Comments on: Stop illegal spying

By: Supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation - Homeland Stupidity

Supporting the Electronic Frontier Foundation - Homeland Stupidity — Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:45:55 +0000

[...] the battle. Whether it’s the national ID card, digital rights management, online privacy or domestic spying, EFF is doing the hard work of defending against those who would abuse the power of government [...]

By: Verbos

Verbos — Tue, 17 Apr 2007 16:17:15 +0000

I believe the public is extremely naive about how effective government investigation is and has been for many years. Case in point: During Vietnam, I was in, let’s say advanced weapons systems, not to be too specific for my own sake. I required a high level Top Secret clearance. After the investigation I was interviewed on their findings. They knew things my own mother did not know, let alone any of my friends. How? Now all they want is a legal way to use their data and make it instantly available to the right people. Get a grip, this is not a new thing. The attack on liberty has been slowly hacking away for a century or more. We must agree not to disagree on this issue and resolve our differences after we have won back our liberty!

By: Ray

Ray — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 13:04:49 +0000

Certainly the government had all the information. Frankly I can’t see one justification for the additional police powers. I love the claim that they can’t get a warrant for wiretapping because it is too complicated and the burden of evidence is to great. That says a lot given what the law says.

#1 They can tap for I believe 72 hours without a warrant.

#2 They can use what they find in this 72 hours as justification for the warrant.

#3 In general search warrants have a pretty low thrush hold of required proof. Basically you have to prove that there is a better than even chance that there is a minor chance that there is evidence which can be gathered and specify what that evidence is.

#4 While applications for warrants are pretty long documents, they are in fact basically boilerplate documents. One I helped prepare was about thirty pages, about one paragraph’s worth of information (well a long paragraph but certainly less than a page) was actually unique. Three pages of this document actually simply specified that the location to be searched was in fact in the United States as defined in one additional page. Now this is where maybe we need some form of law change where this could be entered as data and the boiler plate stuff assumed.

I suspect that the real reason for the need for these additional laws is that a little like Nixon’s administration or maybe even to a much greater level the Bush administration sees a “need” to “protect” us from those who disagree with them. How soon we forget that the break ins which started the process which lead to his resignation were part just the kind of “national security” investigation which Bush says we now need.

That said I don’t know that we can get to hard of the government for not figuring out this plot. A friend of mine once pointed out that intelligence is not like the model of doing a puzzle. Instead it is like you take 500 1000 piece puzzles and mix all the parts together, and then from that set of pieces you remove half the pieces, and now you have to solve one specific puzzle by being given one piece and being told to find the rest of the puzzle. Not an easy task, and no wonder they sometime fail.

By: John Moore

John Moore — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 03:33:06 +0000

Would Congress even read a draft of a bill that forces it to do its job?

Very funny! :