FBI Releases Secret Subpoena Information 282
gollum123 writes to mention a CNN article, reporting on an FBI information release. The number of secret subpoenas the Bureau filed last year reached 3,501. These documents allowed access to credit card records, bank statements, telephone records, and internet access logs for thousands of legal citizens without asking for a court's permission. From the article: "The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the same panel that signs off on applications for business records warrants, also approved 2,072 special warrants last year for secret wiretaps and searches of suspected terrorists and spies. The record number is more than twice as many as were issued in 2000, the last full year before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001."
not very... (Score:4, Insightful)
Rolling Stone said it best... (Score:5, Insightful)
From time to time, after hours, I kick back with my colleagues at Princeton to argue idly about which president really was the worst of them all. For years, these perennial debates have largely focused on the same handful of chief executives whom national polls of historians, from across the ideological and political spectrum, routinely cite as the bottom of the presidential barrel. Was the lousiest James Buchanan, who, confronted with Southern secession in 1860, dithered to a degree that, as his most recent biographer has said, probably amounted to disloyalty -- and who handed to his successor, Abraham Lincoln, a nation already torn asunder? Was it Lincoln's successor, Andrew Johnson, who actively sided with former Confederates and undermined Reconstruction? What about the amiably incompetent Warren G. Harding, whose administration was fabulously corrupt? Or, though he has his defenders, Herbert Hoover, who tried some reforms but remained imprisoned in his own outmoded individualist ethic and collapsed under the weight of the stock-market crash of 1929 and the Depression's onset? The younger historians always put in a word for Richard M. Nixon, the only American president forced to resign from office.
Now, though, George W. Bush is in serious contention for the title of worst ever. In early 2004, an informal survey of 415 historians conducted by the nonpartisan History News Network found that eighty-one percent considered the Bush administration a "failure." Among those who called Bush a success, many gave the president high marks only for his ability to mobilize public support and get Congress to go along with what one historian called the administration's "pursuit of disastrous policies." In fact, roughly one in ten of those who called Bush a success was being facetious, rating him only as the best president since Bill Clinton -- a category in which Bush is the only contestant.
The lopsided decision of historians should give everyone pause. Contrary to popular stereotypes, historians are generally a cautious bunch. We assess the past from widely divergent points of view and are deeply concerned about being viewed as fair and accurate by our colleagues. When we make historical judgments, we are acting not as voters or even pundits, but as scholars who must evaluate all the evidence, good, bad or indifferent. Separate surveys, conducted by those perceived as conservatives as well as liberals, show remarkable unanimity about who the best and worst presidents have been.
Historians do tend, as a group, to be far more liberal than the citizenry as a whole -- a fact the president's admirers have seized on to dismiss the poll results as transparently biased. One pro-Bush historian said the survey revealed more about "the current crop of history professors" than about Bush or about Bush's eventual standing. But if historians were simply motivated by a strong collective liberal bias, they might be expected to call Bush the worst president since his father, or Ronald Reagan, or Nixon. Instead, more than half of those polled -- and nearly three-fourths of those who gave Bush a negative rating -- reached back before Nixon to find a president they considered as miserable as Bush. The presidents most commonly linked with Bush included Hoover, Andrew Johnson and Buchanan. Twelve percent of the historians polled -- nearly as many as those who rated Bush a success -- flatly called Bush the worst president in American history. And these figures were gathered before the debacles over Hurricane Katrina, B
Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
Wow! I bet they have a lot of terrorists to show for all that work. Right...?
::crickets chirping::
-Grey [wellingtongrey.net]
Re:How will this affect me? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:How will this affect me? (Score:5, Insightful)
You're fogetting a few things ...
If each of the 3000 people who was secretly spied on had contact with only 20 people, that's a pool of 60,000 additional people whose privacy was "incidently" violated.
So now they've got, not 3,000, but 63,000 "names of interest."
Take it one level further for each of the additional 60,000 ... 60,000 x 20 = 1,200,000.
It grows pretty fast. The danger is these secret searches escalating into their version of the Kevin Bacon game.
Re:Whatever happened to the good old days with Hoo (Score:2, Insightful)
Just thought I'd let you know that.
Tom
And that's just the legal ones ! (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I disagree (Score:5, Insightful)
No; the problem is that when we give up our basic freedoms to catch criminals trying to take away our freedoms, the criminals get what they want. There are plenty of legal criminal-justice procedures that can catch the bad guys without making the United States into a police state.
You cannot have it both ways.
According to whom? Since when did the choice become "give up your freedoms to us or give up your lives to them"? And need I quote Mr. Benjamin Franklin to say that anyone who makes such a demand deserves neither freedom nor security?
People are worried that some government agency is going after bank records and phone records convienently ignore the fact that businesses do it all the time and legally.
Business = private organization with voluntary membership. Government = public organization with compulsory membership. If you can't tell the difference, then go back to high school civics.
The government actually has to get permission from the courts. That is our protection.
Not according to the PATRIOT Act.
