Inside Bush's Secret Spy Net
Pg 14 \ United States \ Time \ 22 May 2006====================================
-hello Washington listening in to your conversation, I can hear you-
Along with many other Americans and non-Americans, I had the assumption that when the newspapers and other news sources said that the National Security Agency (NSA) was listening in to citizens' conversations to check if they were communicating with terrorists or not. It turns out that our assumptions are all wrong.
According to President Bush, "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans" and White house official pushes forward this point by insisting that, "It's just digits. Just a bunch of data, a bunch of numbers," referring to the records of what number called what number, when and for how long. This should reassure many that the NSA is not really literally listening into people's conversations all the time.
By logical thinking, this would be impossible because if there was somebody listening in all the time, the NSA would need many people to listen in to millions of Americans, which would be a waste of resources and time. Even if the phone calls were taken down in the form of transcripts, I doubt that anyone would have the time, or even bother to look through millions of sheets of paper if a few people from the US called a few people from Pakistan or something like that.
At first, I thought that revealing that the NSA was listening in to phone calls would be a bad thing; not just because it was an invasion of privacy, but also would alert terrorists to the fact that USA is on the alert, and hence be more careful, and it would be more difficult to find these terrorists. Then I saw that if the USA had not revealed that they were taking people's phone records, then people would spread rumours and it would create trouble for the Bush administration and perhaps even the President's political standing. Also, American citizens would feel more secure upon hearing what the NSA is doing for the security of the country. And seeing that there have been no terrorist attacks recently, this phone records business may not be a bad thing after all. No news is good news. -- DE
posted by silvanix @ 3:14 AM
2 Comments:
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The debate continues to range in the United States. To Spy or not to Spy, that is the question.
Personally, I feel that a certain degree of spying is feasible and should be done if deemed to be necessary.
If infringing on a person's rights will save his or her life, I am confident that person would not mind.
Moreover, the recordings today are based on sophisticated systems that track keywords and only record those which have the keywords in them.
Hence, it does not infringe on the rights of people who do not mention any of these sensitive words and thus I still support this policy today.
Ryan
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