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The Domestic spying has gone way passed it's original intent. And this is what happens when you allow the government to start repealing your rights and the Constitution.
Quote:
Nine years after the terrorist attacks of 2001, the United States is assembling a vast domestic intelligence apparatus to collect information about Americans, using the FBI, local police, state homeland security offices and military criminal investigators.
The system, by far the largest and most technologically sophisticated in the nation's history, collects, stores and analyzes information about thousands of U.S. citizens and residents, many of whom have not been accused of any wrongdoing.
The total cost of the localized system is also hard to gauge. The DHS has given $31 billion in grants since 2003 to state and local governments for homeland security and to improve their ability to find and protect against terrorists, including $3.8 billion in 2010. At least four other federal departments also contribute to local efforts. But the bulk of the spending every year comes from state and local budgets that are too disparately recorded to aggregate into an overall total.
Some snip snip of those budgets and a bunch of this rights infringing nonsense will stop.
Some snip snip of those budgets and a bunch of this rights infringing nonsense will stop.
The problem is, only some of those budgets are known. What about the 'secret' budgets from the agencies. And if we're able to pry them open to find 'em, they will just classify them black.
That's what happened w/ Eschelon, and it wasn't disclosed until it was already up and running and too late for anyone to do anything about it.
Why, then are we still subjected to the Total Body Scan/Pat Down at the airports? Spend billions of dollars, infiltrate American's lives, obtain hoards of top secret information - but don't use it at the airports because it might offend some???
Climate change (global warming) is now a national security threat so the DHS is going to battle that as well. I'm sure they'll get additional funds to battle this "new threat" to us.
Climate change (global warming) is now a national security threat so the DHS is going to battle that as well. I'm sure they'll get additional funds to battle this "new threat" to us.
Climate change (global warming) is now a national security threat so the DHS is going to battle that as well. I'm sure they'll get additional funds to battle this "new threat" to us.
Unbelievable! Can't this woman find the U.S./Mexican border? She is truly lost in space. Seriously, how/when can we get rid of her? Will it have to wait for the next administration? Can she, along with others, be petitioned out? Do we have any recourse here? This is absurd!
you can thank clinton/gore, and reagan , and bush1 and carter
In 1993 Al Gore was charged by then President Bill Clinton to run the "Clipper" project. Clipper was a special chip designed by the National Security Agency (NSA) to be built into all phones, computers and fax machines. Not only would Clipper provide scrambled security, it also contained a special "exploitable feature" enabling the NSA to monitor all phone calls without a court order.
In 1993, VP Al Gore went to work with a top secret group of Clinton advisers, called the IWG or Interagency Working Group, and delivered a report on the Clipper project.
Al Gore quickly embraced the Clipper chip and the concept of monitoring America at all costs. In 1994, Gore wrote a glowing letter supporting the Clipper chip and the government-approved wiretap design.
"As we have done with the Clipper Chip, future key escrow schemes must contain safeguards to provide for key disclosures only under legal authorization and should have audit procedures to ensure the integrity of the system. We also want to assure users of key escrow encryption products that they will not be subject to unauthorized electronic surveillance," wrote Gore in his July 20, 1994 letter to Representative Maria Cantwell.
However, Gore lied. In 1994, federal officials were keenly aware that the Clipper chip design did not have safeguards against unauthorized surveillance. In fact, NASA turned down the Clipper project because the space agency knew of the flawed design.
In 1993, Benita A. Cooper, NASA Associate Administrator for Management Systems and Facilities, wrote: "There is no way to prevent the NSA from routinely monitoring all [Clipper] encrypted traffic. Moreover, compromise of the NSA keys, such as in the Walker case, could compromise the entire [Clipper] system."
In 1995, Washington Weekly forced the Clinton administration to admit there was such a contract. The NSA, in response to a Washington Weekly Freedom of Information request, admitted that Systematics had a secret contract involving the construction of a Secured Compartmentalized Information Facility (SCIF) at an Army base in Georgia.
Motorola, Hughes, and Loral all made huge sales of "encrypted" satellite communication systems to China. Each sale required the personal signature of Bill Clinton to waive laws passed by Congress prohibiting such export. Each sale was preceded by a long series of memos to Ron Brown all begging to sell encryption technology to China.
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In 1994 President Clinton signed the Communications Assistance in Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), also known as the digital telephony bill. This bill requires regional telephone service providers to work with the FBI in establishing a standard interface for law enforcement to use when tapping a phone line. Law enforcement can already tap copper phone lines, but new technology in the form of digital fiber optics, smart call services like call forwarding, and wireless cellular and PCS communications, left FBI wiretappers in the dust - hence, the campaign for greater wiretapping capability.
A roving wiretap would enable police to monitor all phone calls made by a suspect, rather than just those from a specific telephone. High speed computers would monitor calls passing through a certain network, selecting and "red flagging" a conversation that contained the peculiar "voice print" - a digitized pattern of a person's unique vocal characteristics - of a person under investigation. If the suspect made a phone call from his neighbor's house, or used a cell phone or pay phone, his call would be recognized, retrieved and uploaded to a law enforcement agent by the carrier's "critical electronic equipment". These same computers would be able to recognize certain words and phrases and record those conversations for law enforcement scrutiny as well. This technology is already employed by the National Security Agency to monitor international calls, and some experts believe it is already in use in some parts of the U.S. (Source: The Implications of Roving Wiretap Technology by Allan Colombo, Safety and Security Magazine). The FBI has also requested the capability to track the location of every cell phone in the U.S. that is in the "standby" mode. This would make a tracking device out of every cell phone used in the country.
What's more, "...the FBI published a stealthily phrased notice in the Federal Register signaling, in effect, that the federal government wants to require the nation's phone companies to radically alter their critical electronic equipment to enable the Bureau to eavesdrop on one out of every one-hundred telephone conversations occurring at any given time in the nation's largest cities and other, undefined prime target areas." The FBI also wants authority for "emergency wiretaps" that would not require a court order and would be good for 48 hours and an easing of federal guidelines restricting how wiretaps are used. (Op-ed published in the Los Angeles Daily Journal entitled, "Congress plans National Wiretap Week" by Laura W. Murphy, Director, ACLU National Office 3/96).
hmmmmm
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