So you think the NSA Database issue is harmless if you are NOT a terrorist

LISTEN UP. This just happened minutes ago to my best friend.

I happened to be in her presence while she was trying to resolve an issue with AT&T about her inability to use her internet service to e-mail her grandchildren who live in NJ (she lives here in Maryland). She was complaining that her internet e-mail was unavailable for her to use. The first person she spoke with told her that she had exceeded her minute allocation. She has UNLIMITED service. The person told her that it must be because she had not paid her bill. They discovered that she had a zero balance on her account and that her bill had been paid well before the due date. She next learned from an AT&T superviosr that a BLOCK had been placed on her e-mail service. (This is a white, 50-something, grandmother, who works as a clerk and who has never left the borders of the USA). To make a long story short she discovered that because she had sent an e-mail to a friend who was vacationing in Holland and had received a response from that person that her e-mail account had been blocked. She was outraged and in tears. I suggested that she at least cancel her service with AT&T and that she write or phone her Senator and Representatives about the incident. The problems started immediately after she received an e-mail from her friend who is in Holland for a month's vacation (this friend is a Jewish woman who is 73 years old, an American citizen).

So you can't tell me that this data mining program is harmless and that they are not tapping in on ordinary citizens. I wonder how many other stories are out there that are similar? There should be a place for ordinary citizens to report this shit so that there is enough evidence against this Bush regime to prove that citizens' rights are being taken away and that our Constitution is being trampled. This shit is unbelievable! (I guess I will be blocked after this post.)

Anybody here have any experiences with this to share?

affect you.

most of my e-mails to my friends in Belgium have been tossed back and blocked...same for many of my friends (US citizens) !

I am trying to help my friend compose a letter now.

some kind of "watch list?" I have a feeling that there are many more incidents of this that are going unreported because people are just giving up.

:sarcasm:

Welcome to DU!! :hi:

...Dear Leader is keeping us safe from all those nasty brown people who hate us for our (rapidly diminishing) freedoms!

I'm surprised the CSR didn't tell you that-- whether it's true or not.

From what I understand, Holland is a hotbed for people running the 419 Scam, for example.

Let's all start sending mass amounts of e-mail to random overseas locations (stores, theatres, etc.). Then we'll keep the government all wrapped up for ages! }(

some of the DUers are on this subject. Spying on Americans and culling dissent are a time honored tradition.

Every instance of resistance to the all powerful state is recast by authority as "Rebellion" or "Riots", The Haymarket Square Riot, the Whiskey Rebellion, Dorr's Rebellion, the anarchists or socialists or communists or peaceniks or atheists or terrorists or liberals are all trying to subvert and destroy America.

For the good of the nation I, President Adams, Lincoln, McKinley, Wilson, Johnson, Nixon, Clinton, Bush must crush these dissidents who threaten our way of life. I must enact the Alien & Sedition Laws, I must suspend Habeas Corpus, I must stop dissent against the War Effort, I must jail antiwar protesters, I must keep dossiers on enemies, I must listen to phone calls...

I'm glad so many are rightly calling out the * Regime over these issues, but it's like any other administration has ever respected a citizen's rights. Because when you get down to it, government views itself as legitimate and inherently lawful and any and all disent from that view is "treasonous".

I can't remember where, but I read YEARS AGO that the NSA recorded every phone call in the country for surveillance purposes. Now, I've never been a consumer of "straight news", so this probably came from some underground rag full of conspiracy theories. But this particular idea made perfect sense, was technologically feasible AND required no vast web of deceit among disparate agencies and people.

I instantly accepted it as very possible, and probably even likely. Ever since, I've just taken it on faith that everything I say is being taped and checked, thus explaining the terseness of my phone communication methodology.

Like you, I was shocked at how, well, shocked DU was at this story, since I had taken it on faith for over a decade. I guess I thought it was common knowledge among the well-informed masses since I had so thoroughly wired it into my consciousness.

