All Hank, all the time.

[ltl/fb]

Originally posted by Spanky
I was only talking about international transactions. And if people and goods have to go through customs, why shouldn't internationl phone calls and bank transfers?

OK, so, I'm a US citizen (born in the country to people who were born in the country whose parents were here legally). If I am in the international terminal at LAX, having arrived from, um, Australia, I have no constitutional protections? Or protections of other laws?

And what Burger asked about, because it interests me.

[Spanky]

Originally posted by Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
You're stating what the law is, not what you think the law should be. If no 4th A. is so good for the foreign goose, why not the same for the domestic gander?

Is this a serious question? I think the benefits for not having the government, at its discretion, within the United States, listen to your phone calls or search your house are obvious. On the flip side, the US trying to enforce the constitution, or thinking that US. Constitutional protections should apply outside the US is, to me, also obviously absurd. Do you disagree? Do I really need to explain the benefits to one and the drawbacks of the other?

[Spanky]

Originally posted by ltl/fb
OK, so, I'm a US citizen (born in the country to people who were born in the country whose parents were here legally). If I am in the international terminal at LAX, having arrived from, um, Australia, I have no constitutional protections? Or protections of other laws?

And what Burger asked about, because it interests me.

If you are interested why don't you look it up? You are a lawyer correct?

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by Spanky
If the phone calls are between US citizens, yes. If two US citizens are talking to eachother on the phone with the phone call starting in the US and ending in the US, then absent exigent circumstances, the government needs to get a warrant to listen to such calls.

The profile of David Addington in this week's New Yorker says that the NSA has been listening to domestic calls.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Do these "domestic" calls involve known terrorist supporters located outside of the country?

If someone reported those facts, it would be treason, no?

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by Spanky
Is this a serious question? I think the benefits for not having the government, at its discretion, within the United States, listen to your phone calls or search your house are obvious. On the flip side, the US trying to enforce the constitution, or thinking that US. Constitutional protections should apply outside the US is, to me, also obviously absurd. Do you disagree? Do I really need to explain the benefits to one and the drawbacks of the other?

Yes, I do disagree. Your argument is an odd form of utiliatarianism. You believe that government surveillance of people is good, because it can thwart terrorist activity. The value of detecting or deterring such activity is greater than the harm to the privacy* of those being surveilled, as well as the perceived threat to privacy suffered by all others.

Yet, for some reason the same argument does not apply within the United States. Here, the value of detecting terrorism is outweighed by the privacy interests of the citizens.

Let me sharpen the point: If torture is a legitimate means to obtain information from people, why is it legitimate against foreigners, but not U.S. citizens?

Or, in a different way, if markets are the best way to protect democracy in the U.S., should we not be able to assume the same in foreign countries?




*I'm using the term "privacy" here in the narrow sense, and shorthand for, protection from search, seizure, and other government surveillance without some articulable suspicion.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
His argument is based on some unfounded notion that the Democrats actually want to work with the administration and be helpful. Hogwash.

What you suggest here would be more plausible -- not actually plausible, but farther from sheer lunacy -- if it were the Democrats who were following the party line on Iraq lately and the Republicans who were openly disagreeing with each other.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
If someone reported those facts, it would be treason, no?

Funny how the NYT likes to expose secret government programs - harming the many - while going to the wall to protect its secret sources - protecting only the one.

[SlaveNoMore]

Tyrone Slothrop
What you suggest here would be more plausible -- not actually plausible, but farther from sheer lunacy -- if it were the Democrats who were following the party line on Iraq lately and the Republicans who were openly disagreeing with each other.

By party line - I'm assuming you mean Kerry/Murtha/Feingold?

[Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
Funny how the NYT likes to expose secret government programs - harming the many - while going to the wall to protect its secret sources - protecting only the one.

The two seem entirely consistent. Without the latter, the likelihood of being able to do the former is reduced.

Why isn't the Bush administration seeking out the leakers within the government? The press is just reporting what the government (i.e., the Bush white house) lets out.

[SlaveNoMore]

Mmmm, Burger (C.J.)
Why isn't the Bush administration seeking out the leakers within the government? The press is just reporting what the government (i.e., the Bush white house) lets out.

1) Good Question. Why isn't Gonzales going after the leakers to the NYT?

2) But um, Bush White House? It's clearly disaffected jerkoffs at State or the Pentagon.

[Anntila the Hun]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
1) Good Question. Why isn't Gonzales going after the leakers to the NYT?

It should be obvious. Gonzales hates America!! He's another ratfaced traitor!!

[Gattigap]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore


2) But um, Bush White House? It's clearly disaffected jerkoffs at State or the Pentagon.

Sigh. I remember the good old days, when terrorist-loving sympathizers only resided at Foggy Bottom.

Only now, because of their clear incompetence and failure to Win This Fucking War For Our President, can we also find them across the river sitting somewhere inside the E-ring. Sad.

[Sexual Harassment Panda]

Originally posted by Gattigap
Huh. Apparently not a single sentence of the NYT story revealed any new operational information about the program.

• But a search of public records -- government documents posted on the Internet, congressional testimony, guidelines for bank examiners, and even an executive order President Bush signed in September 2001 -- describe how US authorities have openly sought new tools to track terrorist financing since 2001. That includes getting access to information about terrorist-linked wire transfers and other transactions, including those that travel through SWIFT.
  
  "There have been public references to SWIFT before," said Roger Cressey, a senior White House counterterrorism official until 2003. "The White House is overreaching when they say [The New York Times committed] a crime against the war on terror. It has been in the public domain before."
  
  Indeed, a report that [former State Department official Victor] Comras co-authored in 2002 for the UN Security Council specifically mentioned SWIFT as a source of financial information that the United States had tapped into.

Oh, my fucking God. Those goddamned government officials are aidng and abetting the enemy that's trying to kill us. Hopefully the execution of Bill Keller will stop THAT shit.

Apparently the idea that the SWIFT monitoring system was still producing anything of value is...well...wrong .

• In The One Percent Doctrine, Ron Suskind spends a lot of time describing the way U.S. intelligence tracked global money flows after 9/11, including accounts of the cooperation they got from Western Union (wire transfers), First Data Corporation (credit card records), and the takeover of a "money store" in Pakistan. He doesn't mention the SWIFT program specifically, but he makes it clear that U.S. teams had their fingers in a lot of financial pies and had a considerable amount of success with it.
  
  But only for a while:
  
  In the closing months of 2003...the carefully constructed global network of sigint and what can be called finint, or financial intelligence, started to go quiet.
  
  In short, al Qaeda, and its affiliates and imitators, stopped leaving electronic footprints. It started slowly, but then became distinct and clear, a definable trend. They were going underground.
  
  ...."We were surprised it took them so long," said one senior intelligence official. "But the lesson here is that with an adaptable, patient enemy, a victory sometimes creates the next set of challenges. In this case, we did some things that worked very well, and they started to evolve."
  
  Or devolve. The al Qaeda playbook, employed by what was left of the network, its affiliates and imitators, started to stress the necessity of using couriers to carry cash and hand-delivered letters. This slowed the pace of operations, if not their scale, and that was, indeed, a victory.
  
  By the beginning of 2004, Suskind says, the finint operation was in a "state of increasing obsolescence." The money store had closed down, the Palestinians had gotten wise to Western Union, and the "matrix," as he calls the overall finint operation, was becoming less and less effective.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally posted by SlaveNoMore
By party line - I'm assuming you mean Kerry/Murtha/Feingold?

No, I meant that there was no Democratic party line on the issue.

"I'm not a member of any organized political party, I'm a Democrat."
-- Will Rogers