Letters to the Editor
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Glenn:
Glenn quotes from the legal complaint:
185. Defendant Verizon, through its Verizon Wireless division (dba Cellco Partnership) or its affiliate(s), has engaged and maintained and still does maintain a high speed data transmission line from its wireless call center to a remote location in Quantico, Virginia, the site of a U.S. government intelligence and military base.
188. By virtue of the high speed transmisison line, the Quantico recipient was enabled by Defendant Verizon to receive real time information as to all customer calling data and transmission of real time contemporaneous calls, including call history information and content.
This in itself isn't particularly alarming. The FBI's wiretap people are in Quantico (IIRC), and this could describe just the CALEA-mandated data delivery for CALEA-compliant (i.e., warranted) wiretaps.
CALEA does require real-time, contemporaneous delivery of dall data (CDR information), or even content (including RTP "streaming voice" streams for VoIP or PTT calls) if there's a Title III warrant.
Does the complain make clear whether it was the FBI or the military that was the recipient?
Cheers,
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tominwindsor
We are already in the imperial era, and have been for decades. It's just the republican one that has yet to fully go away, which is what happened in Rome, too. There is no clear point when a republic dies and an empire takes over. The two overlap, often for decades, before one fully ends and the other fully comes into being. In fact, we've been an empire in the making for at least 160 years--the Mexican war--if not even longer. But these past few years have certainly accelerated this transformative process for the worse (unless you're an imperialist, that is).
The question is whether things can still be stopped and reversed, or if it's too late. I'm not convinced that it's the latter, for reasons that I've articulated previously. They are not 100% perfect, and we are not 100% powerless. And then there's always the element of unforseen developments that throw a wrench into the works--hopefully their works, not ours. E.g. Macaca, Foley, Katrina. Then again, this works both ways, e.g. Archduke Ferdinand, the Reichstag fire, 9/11. We can only try our best, hope for the best, and see what happens.
But nothing is inevitable or preordained. That's magical thinking.
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@ tominwindsor
"Do not go gentle into that long night,
rage, rage against the dying of the light!"Dylan Thomas.
Windsor, CT? I usta live there....
Cheers,
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Update:
Glenn:
Just as importantly, the eavesdropping here involved foreign-to-foreign communications (i.e., Iraq-to-Iraq), which nobody in Congress believes ought to require a warrant.
Presumably they thought that Blackwater had kidnapped the soldiers.
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Dylan Thomas
It actually goes:
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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Dylan Thomas -- again
But the final two lines of the poem really are:
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
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The Plummeting Popularity of Congress
While this congress seems to be always concerned about how it is being perceived, they also seem unconcerned about their popularity in the polls. With each capitulation to the Bush administration, they sink lower and lower in the popularity ratings and yet they continue on this path.
Ostensibly, the breaking of the Repulicans' control over Congress was a rebuke to the path the current adminstration was taking us down. Yet, the current Congress seems more and more like the Republicans they replaced and they're doing so in the face of lower and lower polling numbers.
One can't seem to credit the current congress for doing anything because it is right, moral and would stop the very real problems created by too much power and secrecy in government, but one would think they would do it because they wished to remain in the good graces of the people who elected them.
One wonders if the DNC or the politicians are looking at these numbers with the appropriate concern. Does the will of the people matter at all?
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Remember the John Bolton hearings
"Yet at his hearings, Bolton admitted that on several occasions while he was an undersecretary of state he had asked the NSA to reveal the names of Americans in agency intercepts. The NSA obliged without any showing of cause or process of review. Newsweek investigated and learned that during one 18-month period in 2004 and 2005, the NSA supplied the names of 10,000 U.S. citizens to interested bureaucrats and spies."
Slate.com/id/2132810.
Also, see Bolton Testimony Revealed Domestic Spying
www.truthout.org
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This is for kovie: No one else may read. It's a personal...
I've got the most "weird" contraption gadget-computer in the whole wide world. Never doubt it, kovie.
I get pop-ups that say: Use other connection. The Internet must disconnect immediately. The telecoms needs to be honest SO I can get filed Salsa apolitical recipes. I want to go back to farming.
Retry! okay.
Restart? OK.
Okay- Then: The modem sounds like a Loco-coo-shoo train roaring, and masticating louder and louder with her mouth wide open. Smack smack. toot, toot.
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The computer chair turned into a black noisey cricket. The firefly outdoors somewhat soothes my angry heart with her dragonfly silent light in the sunshine glow. I see a willow tree weep, and long leaves flow in a soft gentle breeze. Wow- Am I honestly, very cranky, I'll say...
Don't tell me it is not 158 degrees in hell bent D.C.?
I shut down my computer so many times today I had to go play in the white snowy landscape. I make angel-wings designs in the flakes of pure white snow.
It's silly to make GoodCelery! snowballs to throw into the mild Salsa. So-That's what I imagined I'd have to do to cut the 'futility' bills at NSA's facility outside of Fort Meade, Maryland.
So- instead of acting too burnt-angry and forgetting the Salsa Pot may get all fried; I'll sip golden honey wine. okay.
Leave my Salsa Recipe alone.
It's a very secret formula.
Howdy- doo-die'a would ya's like me snooping out your weird vague presentiments and capricious...kovis, pass my request along.
Nacho chips!
Ah, I'll shut down the 'gadget' and allow kovie's legal voice team of legal experts, sound.
OT- I heard the chow-chop train chug down the Potomac River and the church bells in town chime...
I will twist and shout elsewhere, or I'll be as angry as a bull-frog that croaks his voice for the last time...Clunk.
As kovie said, "Stand up!"