If you hear heavy breathing on the other end of your phone line, it just might be your government "protecting your interests." The Reuters news service reported today that the NSA is collecting phone records of domestic telephone calls from the big three telephone companies, AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc., and BellSouth Corp., in an effort to build a database of calls to track and locate terrorists. The NSA insists that the program does not include listening to or recording conversations.
President Bush and his officials have defended the actions of the NSA, saying that it "aims to uncover links between international terrorists and their domestic collaborators and only targets communications between a person inside the United States and a person overseas." This is a patently false statement, since phone records from any of those three companies will obviously include billions of domestic calls that terminate domestically as well. This is the largest database in the world, with a goal of collecting all the phone calls made in the United States. The records don't necessarily contain name and address information, but come on, it's the NSA. They can get that information easily any time they want it by checking other databases.
Only Qwest Communications International has refused to help the NSA with its program. According to USA Today, Qwest, with 14 million customers in the Western United States, was "uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants."
Now I'm all for catching terrorists. But at what point does the "War on Terror" become an exercise in stealing our civil rights from us?
1 comment:
The War on Terr has less to do with catching bad guys than the state accumulating power.
So what can you do about this particular incident? Well, here's what I am doing. I'm sending a letter to my phone company. I am strongly suggesting that they cashier whoever made this idiotic decision and his bosses; refund they money earned in the sale to their customers; and ask that they pledge never to do this sort of thing again.
If they fail to do those things (especially 1 and 3, 2 probably didn't net that much cash), I will remind the phone company, that, unlike the government, if I think they suck, I've got options called Nextel and Vonage. If enough people do this, trust me, the phone companies *will* fall in line. No customers = ugly bottom line and upset shareholders.
Second, I'm going to call my 401(k) company and tell them that I don't want them holding stocks of those companies.
Point is, when a company does bad stuff, we've gotta hit them where it hurts--at the bottom line. With government, we've got no such option.
Yeah, I'm pretty upset about this.
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