Team Telecom is a group of lawyers from the FBI, DoJ, DHS, and DoD who were empowered to enter any US network operations center of companies like Global Crossing on 30 minutes’ notice, allowing them to secretly audit and intervene in the maintenance of the Internet’s biggest backbones. The employees who dealt with the team… READ THE REST
Which is a bigger advantage for the USA? Printing the world’s reserve currency or tapping all the phones and data lines?
I can’t wait for the full story of the secret actions of the government during the George W. era to come out, to reveal to the American people exactly how far the country slid into a surveillance state (moreso than it was before) in order to protect the population from “terror”.
In 2004, most Americans weren’t even suspicious that the government might be monitoring Internet traffic. Quietly, the US government has built a comprehensive and far-reaching network of laws (secret or actually published) and secret groups operating with little effective oversight, completely subverting its’ citizens privacy by giving the government access to more or less any Internet data in the event that it might reveal badthink.
I wonder if there’ve been any covered-up murders over the various top-secret wiretap/access protocols, and if we’ll ever hear about them.
Fuck’s sake. Did every last one of these loons spend their teens wanking furiously over the idea of the STASI? Wasn’t that kind of not the point they purported to be making back then?
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You mean ALL of our meta data and transactions and all that stuff is controlled by private, for profit, zero accountability companies? What the F? Did I vote for Global Crossing and not know it? That’s messed up. I sure as heck want someone who was hired by someone I elected to go in there and know what’s going on. When you drive a wedge between me and my government what am I left with? Someone who’s basing MY security on quarterly profit numbers? That scares me more than a bureaucrat trying to find out who leaked that whole bomb maker double agent stuff. ALL that data & backbone stuff should be nationalized. Tonight.
The George W. era? That’s pretty much the same thing as the Obama era. This really isn’t a partisan issue. Both major parties are in it up to their necks, which is why I oppose both.
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Yes, but 9/11 and the PATRIOT Act and a lot of the groundwork that’s still well-trod by the current administration happened under GW’s administration. I’m making a historical, not a partisan, distinction.
I just don’t see any relevance to the fact that these things took place under a previous administration. The renewal of the USA PATRIOT Act and the expansion of the security/surveillance state continues and even accelerates under the Obama admin. And even under the previous admin, Democrats voted in droves for these things. Even Obama, after promising to filibuster the gutting of FISA while lying his way to the nomination, voted for it.
Besides the widespread cry that Obama is the Antichrist? It’s good to remember that we can have more than one villain.
I’m not trying to throw political rocks at anyone. Not everything has to be a partisan political issue.
I can’t wait for the full story to be told.
“In time, one inevitably comes to resemble one’s enemies.” - Borges
For a few years, I’ve been thinking about, and increasingly, witnessing how the US has come to resemble its erstwhile nemeses. Will we go on to crumble a few decades after the USSR? We should be able to stick it out longer, considering the Soviet Union had to transform from an unbelievably inefficient, almost feudal, agricultural society to an unbelievably slapdash industrialized nation.
It really seems unnecessary, all of this driving the US into the ground stuff. But the country, or perhaps just the money that buys the government of the country, seems dead-set on it. I reckon the industries that profited from the Cold War intend to go on making money from any war that can be cooked up.
The Stasi’s actions were limited by law (no matter how unjust) and in scope. The current tepid “wars,” undefined, unending by nature and perhaps by design, and conducted largely by private contractors, seem to fit the bill nicely. If one’s on the board of a military contractor.
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The article notes that the method the FCC uses to obtain leverage is its ability to approve the installation of new undersea cables, and it denies or delays approvals until the US government gets the spying agreement it wants. If that sort of thing bothers you, then perhaps you should be wary of giving the FCC the right to enforce net neutrality on service providers; surely they could turn that into a weapon as well.
Net neutrality is a fine engineering concept and should be followed, but I don’t think I trust the FCC to enforce it.
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