Yeah mistakes are going to be made, some people who have no guilt are going to have their records examined. Thats a small price to pay to at least try and stop another 9-11 from occuring. Yeah I know, its the right wings mantra, hide behind the fear of another 9-11. Too bad its a valid point. It sucks but there are far more loonies out there looking to deprive us of our freedom and lives than there are government workers trying to take your rights.
No, it's not a valid point. It's a demonstration of the logical fallacy of appeal to emotion, much like the "do you want the 'smoking gun' to be a mushroom cloud over Manhattan?" defense of the Iraq war.
As for your second assertion, I'm willing to bet that the government is MUCH better equipped to take away our rights than "the terrorists." The terrorists have a handful of nuts with shoe-bombs and AK-47's. The government has an army numbering in the hundreds of thousands, which, while not directly for the idea of taking away your rights, must follow the commands of the few people who *are* interested in doing so.
You freely give up your privacy to any number of corporations, publish your thoughts out in the open on the net, and yet when the government follows the laws established to insure that it operates in the intrest of you and others you cry about it?
Once again. Business and internet = voluntary. Government = compulsory.
Also, if you are so naive as to believe that every law out there is to "insure (sic) that [the government] operates in the intrest (sic) of you and others," then I can only laugh.
Re:How will this affect me? (Score:4, Insightful)
"I do normally take the view that if you're not doing anything wrong then you have nothing to fear"
That's a viewpoint I hear all the time, and I must confess that I'm completely mystified by it. Do people who believe this think the government will never abuse it's power? They're abusing their power right now and have many times before -- that's true of almost every government in human hisotry. You'd have nothing to fear when doing nothing wrong only if the government was completely honest. The more power they have the more they'll abuse it, as they keep proving every day. I should think that would be obvious.
Brownshirts are Back (Score:2, Insightful)
They causes will be blatant corruption and incompetence of the federal government, elections processes that clearly favor those with money, the federal power grab of all decision making, the lack of decision making on important issues, the transition to a surveillance culture, the ability of big business and other special interests to buy legislation, the rube goldberg tax system, the unaccountability of those in power and the abuse of the court system.
As an IT guy there comes a point where a system is too antiquated and been kludged too much to continue throwing money at it. You have to start from scratch and use lessons learned to build a new system. Or move to another job.
Re:How will this affect me? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How will this affect me? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Whatever happened to the good old days with Hoo (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't think the average American gets it. I could go right now, buy a ticket to fly to any state, walk up to a stranger and end their life. How safe are you really? I wouldn't do this for the reason that I respect life as I would hope they respect others [including myself]. Now that I said this I'll probably get an anal probe at the airport next time... oh well.
So the key to "safety" is co-operation. That means no hording the planet for your own use [oil, pollution, etc, etc], that means equal chances to make it in life [e.g. no class system, rich getting richer, etc]. Right now life is so cheap in most countries [including the States]. Of course this means that most Westerners [and I'm a cannuck so I mean myself too] would have to tone down their quality of life. Why should we live like kings while others suffer? What have you done to build your country? Maybe your grand parents grand parents helped to build your nation but that's long since removed from our lives. We just take everything for granted.
If the states could just get along with others instead of trying to impose imperial rule over them they wouldn't have to treat their own citizens as the enemy.
Tom
Re:How will this affect me? (Score:3, Insightful)
How would they feel if we re-framed it like this: "If you're not doing anything wrong in the bathroom, you shouldn't be worried about the government videotaping you there." ... or ... "If you're not doing anything illegal in the bedroom, you shouldn't be worried about the government recording your sex life."
Its the people who see nothing wrong with this (wholesale invasion of privacy) that should be kept an eye on - they're obviously anti-social psycho exhibitionists :-)
Re:Is this necessarily a bad thing? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How will this affect me? (Score:5, Insightful)
A) In a SANE world, he'd have been held or released on the basis of his actual infringement (flying through Bush's Secret Magical Zone). Websurfing habits would not come into play because it would have nothing to do with it.
B) How would the judge issue a warrant to get their past websurfing habits? Is this the real secret that Bush is hiding from us? That the NSA employs Timecops? If so why don't they just go back in time and kill my gr
Re:How will this affect me? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, keep in mind that according to the 9/11 report, that the reason there was no warning was because the bad guys did not use any electronic form of communication.
So, either terrorists are now dumber than they used to be, or the American public is.
Re:How will this affect me? (Score:2, Insightful)
If the terms "President" & "F-16" preceed "Overnight Holding", you don't have any aids infested inmates to worry about, rest assured you'll each either be in solitary, or accompanied by an undercover "inmate".
Give me liberty or give me death (Score:3, Insightful)
—Patrick Henry
There was a time when some Americans thought freedom was worth risking their safety for. In fact, many people who sign up to serve their country still think that. It's a pity that so many people at home seem to have forgotten and would so easily cast aside hard won liberties. Have the courage to stand up for your freedoms and keep it "the land of the free and the home of the brave" rather than giving in to fear and cowardice.