Hi Jethro--
Let me help you with this concept. **MSFT IS NOT monitoring your internet
activity, unless y ou mean Windows Live search. They are monitoring that,
saving it, and reporting it to the US government--i.e. DOJ among other
agencies. But your Government in the UK and our government in the US sure
as hell are. MSFT also attends frequent secret meetings in Washington DC
when summoned by US DOJ on retaining your now called Windows Live aka MSN
searches. They also lied to their employees about this for years, and this
was the subjected of a coupld heated discussions in the Remond cafeteria
with MSFT employees and Ballmer and Gates present during the last couple
years. This is well documented on Softie blogs in the past.
1) Microsoft *does not monitor *your internet activity. They do however, at
the US government's (DOJ, CIA, and several alphabets) monitor and save and
transmit your MSN search activity to the govenrment and retain it for about
two years.
The government has your ISP monitor your internet activity via Trojans that
are difficult to detect but actually easy to foil scriptwise like "Magic
Lantern" and its sequels
The US govenment also has a "no fly watch list" that has balooned to about
70,000 full of babies' and childrens' names, as well as dead people, and
thousands of innocent people on the list. They have no due process or
recourse in removing their name prior to being detained or not allowed to
fly. Days after 60 minutes made a fool of the imb ecile DOJ assinged to run
the program she cleaned out her desk when numerous flaws were pointed out
for which she had no explanation. She is typical of the level of
incompetence in combatting so-called terrorism in the U.S. and its
incompetent moron president.
2) I understand you're in the land of a million cameras--that'd be the UK
where your every move in public is video taped. No matter--the US is
monitoring you as well.
3) Your ISP is reporting your surfing activity and monitoring it for a
consortium that includes the US government.
4) The cowards in the US Congress have been cowed by the fear mongerer Bush
into passing legislation before they left for their August holiday that has
given Bush unfettered wire tapping ability. The cowards will not revise
this. The intelligence czar McConnell got it unprecedented polticking in
negotiating against the spineless US Congress to wiretap each and every
phone call whether it is domestic (they just aren't saying), mediated
through US switches, or involved anyone, ("suspected" of terrorism or not
whose calls go through US switches or who talks with anyone in the U.S.
Your government in the UK is fully on board with whatever Bush wants done.
The National Intelligence Director and the Clown with no federal litigation
experience Gonzales now have complete carte blanch to do whatever they hell
they want to wiretap you in the UK and us in the US. Welcome to 2007.
One curious note is that in the legislation passed out of fear and
intimidation last week, the phone companies were not given the blanket
immunity liability they requested.
It is quite humerous that although ATT, Comcast, Bell South, and Murdoch's
operations in the UK adamantly said they were never involved in warantless
wiretapping, they are making a big point of requesting liability immunity
for the very transgressions they swear they didn't commit. It begs the
question why they need liability for what they falsely claim they haven't
done and aren't doing.
August 11, 2007
Editorial NEW YORK TIMES
The Need to Know
Like many in this country who were angered when Congress rushed to
rubber-stamp a bill giving President Bush even more power to spy on
Americans, we took some hope from the vow by Congressional Democrats to
rewrite the new law after summer vacation. The chance of undoing the damage
is slim, unless the White House stops stonewalling and gives lawmakers and
the public the information they need to understand this vital issue.
Just before rushing off to their vacations, and campaign fund-raising, both
houses tried to fix an anachronism in the 1978 Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act, which requires the government to get a warrant to
eavesdrop on conversations and e-mail messages if one of the people
communicating is inside the United States. The court that enforces the law
concluded recently that warrants also are required to intercept messages if
the people are outside the United States, but their communications are
routed through data exchanges here.
The House and Senate had sensible bills trying to fix that Internet-age
problem, which did not exist in 1978. But that wasn't enough for Mr. Bush
and his aides, who whipped up their usual brew of fear to kill off those
bills. Then they cowed the Democrats into passing a bill giving Mr. Bush
powers that go beyond even the illegal wiretapping he has been doing since
the 9/11 attacks.
The new measure eviscerates the protections of FISA, allowing the attorney
general to decide when to eavesdrop - without a warrant - on any telephone
call or e-mail message, so long as one of the people communicating is
"reasonably believed" to be outside the country. The courts have no real
power over such operations.
