Posts Tagged ‘USA Today’

Jailed Qwest CEO had refused NSA requests

June 15, 2013
Qwest logo

Qwest logo (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

QWEST, NSA, AND INSIDER TRADING?

The Story Of Joseph Nacchio And The NSA – Business Insider:
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-story-of-joseph-nacchio-and-the-nsa-2013-6

Former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio is currently serving a six-year sentence after being convicted of insider trading in April 2007 for selling $52 million of stock in the spring of 2001 as the telecommunications carrier appeared to be deteriorating.

During the trial his defense team argued that Nacchio, 63, believed Qwest was about to win secret government contracts that would keep it in the black.

Nacchio alleged that the government stopped offering the company lucrative contracts after Qwest refused to cooperate with a National Security Agency surveillance program in February 2001.

So it’s in the news because of the very public revelations by Edward Snowden in the Guardian. But wait a minute. Is this a “new” story? Guess not. Only “conspiracy theorists” made a big deal of it before, including long before Leslie Cauley’s USA Today story:

Back in 2006 Leslie Cauley of USA Today, citing multiple people with direct knowledge of the arrangement, reported that shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks America’s three largest telecoms signed contracts to provide the NSA with detailed call records from hundreds of millions of people across the country.

Cauley noted that Qwest’s refusal to participate “left the NSA with a hole in its database” since the company served local phone service to 14 million customers in 14 states.

From USA Today (emphasis ours):

The NSA, which needed Qwest’s participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard. …

… the agency suggested that Qwest’s foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government.

Nacchio’s legal concerns about the NSA program at the time mirror those of civil liberty groups today.

Cauley, citing sources familiar with events, reported the NSA asserted that Qwest didn’t need a court order — or approval under Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (which oversees NSA snooping) — to provide the data.

“They told (Qwest) they didn’t want to [run the proposal by the FISA court] because FISA might not agree with them,” one NSA insider told USA Today.

There is a record of the NSA running afoul of FISA: In July the FISA court ruled that the NSA violated the Fourth Amendment’s restriction against unreasonable searches and seizures “on at least one occasion.”

Her sources told Cauley, the author of the USA Today story, that the NSA had said other agencies like FBI, CIA, and the DEA might have access to all that massive database.

Hey, People! What else is true that those crazy tin-foil-hat conspiracy theorists have been telling us?

And looky here, even on CSPAN, we see appearances by NSA spokesmouths doing talks on what this program does and why, and no, there are strict rules on what we look at, we stay inside guidelines.

But do you know why they’re not even denying one thing that Snowden said, that he could have looked at anybody’s records, even the President’s? Because they know that anybody can see that this is obviously and clearly a violation of the Fourth Amendment.

Here’s the Fourth:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Okay, now read it with the emphasis where it goes. It’s a right to BE secure in you “persons, houses, papers, and effects”. It is NOT a right to FEEL secure, or a right to be secure “if you have nothing to hide”. Remember, this is an amendment that recognizes the natural right of persons to such security. Having thousands of government agents able to spy on anybody at any time is NOT being secure from “searches”.

The amendment does not make an exception for future technology! It is a LIE that it does not. The word “effects” easily extends the spirit of the natural right recognized in this amendment (recognized, not created) to electronic communications between people. The moronic argument that one sends all those private emails into the ether as if they meant it for broadcast to anybody who wants it is stupid.

If any telecommunications company asked for your permission to share all your comings and goings with any third party that wanted it, you/we would say No, of course.

One more point about the Fourth Amendment. The significant word there for the purposes of Orwellian Big Brother Mass Search of data is “persons”. This is a plural of the word “person”, and when a warrant “particular describes” the “persons or things” we would expect those “persons” to be indentified individually.

Like the freedom of speech, of religion, and the freedom of press, and the Fifth, this speaks to the rights of us as individual “persons”, NOT to our rights as groups. It might be “reasonable” to law enforcement to go house to house searching inside for a couple of bombers on the run, but it is not “reasonable” to each and every place they might feel like searching.

For example, take any one house in Watertown, it was not “reasonable” that a particular John Doe had Suspect #2 in hiding in his residence. Nobody was “secure” in their houses or persons that day. Contrary to some government-media spokesmouths’ mutterings, who said it was a “voluntary” lockdown, the evidence is to the contrary.

WOLF BLITZER’S EPISODE OF FOOT-IN-MOUTH DISEASE

Wolf Blitzer stuck his entire foot in his mouth to try to get a whack in at Rand Paul. Never mind the video on youtube that shows Boston’s finest knocking aggressively on doors and literally ordering the occupants outside, so they could go in and search the house.

The Dunkin Donuts operators of those news feeds did not come in, and the policemen wanting their coffee and donuts had to call them and tell them they could come open the store for them.

There is also the story of the policeman that went to fetch milk for a mother’s baby because the mother thought she could not leave the house.

And then Blitzer of course left out of his embarrassing presentation the point Rand Paul raised that it only took FIFTEEN MINUTES after the “lockdown” was raised for a regular citizen to find the bad guy. Could have saved millions of bucks and let people do productive work.

CONGRESS IS CULPABLE FOR THIS BIG-BROTHER-GATE

Let us remember that some of us warned about this when Congress enacted into law a proviso that  exempted all telecommunications companies from any civil or criminal damages resulting from the release of data to government. That was some years ago and it is obscured in the results from search engines.

Here is some relevant data from the Electronic Freedom Foundation:
https://www.eff.org/pages/calea-faq#3

But then with the Patriot Act, the ones ordered to serve up data are ordered to keep it secret. How do we know that the NSA spokesmen are telling us the truth? Are NSA agents, employees and contractors under orders to keep other details secret, like maybe the collection of CONTENT we know they survey as well?

They are now saying this dragnet of all the records of calls and emails only involves the header information. Baloney, because that leads them to where they get all the content they want.

Whistleblowers have already released to the “wild” that they record all the calls in a loop and listen for certain keywords and when those keywords happen, a recording kicks the call content to an analyst. Posted here at Business Insider’s web site is a list of keywords from years back:
http://www.businessinsider.com/nsa-prism-keywords-for-domestic-spying-2013-6

Okay, some people like (Old Guard Establishment Republican) Senator Lindsey Graham, is saying that he has no problem with this universal Big Brother surveillance of everybody because he has “nothing to hide”. Now from the people come calls for Lindsey Graham to give us his passwords so we can check to see whether he has nothing to hide.

WHO HAS SOMETHING TO HIDE?

Well, now we see the biggest coverup of these times of the biggest lawbreakers of our time and for a long time, and that is the NSA itself.

If spying on all of us Americans, and residents and tourists inside the USA, was so harmless, then why did they act like it was something to hide?

Why are they still hiding from any conversation that points out the whistleblower’s exposure to the fact that so many government agents have access to any telephone conversation they wish to listen to? Why are they avoiding the fact, now made public, that they can pull up any email they wish to look at?

Why are they trying to change the subject and shoot the messenger?

Now we know. The NSA gets ALL the header information for whatever they want, and acts like there is no Fourth Amendment when they want to listen to YOUR phone call or look at YOUR email, whoever you are.

Maybe Lindsey Graham says he has nothing to hide precisely because he does have something to hide and somebody at Fort Meade knows about it?

Why are none of these smarter-than-thou clever “reporters” asking questions like that?

There is something rotten not in Denmark but in the USA. Well, probably Denmark too.

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Posted in Big Brother, Censorship, Constitution, Corruption, Dictatorships, Elections, Government, Internet, IRS, OBama, Police state, Privacy, Socialism, USA | 1 Comment »