After years of playing footsie with the language, the Attorney General and director of intelligence basically have to admit that eavesdropping on phone calls and email outside the FISA regulations is illegal.
In their fearmongering to get Congress to pass the Protect America Act revisions that include retroactive immunity for telecom companies, these officials were trying to make the case that we are "losing" intelligence since the old law expired. To do so, they had to say that they can't just carry on with their spying activities because it's "illegal" under FISA.
When officials at the highest reaches of government can't be trusted to abide by the law, then why should we?
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FISA :: Why We Can't Find Out The REAL Story
Interesting piece in the Vail Daily re: FISA today.
I had the pleasure of meeting a Russian fellow years ago named Leon Ferber, who at the time ran a company called "Perception Technology" in Canton, MA. He's listed in old SEC filings as a VP, but it was his, as much as a public company remains "yours."
Leon, who mysteriously shows up on Google far fewer times than, say, you or I do, invented "Speaker Independent Voice Recognition" back in the 1960's, under contract then to a secret three-letter-acronym agency of the US government. It took a while to catch on, since it required a lot more computer than even the best vacuum tubes could offer in 1964.
Today it is everywhere. Say "Show restaurant icons" in your Prius, for example, and the car's dashboard GPS obeys, no matter who says it, man or woman, adult or child.
Leon's work is the basis for the NSA, NRO, FBI and other US government "eavesdropping" of voice calls today.
The trick he mastered, you see, is how to listen in on a lot of calls. In fact, every single call placed in the USA and around the planet each day. Today's technology and computers have no problem with this call volume - the same ones that provide the digital interface to "law enforecement" route each one of them, after all.
What the governments of the world with the capability to listen like this don't want people to know is that they can and do listen to each one, too.
It's all automated, and the computers listening in can understand every language. When "key words" are detected, the calls are further screened and logged according to sophisticated algorithms developed over decades. Enough "hits" and somebody - a human somewhere - finally gets an email and the process is "escalated." Of course, you can track anyone you'd like by number, and even their voice print alone, from any phone, mobile or fixed, from anywhere to anywhere. Digital technology really is fabulous for this type of thing.
But the main reason this administration doesn't want the details to get out is ... it is all or nothing with this technology and has been for quite some time.
The systems don't just "do" selected calls, they have to monitor every call (and email, now) to function, to track users properly. This is how they were designed and was "ok" when they just monitored "international" calls, not that this was really ever anything but a software configuration.
Funny isn't it - the one telecom CEO who said "no" to these guys expanding to domestic monitoring is in jail now, isn't he?
Yes, it is
Yes, it is funny that the one CEO who balked is in jail. What else if funny is that, according to him, the NSA approached him about this program in February 2001, before 9/11. It kind of begs the question, if this program is so good at getting info from terrorists, why didn't it stop 9/11?
scrambling
If someone could build a complete anticommunication device, it would cripple even the U.S.