Washington Post : US eavesdropping finds few suspects

[rpgamerd00d]

28 minutes ago
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Nearly all of the thousands of Americans subjected to a domestic surveillance program authorized by President George W. Bush have been dismissed as potential suspects, the Washington Post said on Sunday.

The Bush administration says the surveillance, conducted by the National Security Agency without a warrant, helps defend the United States against terror attacks. Critics say it violates the rights of Americans by eavesdropping on telephone conversations.

According to the newspaper, intelligence officers heard nothing suspicious in the calls and saw no reason to suspect most of the people of improper activity, according to current and former government officials and sources in the private sector familiar with the technology being used.

Each year, fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents spark enough interest during the surveillance to cause monitoring of domestic phone calls as well, according to an authoritative account, the newspaper said.

Two sources said thousands of people in the past four years have had their telephone conversation recorded or e-mails read by intelligence analysts.

According to the newspaper, hundreds of thousands of telephone conversations, e-mails and faxes are sifted by computer-controlled systems to determine when intelligence officers will take a hand. Most of the leads were dismissed within days or weeks.

While government officials such as Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden said last month that it was inevitable that some leads would not pay off, some national security lawyers said the large number of communications put under scrutiny would be hard to justify as a permissible intrusion to search for wrongdoers.

more...
http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060205/pl_nm/security_eavesdropping_targets_dc;_ylt=Agc7isGcxtiTv_i5C_rnzv4a.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--

[BuyingThyme]

1. Good Morning Kick!

When al Qaeda calls, we...

[applegrove]

2. Just make them legal. You can easily do that. Then go ahead and

listen away. Even if you discount people - great. Just make it legal. Some oversight.

[JuneInJax]

3. the WAPO article

http://makeashorterlink.com/?R2EA2659C

You have to be registered to see it, but it goes into MUCH more detail and scares hell outta me.

A couple paragraphs:
Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, invented a data-mining technology used widely in the private sector and by the government. He sympathizes, he said, with an analyst facing an unknown threat who gathers enormous volumes of data ''and says, 'There must be a secret in there.' ''
But pattern matching, he argued, will not find it. Techniques that ''look at people's behavior to predict terrorist intent,'' he said, ''are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that's necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines."

That's what this article says * is doing, and worse.
:scared:
Moni

[lovuian]

4. few terrorists but lots of blackmail!!!

:argh:

[EST]

5. Yeah-blackmail and political espionage.

[enough]

6. K&R

[unblock]

7. what are they talking about? they're ALL terrorists until proven innocent

:sarcasm:

[usregimechange]

8. Or this thread... but one needs to be on front page...

[annabanana]

9. "nearly all"

interesting qualifier..I guess the ones that were snared were the Quakers, and that vegan handing out peanut butter sandwiches at Halliburton..

If casting a massive net to catch 10 fishes isn't a "fishing expedition", I don't know what is.

[bigtree]

10. k&r

[salin]

11. sounds so "innocent" - only a few get close scrutiny

but they won't disclose what happens to the data collected in the "wide net" phase (you know the 1,000 + people whose communications are picked up to study before singling out that 1 suspicious person that they find).

Anyone else sense a whitewash?

[BuyingThyme]

12. kcik

[spanone]

13. PROPAGANDA...the Hearings start tomorrow. Propaganda.

DO IT LEGALLY!