The only encouraging notes were that the new law has a six-month expiration
date, and that leaders of both houses of Congress said they would start
revising it immediately. But there's a big catch: most lawmakers have no
idea what eavesdropping is already going on or what Mr. Bush's justification
was in the first place for ignoring the law and ordering warrantless spying
after 9/11.
The administration has refused to say how much warrantless spying it has
been doing. Clearly, it is more than Mr. Bush has acknowledged, but
Americans need to know exactly how far their liberties have been breached
and whether the operation included purely domestic eavesdropping. And why
did Mr. Bush feel compelled to construct an outlaw eavesdropping operation -
apart, that is, from his broader effort to expand presidential power and
evade checks and balances?
It's not that FISA makes it too hard; the court approves virtually every
warrant request. It's not an issue of speed. The law allows the government
to initiate surveillance and get a warrant later if necessary.
Instead of answering these questions, the administration has done its best
to ensure that everyone stays confused. It has refused repeated requests by
Senator Jay Rockefeller, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence
Committee, for documents relating to the president's order creating the
spying program, and the Justice Department's legal justifications for it.
When this issue resurfaces, Mr. Bush will undoubtedly claim executive
privilege, as he has done whenever he has been asked to come clean with
Americans about his decision-making. But those documents should be handed
over without delay for review by all members of Congress. We also agree with
the American Civil Liberties Union, which has petitioned the FISA court,
which normally works in secret, to make public its opinion on the scope of
the government's wiretapping powers.
If Mr. Bush wants Americans to give him and his successors the power to spy
on them at will, Americans should be allowed to know why it's supposedly so
necessary and how much their freedoms are being abridged. If Congress once
again allows itself to be cowed by Mr. Bush's fear-mongering, it must accept
responsibility for undermining the democratic values that separate this
nation from the terrorists that Mr. Bush claims to be fighting.
August 11, 2007 NEW YORK TIMES
Reported Drop in Surveillance Spurred a Law
By ERIC LICHTBLAU, JAMES RISEN and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 - At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior
intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American
eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based
communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.
Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a
dangerous situation.
Some lawmakers were alarmed. Others, jaded by past intelligence warnings,
were skeptical.
The report helped set off a furious legislative rush last week that,
improbably, broadened the administration's authority to wiretap terrorism
suspects without court oversight.
It was a surprising victory for the politically weakened White House on an
issue that had plodded along in Congress for months without a clear sign of
urgency or resolution. A flurry of talk in the last three weeks on
intelligence gaps, heightened concern over terrorist attacks, burdensome
court rulings and Congress's recess helped turn the debate from a slow boil
to a fever pitch.
For months, Democrats had refused to give the administration new wiretapping
powers until the White House agreed to turn over documents about the
National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on some Americans'
international communications without warrants.
The White House refused to back down, even after Congressional subpoenas
were issued. The administration ultimately attracted the support it needed
to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from moderate Democrats
who felt pressed to act before the recess.
For the White House and its Republican allies, the decision by the
Democratic-controlled Congress to act quickly was critical to safeguarding
the country this summer as intelligence officials spoke of increasing
"chatter" among Qaeda suspects.
To many Democrats who opposed the action, it was a reflection of fear
mongering by the White House, and political capitulation by some fellow
Democrats.
"There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation
through," said Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the
Intelligence Committee who voted against the plan.
The White House, Mr. Feingold said Friday in an interview, "has identified
the one major remaining weakness in the Democratic Party, and that's its
unwillingness to stand up to the administration when it's making a power
grab regarding terrorism and national security."
"They have figured out that all they have to do is start talking about an
imminent terrorist threat, back it up against a Congressional recess, and
they know the Democrats will cave," he added.
Representative Jane Harman, Democrat of California, said the White House
"very skillfully played the fear card."
"With the chatter up in August," Ms. Harman said, "the issue of FISA reform
got traction. Then they ran out the clock."
A White House official said the push was driven by genuine concerns by Mike
McConnell, director of national intelligence, for the government's ability
to conduct terrorist surveillance.
"There was no real argument on the need for a fix" between Democrats and
Republicans, the White House official said. "He's a straight shooter."
The prelude to approval of the plan occurred in January, when the
administration agreed to put the wiretapping program under the oversight of
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court is charged with
guarding against governmental spying abuses. Officials say one judge issued
a ruling in January that allowed the administration to continue the program
under the court's supervision.
