Why do people all of a sudden care about illegal wiretaps and email monitoring?
 

The US Government has been intercepting every phone call, email, fax, and radio signal for over a decade. For those with a ten day attention span this was called operation Echelon, it involved the US and Britain, and it dates back to at least Bush 1.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/503224.stm


Democrats and Republicans have known perfectly well that this was going on since at least 92. It seems to me like the only reason they're publicly discussing this now is to get us used to the removal of our constitutional and human rights. They're fueling the rights vs. safety "debate" and most of the cowardly US population is eating it right up because they're affraid of their own shadows.

"Sure Mr. Bush, come take my husband away in the middle of the night with no record of his arrest and no chance of me ever seeing him again because he read the wrong book or website. As long as you tell me I'll be safe from the boogyman."

My favorite part:

Lotsa people on this board are scared that their 1-900 sexchats have been wiretapped and will be made public.

Echelon is mostly a foreign comms spying program rather than domestic, no?

The email thing... The FBI has had CARNIVORE for quite a long time.

paranoid....

no one cares until its used against them

you should feel lucky that there are people out there that care about your own pathetic rights

[quote]Echelon is mostly a foreign comms spying program rather than domestic, no?[quote]
it more widespread then that , its international , america , canada , england ,australia and few others , Australia was the first country to acknowledge that echelon existed years ago

carnivore has been in action since just after 9/11 , the fbi wanted to get it in use a year or 2 before the 9/11 attacks , but the courts and parliment knocked it back on the ground of invasion of privacy , a few days after the towers came down the FBI rushed another voting in and got it passed in this time

i dont, its obvious they were doing it all along

better off if we never knew

Actually the domestic program that started some time ago was based on a database called FIRSTFRUITS - it was originally developed by an outside contractor in Florida, but that will be revealed in the next few weeks. It was renamed in 2004 or early 2005 after some journalists caught on to the codename, but it still exists and is administered by Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC), a component of the National Intelligence Council. The reported chairman of the group is Dr. Larry Gershwin, the CIA's adviser on science and technology matters - his codename was Curveball in the CIA a few years ago.

There are publicly available publications by many members of the groups involved from the last 3 years - primarily the Studies in Intelligence trade mag - which features articles by many of the members of the FDDC and can be found with a few quick searches out there


The important part of all of this is not that all of this has been going on - its the medias realization that not only has it been going on (and theyre all up in arms about it now) but that they were some of the targets - its all been public since 6 years ago if anyone took the time to look - even when they went to the FISA court to try to get warrants a few years back and were denied because of the domestic angle - "and then After the Justice Department appealed the FISC decision, the FISA Review court met for the first time in its history. The three-member review court, composed of Ralph Guy of the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, Edward Leavy of the 9th Circuit, and Laurence Silberman [of the Robb-Silberman Commission on 911 "intelligence failures"] of the D.C. Circuit, overturned the FISC decision on the Bush administration's wiretap requests" - which gave these telcos and everyone else free reign to do what ever they felt was necessary


Ya'll need to get out more and stop listening to MSM - they are like 5 years behind the real stuff :)

I Invented Wire Taping.

It's called political opportunism.

They hate Bush for other unrelated reasons (his policies on trade, foreign relations, adult entertainment, abortion, immigration, whatever) but they use Iraq/ WMD and the NSA scandal to get at him.

For US citizens and the US press, you could also call it treason.

Do you think the fbi/nsa or whatever they are called wiretap celebs like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton for fun to see what they are talking about? :helpme

Seriously, cause Paris is kind of like an "American Princess"....

What do they do when they hear people talking about stupid stuff like who's prettier than who and stuff like that for hours and hours? Do they laugh and keep on listening? Or tune out...

I talk about a lot of nonsense and stupid things on the phone for hours so I am kind of worried.

Nope, look into the UKUSA agreement, for the longest time the NSA couldn't spy on the U.S. but had either the Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) in New Zealand, the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) in Britain, the Communications Security Establishment (CSE) in Canada, and the Defense Signals Directorate (DSD) in Australia spy on each other's citizens.

Problem is Joe and Jane Sixpack have been too engrossed with Will and Grace reruns and Brad Pitt and Angela Jolie squirting out a kid in Nambia to really think what goes on in the real world. :(