Your post about rummaging through CDRs and private messages, even if for "legal" and "troubleshooting" purposes merely highlights the NEED for encrypted telephony and encrypted text messaging.

There is a big opening here for some company to market an encrypted cell phone. I would recommend incorporating zfone into the cell software. As long as the recipient had a similarly equipped phone, then text messages and voice messages would be auto-encrypted and there would be no back door through which even the phone company could rummage through what is NONE OF THEIR BUSINESS. You (telcos) merely provide the means to communicate. You do NOT own or have rights to WHAT is communicated. Period.

Same with the government. NO rights at all for government. Rights belong to the People. The founding documents are devised to set limits on the government and vouchsafe the rights of the people, they are NOT devised to circumscribe what the People can do and give "rights" to government (or corporations).

(more like a bad standup comedy routine, actually, right out of Orwell) was, of course, from Fox News, and if he didn't personally coordinate his questions with the White House press office, this was obviously done on some level between his superiors at Fox and the administration, even if only in unstated but understood terms. Fox (which did such a wonderful job promoting St. Rudy of 9/11) is of course a mouthpiece for the RNC and the Bush administration posing as a credible news orgnization, much as Pravda and Tass posed as such in the USSR (and their contemporary versions are now doing under the Putin regime--tyrants always seek to control the media).

That was the Fox "reporter", who could be expected to ask such a "question". Here's what Bill Plante of the far more "serious" CBS News (run by the noted and hard-hitting investigative journalist Katie Couric, formerly of the Today Show) asked:

QUESTION: ... if you can get the Congress to protect telecom companies from lawsuits then there's no recourse for Americans who feel that they've been caught up in this.

QUESTION: I know it's unintended to spy on Americans, but in the collection process information about everybody gets swept up and then it gets sorted. So if Americans don't have any recourse, are you just telling them when it comes to their privacy to suck it up?

BUSH: I wouldn't put it that way, if I were you — in public. You've been around long enough.

Anyway, people who analyze the program fully understand that America's civil liberties are well protected. There is a constant check to make sure that our civil liberties of our citizens aren't — you know, are treated with respect.

BUSH: And that's what I want, and that's what most Americans — all Americans want.

Slightly better, but not much. Notice how he prefaced his question with the totally presumptive (since no one can know this for sure) apologetic remark about how "I know it's unintended to spy on Americans", as if to emphasize that everyone KNOWS that the administration doesn't intend and would never try to abuse these absolute powers that it claims for itself.

And note how he phrased his question in such a way as to suggest that the real problem with having such unchecked power is not willful abuse, but that it might merely accidentally lead to some abuses, however inadvertant. Even when reporters try to ask genuine questions of Bush, they do so in the most apologetic and respectful manner, so as to not give even the hint of offense, so tamed and cowed have they become. Of course, they haven't merely become so obsequious, but were likely selected as WH reporters for precisely this quality.

There is a sort of ethical and intellectual corruption in today's establishment media that has clearly been arranged through the tacit and explicit cooperation of the people who run them, and the people on whom they report, so as to limit the reporting that's done to that which superficially still appears to be real reporting, but which is actually not, since it doesn't engage in genuine and sustained investigation that doesn't hesitate to take on the powers that be.

What we have here is a combination of fake reporting (Fox), and weak reporting (CBS), with possibly the only real reporter in the room, Helen Thomas, being repeatedly marginalized and silenced whenever she tries to ask a real question, as she tried to do of Dana Perino earlier this week, on FISA. Notice how Perino treats her with such contempt:

Q: Who gave them the right to break the law?

MS. PERINO: Nobody broke the law, Helen. That might be your opinion, but nobody broke the law.

Q: When these companies -- when no warrant is given, and they didn't break the law?

MS. PERINO: Helen, you're entitled to your opinion, but you're not entitled to your own set of facts.

Q: Oh, come on, let's --

MS. PERINO: And the facts are that companies were asked to help, and they were helped --

Q: Why can't they get --

MS. PERINO: -- and they allowed -- they helped with a legal program that has helped save lives.

Q: Who told them they could break the law?

MS. PERINO: That is just -- that's not true, Helen.

One of Obama's first acts as president should be to award Thomas a Medal of Freedom, as much because she clearly deserves is as to stick it to the Bushies.

We live in surreal times.

I wouldn't put it that way, if I were you — in public. You've been around long enough.

That the occasion of the President actually saying something truthful has to be noted.

CCTVs in England and the Tattle-Tale brigade doesn't seem to be going over too well with all of the locals. There are people out there actively destroying them.

Motorists Against Detection

http://www.speedcam.co.uk/welcome.htm

A fun Image search of some trashed cameras.

http://images.google.com/images?q=Motorists+Against+Detection&ie=UTF-8&oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi

The preferred method is to file a tire with gas, put it on a chain, hang it over the camera, and light it up.

But as Big Brother gets more advanced, so does Little Brother, like the use of camera phones, i.e. small, cheap, video recorders to capture big brother's abuses and then plaster the net with the video.

Just wait until they're all back in the States....

Forever is a long time to wait.