{"id":567,"date":"2006-05-11T15:57:49","date_gmt":"2006-05-11T20:57:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.scaredpoet.com\/wordpress\/?p=567"},"modified":"2006-05-11T16:04:35","modified_gmt":"2006-05-11T21:04:35","slug":"att-bellsouth-and-verizon-colluding-with-nsa","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/?p=567","title":{"rendered":"AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon: Colluding with NSA?"},"content":{"rendered":"

USA Today reporter Lesley Cauley recently broke the news<\/a> that the National Security Agency<\/a> has been doing its typical bang-up job of using a canon to kill a mosquito, trampling over the the rights of millions of Americans in its effort to find al Qaeda terrorists. The NSA seems to feel that by collecting a massive database of all calls made in the US, it can find the bad guys<\/a>. Needle in a haystack, anyone?<\/p>\n

Currently Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth (soon to be a part of AT&T anyway) have been named as companies willingly turning over their calls databases beginning shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks<\/a>. This does not<\/em> mean that users of Sprint-Nextel, T-Mobile or other telecom companies are “under the radar,” as just about any call beginning or ending on an AT&T\/Verizon network was likely logged. Note that many cell companies must contract with local exchange carriers – like AT&T or Verizon – to carry their cell calls over landline networks to their destinations.<\/p>\n

And Bush says nope! No privacy violation here!<\/a><\/p>\n

“Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates,” Bush said. “The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

So if the target was known affiliates<\/em>, then wouldn’t their activities, including what phones and telecom devices they used, where and when, be, well… known<\/em>? Then why go through the herculean effort of sifting through massive amounts of unknown<\/em> data, except to possibly undertake a witchhunt?<\/p>\n

And I know there are a lot of uber-patriots out there who will counter that if God-Fearing Red-Blooded American Citizens made calls that were recorded but didn’t break any laws, then they have nothing to worry about. And that’s all fine and good, but really<\/strong><\/em> now… What does my calling to order a pizza having anything to do with Al Qaeda? Should I just be okay<\/em> with the fact that maybe, some pencil-pusher at the NSA has a transcript of the romantic babblings that may have occurred over the phone between myself and my better half?<\/p>\n

We have reached a stage in this “war against terrorism” that I feared would come to pass. We must now fear more from our own government that we had to fear from the terrorists. The terrorists don’t need to be jealous of our “way of life” any longer; the hyper-patriots are doing a smashing job of taking our freedoms away for them.<\/p>\n

What’s worse, these same agencies no longer feel the need to do this clandestinely. A year ago maybe, the NSA would have denied the whole thing. Now, the stance is “yeah, we’re doing this… so what?”
\nThe terrorists HAVE won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

USA Today reporter Lesley Cauley recently broke the news that the National Security Agency has been doing its typical bang-up job of using a canon to kill a mosquito, trampling over the the rights of millions of Americans in its effort to find al Qaeda terrorists. The NSA seems to feel that by collecting a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-567","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sociopolitical-rants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=567"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=567"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=567"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scaredpoet.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=567"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}