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MineralMan

(146,192 posts)
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 10:38 AM Jun 2013

Government Spying on Americans - New? Not Really...

Nixon did it during the Vietnam war. Everyone did it, to one degree or another. In the late 1960s, the technology hadn't even come close to what is available now, but the Feds were still snooping on Americans in many ways.

In 1975, Senator Frank Church chaired a Senate committee, called, of all things, the Church Committee, to look into what the alphabet agencies were up to. This was prompted by some revelations during the Watergate investigation. They found all sorts of stuff to talk about, and issued a number of reports on spying by the government on US citizens and more.

You can read a brief summary of this on Wikipedia, and find links in that article to lots more resources.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee

That was a long time ago, and many DUers don't remember it, or weren't even born yet. Old farts like me remember, though. There's nothing new under the sun, except for technology. If today's technology had been available in Nixon's day, they'd have been doing the same thing.

In fact, they have been doing the same thing ever since. The capabilities and the use of those capabilities have just kept growing. It's old stuff. Even before Nixon, someone was opening envelopes and listening in on phone calls. The difference is a matter of scope, not intent.

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Arctic Dave

(13,812 posts)
1. The scope and intent matters the most.
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 10:51 AM
Jun 2013

Now they can track everyone and they can change the "intent" to whatever they want.

It is like being an African American driving a BMW in the South. A cop pulls him over but he has done nothing wrong. The cop only wants to harass and he will use any excuse to do it.

Now imagine that cop doing this to anyone anytime he feels like it.

MineralMan

(146,192 posts)
2. Yes, that has changed, at least the scope.
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 10:59 AM
Jun 2013

The intent, however, remains the same. Had the technology existed in the 1960s, it would have been used. What exists gets used.

The intent is to know what people are doing. The scope has changed with the available technology.

JustAnotherGen

(31,683 posts)
3. Someone at DU finally wrote it
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:08 AM
Jun 2013

Technology.

Technology changed. Hoover would have had a field day with Facebook, Twitter, email, etc etc.

I'm still shocked that people have had faith in the positive intent of the USA. However, my father was one of the bad guys - and ingrained in his children that your country does things that they want you to believe only other countries do.

Next - what is it people intend to do with this information MineralMan? The past few days I've read nothing at DU other than righteous indignant comments. When a DU'er points out that this is the law - folks want to fight that fact. My question now - where were they when the UnPatriot Act became the law?

Riddle me this: if MLK could be painted as a Communist and treated as such during the Cold War and Civil Rights Era - what makes folks believe that they can fight it now - with words? That's all he really had - right?

BTW - I'm no flag waving support my country blindly to any and all means type of person. Anyone on here who has read my comments on race in this country knows that I think we absolutely suck as a country and are morally bankrupt. Ditto on Veterans, the Impoverished and Working Poor, and women's rights. I guess I'm cavalier now because I came to the conclusion 19 years ago that we are just about worthless when it comes to social justice globally and the inherent rights of human beings.

MineralMan

(146,192 posts)
7. These days, in my dotage, I'm more of an observer
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:21 AM
Jun 2013

than anything else. I try to look at what is, rather than what should be. Back in the late 1960s, I remember being alarmed at the snooping into the lives of Americans. I also remember the snooping into the civil rights movement, dating back even farther than that, and the McCarthy era, too.

The conclusion I came to then is the same conclusion I have come to today: Government is always interested in finding out what Americans are up to. It doesn't much care what I'm up to, though. I don't matter much on a grand scale, if I matter at all. But, in looking for people who do matter in some way, scooping up everything and then sorting it out seems to be the current strategy.

That's always been the general practice, but wasn't possible on the scale that's being employed now. Now, they can scoop up just about everything, at least when it comes to communications. They can, so they do. Then, they try to find ways to sort out what's important from what's mundane. They succeed, more or less, based again on the available technology.

Most of what they scoop up is completely worthless, so that's the first step. Sort that out and dump it. That's a lot of stuff to sort through, but they use techniques not that dissimilar to the spam filter on your email client. The scale is hugely larger, but that's the strategy. They dump almost everything they collect, because it simply has no significance to anyone.

What's left gets sorted through a little more carefully, but most of that gets dumped, too. What's left after that actually gets looked at, maybe, by some human being who might be able to see if it's important or not. Most of that gets kick into the waste stream, too. And, as we saw with the Boston Marathon Bombing, some of the important stuff gets lost in that process as well.

The technology allows collection of massive, massive amounts of data, most of which will end up going to some null device somewhere. That technology, though, still can't sort out what's really important, on a security basis, from the remaining crap. In a few cases, something is actually found and subjected to some sort of human analysis, which is the only way it can be accurately judged.

