Reply #7: Here's a great Blog entry from this Obama members site on the FISA Bill Topic:

[Pachamama]

The Ring of Power Falls into Evil Hands
By Carrierworld - Jun 27th, 2008 at 2:46 am EDT
Also listed in: Senator Obama - Please Vote Against FISA

I posted this before Senator Feingold bought us all a lifeline, and am reposting this piece from yesterday here in this blog as it may give you other FISA rebels some talking points.

By Carrierworld - Jun 26th, 2008 at 7:46 am EDT

It appears the FISA debate has been lost, friends. This is a pity and what is more pitiful is that Senator Obama is not among the 15 senators who voted against Cloture on the motion in the Senate.

What few people grasp about the FISA debate is that it is a vendor driven phenomenon. Surveillance systems are available worldwide, they are lightly regulated, and they confer immense power upon the people who deploy them in their communications networks. There is also lots of money to be made by vendors who build and sell systems that manage this--Network Management. There is a longer, technical answer to how these systems work and a shorter anecdote for those of you who get bored by technical detail, but the thing to keep in mind when you ask yourself, Why Here, Why Now is that much of this was related to advances in technology and the only trusty sword you have against the scythe of technology is the flaccid document called the Constitution:

Technical: Old style telecoms switches are called TDM switches--Time Division Multiplex switches. These are the big, room-sized monsters which take a lot of energy to run. Vendors sold special equipment that would go in the colocation space or be close by with the switches, which would bleed a telecoms signal with thousands of calls or online sessions in it. This information then be sent on, in real-time to the recipients in the government who wanted it. in the late 1990s, VOIP, or Voice Over Internet Protocol began to take off. These switches are based on servers--basically big PCs maybe the size of a dishwasher. To bleed the signal you would run it through another server. To make your monitoring legal, you only need stick that second server in a colocation space in the UK, or elsewhere overseas. At the same time there were combos of TDM and VOIP, which would monitor calls, online sessions, as well as all your texts messages (SMSs). These would then be put in a basket with the identifying information of the target. The basket, an IP connection really, delivers the information in real time to the people who want to know. Monitoring lots of people is no problem at all. A single provider in a single switch can probably do 500,000 calls or online sessions at once.

Nontechnical: Think of the whole FISA debate as if it were a camp production of the Lord of the Rings. The ring is the ability to monitor the communications of the masses. The various players fight over control of the ring and even people with good intent such as Obama (Aragon) sway to its power. Only a race of crusty hobbits like you and me (Well, me anyway) have any chance of managing the ring's power, by rejecting it. And it even makes us a bit crazy! Except unlike the end of the Tolkein trilogy, wickedness has won out, and evil rules througout Middle Earth, and alas all is lost.

Off you go kiddies, that's your story for the day!