A Key Sept. 11 Legacy: More Domestic Surveillance - LATimes

[WillyT]

A key Sept. 11 legacy: more domestic surveillance
By Ken Dilanian, Los Angeles Times
August 29, 2011, 7:14 p.m.

Thanks to new laws and technologies, authorities track and eavesdrop on Americans as they never could before, hauling in billions of bank records, travel receipts and other information. In several cases, they have wiretapped conversations between lawyers and defendants, challenging the legal principle that attorney-client communication is inviolate.

Advocates say the expanded surveillance has helped eliminate vulnerabilities identified after the Sept. 11 attacks. Some critics, unconvinced, say the snooping undermines privacy and civil liberties and leads inevitably to abuse. They argue that the new systems have weakened security by burying investigators in irrelevant information.

We are caught in the middle of a perfect storm in which every thought we communicate, every step we take, every transaction we enter into is captured in digital data and is subject to government collection," said Fred H. Cate, a professor at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law who has written extensively on privacy and security. A robust debate on the intelligence gathering has been impossible, for the simple reason that most of the activity is officially secret. In lawsuits alleging improper eavesdropping, the Justice Department has invoked state secrecy to prevent disclosure of classified information and systems.

In May, two members of the Senate Intelligence Committee said that Americans would be disturbed if they knew about some of the government's data-gathering procedures. But Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Mark Udall (D-Colo.) said they were prohibited from revealing the facts. "When the American people find out how their government has secretly interpreted" surveillance law, "they will be stunned and they will be angry," Wyden said.

More: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-911-homeland-security-surveillance-20110830,0,4844584,full.story

:kick:

[gateley]

1. Today I just got The Watchers - The Rise of America's Surveillance State

by Shane Harris.

This is from the back cover:

In 1983 John Poindexter, President Reagan's national security adviser, realized that the United States might have prevented the massacre of 241 Marines in Beirut if intelligence agencies could have analyzed in real time the data they had on the attackers. What ensued over the next quarter-century were ambitious government efforts to create an intelligence-gathering system of unprecedented scope and sophistication. But despite the billions of dollars spent, the result is a supreme irony: While catching terrorists hasn't become any easier, spying on the rest of us is now routine./snip

Here's the amazon link:

http://www.amazon.com/Watchers-Rise-Americas-Surveillance-State/dp/B003YDXD4U/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1314751986&sr=1-1

I'm actually hesitant about reading it - I just know it will be infuriating and scary.

[Octafish]

2. Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) -- a truly great Liberal -- warned us...

...back in 1975. The late Senator is on the left. On the right is the late Sen. John Tower (D R-Texas).



“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.”

[gateley]

5. "...the abyss from which there is no return." nt

[Hippo_Tron]

7. I still marvel at the fact that he was the Senator from a state that now votes GOP 70-30

That's back before this country lost its mind.

[butterfly77]

3. They forgot this too..

http://motherjones.com/mojo/2010/08/ground-zero-was-built-graves-slaves

[gateley]

4. Wow - I totally never knew that. nt

[leftstreet]

6. 'data-gathering' to be sold to the highest bidders. It's all about $$ n/t