The intent has always been the same. The technology is getting closer and closer to being able to filter out only what matters, but it's not there yet. It's still a work in progress. In the end, though, some schlub has to look at the stuff from a human perspective. That's the end point for all this data. Some guy sitting in a cubicle. Lots of guys sitting in cubicles. That's the bottleneck.

For most people, it's all meaningless, because their communications are terminally boring.

Junkdrawer

(27,993 posts)
4. We need another Church Committee. And I must say that it feels strange....
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:17 AM
Jun 2013

to have a Democratic President as a target this go around.

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
5. Difference is Frank Church warned us what'd happen if NSA were turned to spy on American people.
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:18 AM
Jun 2013

His committee was about the LAST time Congress held CIA, NSA accountable to Congress. What Frank Church said:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

"I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x3510598

...

http://election.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x8987401

MineralMan

(146,192 posts)
11. He said that before the advent of the personal computer
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:45 AM
Jun 2013

was really evident. Since then, the world has changed in many ways. But, what he said remains true, and is even more true now. Government now has technology capable of sweeping up all communications and subjecting it to examination. It is the examination part that is the current stumbling block for those who would see what everyone is doing. That block is almost gone, too, though.

The thing we, as individual voters, must do is to be very, very careful who we elect to public office. The capabilities of technology will continue to improve.

GOTV 2014 and Beyond!

MineralMan

(146,192 posts)
9. He was right, of course. Walter Mondale was on that committee, too.
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:23 AM
Jun 2013

The Church Committee was right. We don't seem to have done much about it, though. The technological capabilities have grown apace.

MineralMan

(146,192 posts)
10. Yes. And to others. That was more related
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:41 AM
Jun 2013

to human intelligence (or stupidity) gathering, though. The intent was the same, though...looking for "enemies of the state."

It has gone on since there were states to have "enemies," in one way or another.

 

randome

(34,845 posts)
12. Here is a timeline on FISA-related events.
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:47 AM
Jun 2013
http://projects.propublica.org/graphics/surveillance-timeline

An interesting sidelight is that the Guardian has been proven to be wrong on a couple of other occasions regarding this.

Also this from James Clapper yesterday or Friday, I forget when:
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper acknowledges the collection of phone metadata but says the information acquired is “subject to strict restrictions on handling” and that “only a very small fraction of the records are ever reviewed.”


I understand some who don't want to trust the government but if you're in that dark place already, then what makes anyone think a rule or regulation is going to change anything?

At some point, you do have to trust those who are given these type of jobs. And if harm or negligence is shown, then they get the boot.

[hr]
[font color="blue"][center]Stop looking for heroes. BE one.[/center][/font]
[hr]

MineralMan

(146,192 posts)
13. Of course. These capabilities make our elections even more crucial.
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 11:52 AM
Jun 2013

We don't really have any power to turn back time or technology. So, we need to exercise our vote very carefully when choosing the leadership of our country. The technology isn't going away.

GOTV 2014 and Beyond!

 

FarCenter

(19,429 posts)
14. It sounds like they've implemented a standard ETL approach to data warehousing and query
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 12:04 PM
Jun 2013

If a business has data in several data bases, but wants to do management reporting across the data, or to make non-standard queries, the conventional approach is to do an Extract Transform and Load of the data into a data warehouse. The data warehouse is organized specifically to support management reporting and ad hoc queries.

Consider wanting to know about all cell calls originated during a few hours from Boylston Street in Boston. On way would be to launch a query to each of the several cell phone operators in the area and ask them to pull records for those cell sites.

Or consider wanting to know all the phone calls made to a wireline phone number. Since the carriers don't normally capture call details by terminating phone number, this would require going to a number of carriers and pulling together data in an order that they don't normally keep it in. Carriers do collect and sort call detail records on terminating number for toll fraud investigations, but not often.

So probably, the carrier are doing the Extract part and transfering the data to NSA. NSA does the Transform part to standardize the data formats and representations, which would likely be different from carrier to carrier. Then the NSA Loads the data into its warehouse in a structure that pulls together the data for each call and provides indices that support query by a number of parameters useful for investigations.

Which data gets queried out of the warehouse is the thing that then is controlled by subpoenas and warrants, not which data goes into the warehouse.

 

Coyotl

(15,262 posts)
15. Sen. Russ Feingold suffered the same consequence as Sen. Church for opposing spying
Sun Jun 9, 2013, 12:08 PM
Jun 2013

And just watch how they will go after Sen. Merkeley!

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