Mostly

SSNs, birth records, blood type, finger prints, National IDs, DNA on file, surveillance cameras, Toll Road passes, credit card records, credit scores, tax records, homeownership. Wiretap versus Cellular distinciton

The Government has been working for years to erode the constraints put on them in the constitution and have succeeded. * has just be taking all of the power the Government has to it's limits and expanding it via the Never Ending War, since that gives him the ability to EXERCISE his INHERENT PRESIDENTAL POWER FOREVER and EVER, unto the ending of the World...

The methods you've mentioned - SSN, credit scores, etc - are all very "soft" methods of control, where the control mechanism seems sensible and logical in relation to non-governmental action i.e. a credit score makes sense as a means to issue credit. So these are soft methods of control that are often overlooked by the populous, or accepted as "necessary". They may be egregious but they still indicate a government that has some fear of angering its people.

The NSA wiretapping moves into a whole new realm, IMO. This is a "hard" method of control: it exists for no reason other than control and suppression. Granted, not nearly as obvious as a baton to the skull, but coercive nonetheless. The fact that they're moving into hard control methods seriously concerns me because it's a sign that they're no longer concerned about how the people will react. That could mean that either they believe the people won't care enough to do much OR that they're willing to go to certain lengths in order to quash the dissent that this will lead to. Either way, those conclusions are scary.

On an unrelated note, comedian Bill Hicks thought that shows like "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted" were serious incursions into control of the people. He felt they sought to exercise control in two ways: by trying to make you afraid of the authorities, paralyzing you into inaction even when you were morally/socially/legally right AND to convert people into de facto members of a junta by encouraging people to spy on each other. He explained it better than I can. I think he was onto something.

Mostly, Proud Member Of The Tin-Foil Hat Club

Having placed a worm onto your message I will now be informing the State as to your exact whereabouts, the knock on the door shoudl be coming in 3... 2... 1...


:toast:

I have always thought the reasons for those shows were two-fold also, but a different two.

1) To keep people scared of all the criminals out there that are out to get them, justifying the ubiquitous presence of police; and
2) To get the average American used to the sight of armored, helmeted, masked men busting into homes SWAT style - even for situations that don't seen to require SWAT tactics.

These shows have been instrumental for the transformation of the police from a 'police' force into a paramilitary force. When I was a kid, a military brat, it astonished me in the 60s and 70s to go through German airports and see cops with automatic weapons everywhere. You just didn't see any such thing in the States. Now, it's not only unremarkable, but expected.

At any given time, 2% of our population is in state or federal prison, in county jail, or released with bail while cases are being settled -- on any given day, nearly 6 million involved in the 'judicial' system, NOT including the millions who have been convicted, served time and are now on probation or parole and who live under restrictions of being felons.

We are, in the most literal sense, a police state.

I have a story about something that happened to my parents. This has nothing to do with NSA, wiretapping, etc but I do think it rebuts the "Why should I care, I'm not doing anything wrong..." school of thought. However, this is a really LONG story, not nearly as succinct as your own. But it still makes me angry when I think about it.

My parents own a court reporting business. One of their reporters is married to a member of the local sheriff's deptartment in their small town (Ohio, by the way). I'll call him Jim, not knowing his real name. After local elections a while back, a new Sheriff was installed and Jim had some misgivings about the way this guy was appropriating funds, namely buying tons of automatic weapons and such for a community of a few thousand people, mostly farmers and suburbanites.

So Jim secretly begins to catlog all the questionable expenditures, etc. and takes those to the city council members anonymously. They start an investigation, etc. into what this guy is doing. Of course, this pisses off the Sheriff to no end. The council members and the Sheriff go around for a few weeks and eventually Jim has to come forward to support his data.

A bit later, a PhotoShopped, sexually-explicit picture of a female member of the Sheriff's department begins circulating through the department. The head of the Sheriff's department IMMEDIATELY accuses Jim, absent any evidence, and begin targeting him in the investigation.