A ruling a month or two later - the judge who made it and its exact timing
are not clear - restricted the government's ability to intercept
foreign-to-foreign communications passing through telecommunication
"switches" on American soil.
The security agency was newly required to seek warrants to monitor at least
some of those phone calls and e-mail messages. As a result, the ability to
intercept foreign-based communications "kept getting ratcheted down," said a
senior intelligence official who insisted on anonymity because the account
involved classified material. " We were to a point where we were not
effectively operating."
Mr. McConnell, lead negotiator for the administration in lobbying for the
bill, said in an interview that the court's restrictions had made his job
much more difficult.
"It was crazy, because I'm sitting here signing out warrants on known Al
Qaeda operatives that are killing Americans, doing foreign communications,"
he said. "And the only reason I'm signing that warrant is because it touches
the U.S. communications infrastructure. That's what we fixed."
In April, Mr. McConnell began talking with lawmakers in classified meetings
about that "intelligence gap" and alluded to it publicly, too. At the time,
the administration proposed sweeping measures to "modernize" the foreign
surveillance law, a much broader proposal in some respects than what
Congress approved.
The proposal was considered dead on arrival by some Democrats, who argued
that the administration was overreaching and asking Congress to legislate
blindly without access to documents on the legal history and operations of
the program.
Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales' s political problems, including
questions about truthfulness in testimony on the eavesdropping, helped stall
any action, in part because the administration wanted him to have oversight
of the broadened wiretapping authorities.
When the administration proposed its revisions in April, "everyone kind of
laughed at us," said a Justice Department official who insisted on
anonymity. "We got bludgeoned. People just said: 'Are you kidding? We're not
even going to consider it.' "
The administration's classified briefings on the "intelligence gap" grew
more urgent. In May, members of the Intelligence Committees began hearing
about specific cases in which eavesdroppers could not intercept certain
communications, said Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New
Mexico.
By June and early July, Ms. Wilson said Friday in an interview, the scope of
what intelligence officials were missing had grown "frighteningly large."
"I begged my colleagues to act," she said. "They did nothing for six weeks.
They weren't going to act unless they were forced to. So we started raising
the pressure."
Some Democrats reacted skeptically to the closed-door briefings by Mr.
McConnell and other intelligence officials. Intelligence Committee members
acknowledged that they learned in May that the secret court ruling had
caused some problems, but it was not until last month that the
administration reported the gaps.
"They changed that story," a Democratic Congressional aide said, amid talk
about a backlog in warrant applications.
By mid-July, Mr. McConnell's briefings, coupled with the release of a new
National Intelligence Estimate on terrorism, set the tone for a series of
talks between the White House and Mr. McConnell's office and Democratic
Congressional leaders.
After learning of the intelligence problems, Senator John D. Rockefeller IV,
Democrat of West Virginia and chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee,
contacted the White House to discuss repairing them. On July 12, the White
House chief of staff, Joshua B. Bolten, discussed the problem with the
Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, a senior White House official
said.
At first, some Democratic leaders favored amending the surveillance law in
September. Mr. McConnell pressed for an immediate repair.
Two weeks later, the administration lowered its sights, slimming its
original 66-page proposal to 11 pages and eliminating some of the
controversial plans like broad immunity from lawsuits for telecommunications
companies that aided eavesdropping.
Congressional Democrats effectively agreed to try to forge a narrow bill to
address the foreign problem that Mr. McConnell identified. But they were at
odds over a critical detail, the court oversight.
Democratic leaders did not demand that the security agency seek individual
court warrants for eavesdropping. But they did want the court to review and
approve the agency procedures soon after surveillance began.
The administration, however, wanted the attorney general and the director of
national intelligence to approve the surveillance, with the court weighing
in just to certify that no abuses occurred, and only long after the
surveillance had been conducted.
The talks intensified in the days before the recess last weekend,
highlighted by proposals and counterproposals in calls between Mr. McConnell
and the Democratic leadership.
By Aug. 2, the two sides seemed relatively close to a deal. Mr. McConnell
had agreed to some increased role for the secret court, a step that the
administration considered a major concession, the White House and
Congressional leaders said.
But that night, the talks broke down. With time running out, the Senate
approved a Republican bill that omitted the stronger court oversight. The
next day, the House passed the bill.
CH
