threat quickly. I have enough trust in our institutions (courts, media, other) to feel comfortable. Having lived in the Washington area for 20 years, I was acquainted with a number of people who do this or related kind of work and, trust me; they're not interested in spying on average Americans. Just my take, FWIW.

Jordan

Don't forget as our system was originally written there were to be NO warrants. A warrant is guaranteed immunity from re-dress. We as citizens were to be able to challenge any police action against us in court and at that time the police would have to prove to a jury that their actions were sensible and had merit. Under the system they way it is supposed to be the government should be allowed to act as it feels it has to as fast as it wants to but then it later needs to justify that action to the citizenry. The way all the warrant systems we have today work is that they grant immunity to the government for its actions in advance by the word of a few judges even if those actions should later prove to have been egregious. The warrant system also as we know slows the process of law enforcement to a crawl.

This is an area where we and the administrative branch have been stripped of rights and powers. We should have re-dress or satisfaction from the courts for the governments actions and the administrators should have the freedom to act instantly if they feel justified in doing so. Unfortunately the courts have managed to slant power to themselves on this issue and doubly hurt the people in the process.

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Originally Posted by Wildtim

How many times do you have to mail them before they get to know who you are?

I've sent countless letters and e-mails and never even once gotten a response.

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Well, I also go to a lot of the events organized by him and stop by the office every so often as well.

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.

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Originally Posted by Wildtim

How many times do you have to mail them before they get to know who you are?

I've sent countless letters and e-mails and never even once gotten a response.

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I contact my senators and reps occasionally... the all usually answer (several have a checkbox on the form asking if you want a personal answer)... try using [senators] and [reps]

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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.

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Why don't more people think like this?

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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.

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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!:confused:

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?:gth

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.

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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.

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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.