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Spying On the Home Front
By One Eyed View | May 15, 2007
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It seems that my last few posts have dealt with censorship and privacy issues and that was really never my intention with this blog. However, it also seems that no matter where I turn, these topics keep springing up in front of me and I feel compelled to comment and hopefully start some conversations with my readers.
I caught an episode of Frontline tonight on PBS entitled “SPYING ON THE HOME FRONT - In a permanent war against a hidden enemy, how far has the government gone in hunting terrorists by watching us?” While watching this program, I was immediately reminded of an interesting post I read on the Ghosts In The Machine blog recently. That being said, here’s a short description taken from Frontline’s page about this show…
“So many people in America think this does not affect them. They’ve been convinced that these programs are only targeted at suspected terrorists. … I think that’s wrong. … Our programs are not perfect, and it is inevitable that totally innocent Americans are going to be affected by these programs,” former CIA Assistant General Counsel Suzanne Spaulding tells FRONTLINE correspondent Hedrick Smith in Spying on the Home Front.
9/11 has indelibly altered America in ways that people are now starting to earnestly question: not only perpetual orange alerts, barricades and body frisks at the airport, but greater government scrutiny of people’s records and electronic surveillance of their communications. The watershed, officials tell FRONTLINE, was the government’s shift after 9/11 to a strategy of pre-emption at home — not just prosecuting terrorists for breaking the law, but trying to find and stop them before they strike.
President Bush described his anti-terrorist measures as narrow and targeted, but a FRONTLINE investigation has found that the National Security Agency (NSA) has engaged in wiretapping and sifting Internet communications of millions of Americans; the FBI conducted a data sweep on 250,000 Las Vegas vacationers, and along with more than 50 other agencies, they are mining commercial-sector data banks to an unprecedented degree.
One truly disturbing segment of this program what an AT&T technician learned by accident…
Mark Klein worked for more than 20 years as a technician at AT&T. Here he tells the story of how he inadvertently discovered that the whole flow of Internet traffic in several AT&T operations centers was being regularly diverted to the National Security Agency (NSA). Klein is a witness in a lawsuit filed against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), which alleges AT&T illegally gave the NSA access to its networks. This is the edited transcript of an interview conducted on Jan. 9, 2007.
Is it safe to assume that AT&T was not the only communications company involved? So, where does this leave us? Surely, this data mining will only increase, it’s inevitable in this digital age. On one hand, I can see the need for such broad surveillance, but on the other hand, what could this ultimately mean for the future of basic civil rights for the average citizen. If you’d like to learn more, feel free to visit any of the ablove links. Also feel free to leave comments on any thoughts you might have on this issue…but please know; Big Brother could be watching.
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Topics: Community, Conspiracy, Paranoia, Politics, Social Responsibility, Technology, You Should See This - Interesting Web Findings |
May 16th, 2007 at 12:43 am
Sure wish I’d seen this edition of Frontline. The at&t story is, sadly, probably just the tip of the iceberg. It is frightening how much of our privacy and civil liberties have been stripped away since 9/11. Thanks for posting about this. It will be interesting to see how the EFF case plays out in the courts.
May 16th, 2007 at 5:28 am
You can watch the individual segments online here… http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/view/
You also may be interested in following the conversation over at the Frontline website, it’s pretty active with people firmly on both sides of the issue. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/talk/