The House Judiciary Committee has voted to reauthorize sweeping warrantless spying powers that are due to expire at year’s end. The FISA Amendments Act would allow the government to continue the Bush-era practice of monitoring U.S. residents’ phone calls and emails without a warrant, so long as one of the parties in the communication is outside the United States. The Senate Intelligence Committee passed a similar measure last month....
...The National Security Agency has refused to disclose how many Americans have been monitored under the surveillance program on the grounds that doing so would violate their privacy. The NSA made the assertion in a response to a request from Democratic Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall. In a letter, the NSA’s inspector general told the senators that to answer how many Americans have been spied on "would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons."
I think I'm good here in trusting you'll be able to figure out the irony for yourselves. Goodnight and god help us all.
2 comments:
About as reasonable as why those indicted for fraudulent acquisition of controlled substances have no access to state prescription records of controlled substances they have filled because it would violate privacy of ... ?
Just who (or what) has a right to privacy? And, what is privacy, anyway?
Remember when there was such a thing as confidentiality so that insurance companies wouldn't rip a person off? We used to call it HIPAA, but in truth, it merely keeps the information from the private individual person paying the bill.
The easiest way to not have your phone calls monitored is don't make phone calls to your Al Queda contacts overseas. Instead, use Skype (I don't think they've cracked that yet) or PGP-encrypted email.
If you do have to resort to a phone call, use some sort of cypher. Hopefully, the CIA and FBI don't have an informant in your organization who turned over your cypher to the government.
In short, as long as you take appropriate counter-measures, it doesn't matter if they monitor your phone calls or not. Easy peasy!
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