p2pnet - rss feed: Cheney, Specter, clash
p2p news / p2pnet: US co-president Dick Cheney is playing down problems he’s having with the Senate Judiciary Committee over the admninistration’s infamous surveillance programs.
Committee chairman Arlen Specter accused Cheney of, “going behind his back to forge an agreement with other Republican members of his committee to prevent testimony from the executives of three major phone companies that reportedly provided a huge cache of call records to the National Security Agency,” says The Washington Post, going on:
“Cheney defended his actions in a letter to Specter yesterday, saying his intention was to avert testimony that may involve ‘extremely sensitive classified information’.”
The row, “brought into public view the simmering tensions between the administration and Specter, who has been openly critical of the administration’s electronic eavesdropping and data-collection programs,” says the story.
“The administration has defended the programs as legal and aimed only at potential terrorists; Specter views them as constitutionally dubious.”
Another The Washington Post story says Specter has proposed legislation aimed at giving the administration, “the option of seeking a warrant from a special court for an electronic surveillance program such as the one being conducted by the National Security Agency”.
“Sen. Arlen Specter’s approach modifies his earlier position that the NSA eavesdropping program, which targets international telephone calls and e-mails in which one party is suspected of links to terrorists, must be subject to supervision by the secret court set up under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA),” says the article, adding:
“The new proposal specifies that it cannot ‘be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to gather foreign intelligence information or monitor the activities and communications of any person reasonably believed to be associated with a foreign enemy of the United States’.”
The Specter bill would also grant blanket amnesty, “to anyone who authorized warrantless surveillance under presidential authority, a provision that seems to ensure that no one would be held criminally liable if the current program is found illegal under present law,” says the story.
“A third provision would consolidate the 29 cases that have been filed in various federal district courts challenging the legality of the NSA program and give jurisdiction over them to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which was established by FISA. Any decision of that court would be subject to Supreme Court review and otherwise would be binding on all other courts.”
Also See:
The Washington Post - Cheney Plays Down Dispute With Specter, June 9, 2006
The Washington Post - Specter Offers Compromise on NSA Surveillance, June 9, 2006
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June 10th, 2006 at 5:13 pm
Let me fill in here. When the telephone company allows you to place a call you get billed for it. How does this happen? Attached to the call is a whole slew of data that is not just used to bill you. This data is only partially used by the phone companies. Collectively this data (and there is a name for it) is used to establish routing and monitoring of all the systems that make up the network. This data is what tracks the dropping of calls, quality of calls, routing, time to connect and disconnect you name it.
If you tap into this data you can on a very elemental level set up conditions that initiate a recording. But because of the amount of data associated with each call and collectively making up groups of whatever you might dream, any function can be initiated from any bit of this data. So the phone companies not only know when to move traffic onto other systems they now know what data to move to NSA.
ie. Tomorrow all calls moving out of Alabama lasting .5 seconds at 6pm can be filtered through and compared with all .5 sec calls coming in from SE Asia to Oregon and moved onto another route to determine if they were dropped or actually a hang up was made. The rest of the iceberg is left up to the readers imagination.