They put Jim on disciplinary leave while the investigation happens. They search his house, confiscating his wife's computer, which has all of her transcribed court notes, etc. They then conficate computers at my parent's office, including all of their current court notes, etc. Essentially threatening to shut my parent's business down indefinately while their "investigation" was happening (and cousing no small amount of problems for those involved in the cases for which the notes were now confiscated). My parents were beseiged by irate lawyers who wanted their cases transcribed and delivered as promised.

Luckily, mom's made a TON of very loyal friends who also happen to be lawyers, and they put a stop to that shit right quick and got their computers back. But, unfortunately, Jim's wife's computer could not be released as it could have been the source of the picture, according to the Sheriff. So she couldn't work and her husband was on non-paid leave. They were basically headed for bankruptcy.

My parents offered to buy her a computer in the meantime so she could continue to work, but the Sheriffs said they'd conficate ANY computer equipment they found in the household. She was forced to work out of my parent's office (quite unusual for my mom's business) while the whole thing played out. Sheriffs even tried to claim she couldn't work on ANY computer, anywhere or they would conficate it (once again, lawyer friends squashed their nuts on that one).

Jim was eventually cleared of all the accusations. They never did find out who made the picture. The best suspect seems obvious, however. But it was a nine month long saga and he eventually felt compelled to transfer to another position because his boss contuinued to make his life hell.

This is a text-book example of the need for checks to power and the dangers of thinking that doing the right thing somehow makes you immune from persection.

Mostly

well, troublesome. It is a good thing that your mom knew which attorneys to get help from. What happened with all that ammunition that the new Sheriff was purchasing? Any thing become of that investigation? How interesting that this went down in Ohio? How long ago?

How long ago?
The situation with the confiscations, etc. happened about 3 years ago, if I remember correctly. I didn't hear about it until it was nearing its end and had already been going on a few months. But that's just the part that arose from the picture. "Jim's" investigation into the expenditures went back to around March of 2001. So he compiled data for a while, then released it anonymously to the city council, then they investigated, then the Sheriff was investigated, THEN the picture surfaced. So it was a pretty long and drawn out process.

What happened with all that ammunition that the new Sheriff was purchasing?
Well, this is where things are little worrisome. For one, the Sheriff is still in place and as far as I was told by my parents, the city still has all this stuff. The Sheriff claims he was trying to assemble a SWAT unit, which makes no sense at all for this community. But from what I heard, he was basically allowed to keep the stuff he had already purchased, but was told explicitly to cease purchasing for the future. From what I gathered, he had purchased full riot gear, M-16s, flash-bang grenades, there were even rumors of a grenade launcher (I tend to think this might have been a tear gas launcher, which I believe is similar to a military granade launcher, but used only for tear gas bombs).

Any thing become of that investigation?
As I said above, he got to keep everything, but couldn't purchase anymore. He's still in office. So it may be that he did absolutely nothing illegal, and was simply stupid in his allocation of resources. I know he had previously worked for a larger force, so maybe he was just in that mindset of having to deal with heavy situations and didn't realize the same simply does not apply in this new position. But Jim didn't do anything wrong either by trying to point out that some shit was up. So maybe there's no culpability at all with regard to the purchasing of the guns, but the subsequent railroading of Jim and the way it affected his wife and my parents, that's just plain damn wrong.

How interesting that this went down in Ohio?
I don't know - I think this is the sort of thing that could happen in any small town where the bureauocracy is simply smaller and the major players have much more interaction. In a big city, like Columbus, everybody stays at arm's length and people know they're in a spotlight, so they work differently, with more civility. But in a small town, the mayor and the Sheriff and the head of the city council might also be neighbors with long-standing grduges about fences and shit, so things can boil up pretty quickly. In this case, I also think it became a bit of a pissing contest between the Sheriff, who was not only newly-elected but also new to the community, and one of his deputies whom he felt had attempted to stab him in the back.

Mostly