USAToday: Is the BUSH Administration SPYING on PapaLovesMambo?- Page 3

[bwaysinger]

Posted: 5/11/06 at 5:16pm

Hey, Papa! Speak for yourself. I'm not a communist.

[papalovesmambo]

Posted: 5/11/06 at 5:20pm

by that time it will have been revealed that rather than reading a book, our beloved bushie was trying to use his still unpolished mind control abilities to try to wrest control of the planes from the hijackers. that failure was as tragic if not worse than his inablity later to harness his budding telekentic powers in time to shore up levees in nola in katrina's wake.

[bwaysinger]

Posted: 5/11/06 at 5:21pm

^^^^ ???

[PalJoey]

Posted: 5/11/06 at 6:27pm

CNN's JACK CAFFERTY: I don't know about wisdom but you'll get a bit of outrage. We better hope nothing happens to Arlen Specter, the Republican head of the Judiciary Committee, because he might be all that's standing between us and a full blown dictatorship in this country. He's vowed to question these phone company executives about volunteering to provide the government with my telephone records and yours, and tens of millions of other Americans.

Shortly after 9-11, AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth began providing the super secret NSA with information on phone calls of millions of our citizens, all part of the war on terror, President Bush says.

Why don't you go find Osama Bin Laden and seal the country's borders and start inspecting the containers that come into our ports?

The President rushed out this morning in the wake of this front page story in USA Today and he declared the government's doing nothing wrong and all of this is just fine.

Is it? Is it legal?

Then why did the Justice Department suddenly drop its investigation of the warrantless spying on citizens? Because the NSA said Justice Department lawyers didn't have the necessary security clearance to do the investigation.

Read that sentence again.

A secret government agency has told our Justice Department that it's not allowed to investigate it. And the Justice Department just says okay and drops the whole thing.

We're in some serious trouble here boys and girls.

Here's the question.

"Does it concern you that your phone company may be voluntarily providing your phone records to the government without your knowledge or permission?"

If it doesn't it sure as hell ought to.

[PalJoey]

Posted: 5/11/06 at 6:59pm

You may be right about the telcos, CK. Here's an intersting post from Think Progress about the penalties they could be subject to:

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Telcos Could Be Liable For Tens of Billions of Dollars For Illegally Turning Over Phone Records

This morning, USA Today reported that three telecommunications companies – AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth – provided “phone call records of tens of millions of Americans” to the National Security Agency. Such conduct appears to be illegal and could make the telco firms liable for tens of billions of dollars. Here’s why:

1. It violates the Stored Communications Act. The Stored Communications Act, Section 2703(c), provides exactly five exceptions that would permit a phone company to disclose to the government the list of calls to or from a subscriber: (i) a warrant; (ii) a court order; (iii) the customer’s consent; (iv) for telemarketing enforcement; or (v) by “administrative subpoena.” The first four clearly don’t apply. As for administrative subpoenas, where a government agency asks for records without court approval, there is a simple answer – the NSA has no administrative subpoena authority, and it is the NSA that reportedly got the phone records.

2. The penalty for violating the Stored Communications Act is $1000 per individual violation. Section 2707 of the Stored Communications Act gives a private right of action to any telephone customer “aggrieved by any violation.” If the phone company acted with a “knowing or intentional state of mind,” then the customer wins actual harm, attorney’s fees, and “in no case shall a person entitled to recover receive less than the sum of $1,000.”

(The phone companies might say they didn’t “know” they were violating the law. But USA Today reports that Qwest’s lawyers knew about the legal risks, which are bright and clear in the statute book.)

3. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act doesn’t get the telcos off the hook. According to USA Today, the NSA did not go to the FISA court to get a court order. And Qwest is quoted as saying that the Attorney General would not certify that the request was lawful under FISA. So FISA provides no defense for the phone companies, either.

In other words, for every 1 million Americans whose records were turned over to NSA, the telcos could be liable for $1 billion in penalties, plus attorneys fees. You do the math.

Telcos Could Be Liable For Tens of Billions of Dollars For Illegally Turning Over Phone Records

Updated On: 5/11/06 at 06:59 PM

[PalJoey]

Posted: 5/13/06 at 1:39pm

CK--Sunday's New York Times front page reports that Cheney wanted full taps over domestic phones, not just data mining.

Snippet:

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Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping
By SCOTT SHANE
Published: May 14, 2006

WASHINGTON, May 12 — In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any warrantless eavesdropping, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. Details have not emerged publicly of how the director of the agency at the time, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits.

Whatever the internal deliberations, General Hayden was the program's overseer and has become its chief salesman. He is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing next week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Criticism of the surveillance program flared again this week with the disclosure that N.S.A. had collected the phone records of millions of Americans in an effort to track terror suspects.

By several accounts, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency in April last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.
Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping