Miilions of phone records turned over to NSA

its not surprising, everything on the phone is recorded somewhere :s

The Republicans just put the icing on their cake and are finished politically.

I think even the conservative Republican base is going to be at the WTF stage with this new revalation that everyone's phone calls are being documented.

That shit was fucked up that they did that!!

Fourth thread on this today I think?

Still, pretty disgusting. Bush should be impeached.

i read that when congress tried to investigate this. the nsa would not give them security clearence so they just dropped the investigation..

Its easy to figure out how dangerous this can be.

The defense is we just have phone numbers. Well all you have to do then is match the phone calling database to any phone directory, which at that level could easily be mined from other commercial or government databases. And presto, now you have the full map of everyone's communications for the past 5 years.

Its really bad for anyone in any kind of criminal enterprise. You could see all the people that keep calling a known drug dealer's cell phone to determine his customers. And then who that guy is buying from.

You could see if all the CEO's of oil companies are calling each other in a regular pattern as gas prices move inexplicably out of sync with reality to supplies to see if there is collusion and price fixing occuring.

You could see all the calls to the New York Times or Washington Post for example to figure out where the leaks are coming from.

You could find out who gambles in illegal sports betting by matching the known bookie numbers to their patterns of call ins.

You could figure out who is in cohoots with who on virtually anything you wanted to simply by connecting the dots.

You could see who are the instigators of political movements and all the people involved in organizing marches just by looking at the connected calls.

You could see who is behind virtually any conspiracy by seeing who the people who did the crime got the orders from.

You could see who in any government position of secrets is calling foreign government numbers and possibly engaged in espionage.

You could see what companies have an influential relationship with congressmen.

Its basically unlimited what you could determine by having the power of every landline, fax, cellphone and e-mail record and that is what they have.

There are going to be huge lawsuits from this and the phone companies are going to be innundated with litigation.

There could also be a big revival for the pay phone business. Remember those? Now people will be worried about making calls for sensitive things on a number that could be tracked back to them and will seek out ways to communicate more anonymously.

The NSA already have access to most people's phone records and calls... the technology have been in place for years now.

yet one more chance to post this.........

Heard that on the news today too.... they called it datamining.

who cares, i'm not hiding anything.

Those that would sacrifice freedom for security will not have nor deserve either.

Ben Franklin

Do not be alarmed - everything is under control.

Who cares? You want to live under fascism? WTF? This is completely against everything the Constitution stands for. It has nothing to do with whether you've done anything or not, it has to do with the preservation of Liberty, Freedom and to be secured from unwarranted government intrusion into your life.

You're going to see at the next election who cares.

Once the Democrats get control of Congress the Bush admin is in deep shit, because they'll run all the committees and will be going on a subpoena frenzy getting all the dirty tricks.

I'd wager if Bush doesn't get impeached, he'll probably resign to avoid it.

Gator just said it best!

President Bush said Thursday the government is "not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans"

Ok let see you have every single phone call I made, who I made them to, where they were made, when I made them how long the calls were. You also have every phone call to me, who made it, where it came from, when they made it and how long the call was but you're "not mining or trolling" through my personal life?

"Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates."

So 300 million Americans are Al Qaeda suspects? Seems ot me if you're trying to stop terrorism this is HUGE waste of resources since 99.99999% if the phone calls will have absolutely nothing to do with it. That's kind of like want to know if my girlfriend is cheating on me and instead of tapping her phone I tap all the phones in the city she lives in "just in case".

that fucking pic is so hilarious.

If they listened to me and my crazy conversations they would probably think that I'm more air-headed then jessica simpson and that me and whoever I was talking to are a bunch of loonies because we talk about the most stupidest things for hours.... like what celebrity is prettier than who, and who we hate, and other crazy stuff...

it would be a comedy for sure... their brains might fry after they listen in to me...

This started under Clinton back in 1999 !

It was in the press last year and USAToday ran a retread from an NY Times article and the only reason it's big news is because the new CIA Director ran the program !

The Supreme Court has a previous ruling that phone records are not entitled to privacy protection. Phone calls are but not phone records.

Crazy stuff. Kinda scary, I guess. Everyone be on their best behavior, lol.

If everything they are doing is sooooo legal, then why are they completely bypassing the FISA Court, not informing Congress in full, and HIDING it all?

Bush looked nervous as hell today with his 4 points about it. First time I've really sensed he's starting to sweat and be worried about skirting the constitution and pushing the edge so much.

The reason this country was founded with 3 branches, the Executive, the Legislature, and the Judicial is so no one branch could have supreme power and each would have oversight on the other. Its called Checks and Balances. And that is what this administration is saying GFY to constantly.

Do you want all your phone calls for the past 5 years sitting in a government database that can then be accessed by other government agencies and who knows who else?

Suppose you get a new phone number that used to be one used by a terrorist? Knowing how incompetent the government can be and with the attitude of hit first and ask questions later, you could be unfairly connected into an investigation.

What if you have some bad apples at the NSA? With tens of thousands of employees, certainly there are a few. Let's say this guy is really a foreign mole and he decides to zip and ship the phone records connected to major politicians, corporate CEO's, and military leaders to a foreign government spy agency. Now they do the cross database matching and presto, they can blackmail a lot of important people, by knowing all their "dirty phone calls". Maybe its an important member of congress and he's been having an affair. This guy could be compromised by the foreign spy agency.


Or what if its your business phone records and some employee of yours is doing something funky and he's only there a short time and leaves. Then the gestapo comes raiding your company offices one day and takes all your computers away as part of the investigation of this guy? They may assume if he worked in your company you might have been in on it too? Or they might not even be able to know who it is in the company, just that the phone call was made from your company, and they put all your employees through the investigation.

The problem you have is once you give power, it is very difficult to reign it back in. That can lead to a police state because if ever our government were to change, and don't say it can't because history teaches us all governments can come and go, just like we saw Communist Russia go. Now you have all this information in the hands of a dictatorship government. Then what? And that is exactly how bad governments control the people. Just like in China, you can't take a piss without a party member knowing about it. They see everything you do online over there and censor like crazy.

So the bottom line is checks and balances. And without that as the phrase goes, power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

I watched a Senate hearing about the Administration by passing the FISA Court. A half dozen former FISA Court Judges were on the panel and all of them agreed that the FISA law that was enacted by Congress probably impinges upon the power granted to the office of the Presidency by the constitution and until or if the Supreme Court makes a ruling that the office of the Presidency must abide by the FISA law, he does not have to abide by the FISA law.

Congress cannot enact a law that impinges upon the powers granted to the Office of the Presidency by the constitution untill or if the Supreme Court rules that the Office of the Presidency must abide by said law.

It is not a question of what I want. It is a fact that the Supreme Court has previously ruled that a persons phone records do not have any expectation of privacy.