Yeah, that’s cool; thanks. Just blowing off steam….

CITI’s unauthorized use of the VLA on public TV commercials (or is it ‘cit’? — my own fact checking is not too good) really gets to me a lot more, but that’s all rather off topic…
Good article.

Needless to say, if this is true, it would trigger a constitutional crisis (how in the hell hasn’t it been triggered yet?) and the Bushies are losing their minds trying to keep things together. I’ve often wondered about the whole “secret prisons” thing, just why these guys felt they had to make a move like that…..and it could be that some of these guys they’ve kidnapped (maybe all of them?) have information, maybe gained inadvertently, accidentally, by being in the wrong place at the wrong time. I mean, if you actually take a little bit of time to look into it, the whole “official story” of 9/11 is ridiculous and it’s highly likely that there are plenty of ordinary people who know (for a fact) that some part of the story is complete bullshit, because they were there! Add to that the people who were involved, some of them following orders that made no sense at the time, watching how everything has unfolded, well, some of them might decide that being a true patriot is worth more than their life (which was likely threatened after the fact) and they want to step forward and tell what they know. The Bushies would be watching them, looking for them to contact others (safety in numbers) so that they could step in front of the cameras together.

There’s some really interesting explanation as to why these clowns are going so far off the deep end with surveillance like this. My guess is that it doesn’t have a thing to do with the “safety of the nation”, rather, the safety of people in power.

So, get a picture of NSA spy dishes, but don’t use images of radio dishes that have NOTHING to do with the spy-on-Americans program.

Sinking ships? Quadrapedal mammals with scaley tails?

FYI, received the following from my Verizon rep:

However, since your inquiry is a general one, I can provide information.

Recent stories suggest that the Federal Government has been collecting the phone records of potentially millions of Americans as part of the war on terror. The stories specifically reference customer records of landline companies, including AT&T and Verizon.

This is NOT a story that affects Verizon Wireless customers.

Verizon Wireless is not involved in this situation.

Of course what she says might be true. It’s more of an assertion than I really expected at this stage of the game. However if it proves to be false, which strikes me as easily possible, I think we may have an interesting class action here. Aspiring attorneys?

Sincerely,
(Verizon rep’s name removed to protect employee’s privacy)
Verizon Wireless
Customer Service

“We never stop working for you!”

C’mon: please don’t use our telescope (the Very Large Array) as if the neofascists use it to spy on us. It looks, it doesn’t listen. It looks at the far end of the universe, not the USA.

It’s bad enough that CITI blares commercials constantly on (supposedly) public TV, acting as if their ‘worldwide financial expertise’ made it possible. It was NSF (Natl, Sci. Foundation), not NSA funded; neither CITI nor NSA ever had/have anything to do with it…. grrr…..

A lot of hardworking astronomers made it, and still make it work; not a corporation, not a spy organization. It only uncovers secrets of the universe. Please go make your own power objects; thanks.

dk
National Radio Astronomy Observatory.

They’re claiming “Oh, don’t worry, we can’t possible go through all this data *now.* Just because we know every person you’ve communicated with doesn’t mean we care…”

Remember, your laptop would have been a supercomputer not too long ago. Even if they can’t completely search all of their database now, not too long from now they’ll be able to easily.

Anyways, secondary arguments are part of the smoke and mirrors- What’s the NSA doing with the communication-connections of the entire US population in the first place? When did we debate giving *anyone* the entire connections-records of 300 million people?

I’d also like to call attention to the EFF- the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a small non-profit that sued AT&T in January because of this NSA giveaway. The EFF lawsuit is where the first whistleblower came out to give additional support to the lawsuit, which in turn led to all this additional press attention.

Because the EFF works at the intersection of law and technology, their issues may seem obscure. What the EFF does is make sure all civil rights get upheld in cyberspace, and they’ve been doing this before most people were online.

I think this case proves exactly how important the EFF’s work over the past 16 years has been, and I encourage people to read what they do and then donate. They get an amazing amount of important work done for a small non-profit. Disclaimer: I’m a long-time supporter of the EFF and friends with people there.