xtcian

That cracks me up. Well, you know, without cars, I guess people visiting other people is an achievement.

I like reading old newspapers, partially for that sort of silliness, and also because of their attention to someone's race or country of origin. It will describe a fight and say something like, "And then the Swede took another blow, proving he was stronger but not wiser than the Italian."

Sometimes when I tell people that I edit a chain of community newspapers, they think we're only writing about Grandma and Aunt Bessie. I have to convince them that we're writing real news (like Aunt Bessie's corruption trial.)

So, the reason people are upset is that spying on your own citizens is illegal, and represents yet another way that the Bush Administration distrusts and has contempt for the American People. I'm just saying.

Your point is taken. We have a huge problem in the way that 99% of the WAR ON TERROR is complete bullshit. I remember reading an article when the NSA spying stuff first came out, that said that agents in the FBI were overwhelmed by NSA tips, and that they were overwhelmingly junk.

If you are going to put a lot of stock in the polls showing Bush's popularity at 29%, then you should also put stock in all the polls showing that the majority of Americans do not have a problem with the NSA listening the all the international calls without a warrant. By the way, the practice of the NSA's phone program began in 2001? Nope, try Carter and then EVERY President since then.

Speaking of polls, polls also universally show Americans are in huge support of securing the soouthern border too.

Lastly, every poll I have ever seen shows that all citizens of the world agree that dook sucks.

Forgot -- Ian, thanks for the postcard. You are a man of your word. Dean

"you should also put stock in all the polls showing that the majority of Americans do not have a problem with the NSA listening the all the international calls without a warrant"

I believe the poll you reference here was in the Washington Post; it concerned domestic calls, not international. There was another poll (MSNBC, I believe) which ran the same day with directly contradictory results.

I won't even get into the real reasons Americans support "securing the soouthern [sic] border" - let's just say it has a lot less to do with the economy than it does to do with isolationism and xenophobia (and one more I won't even mention to avoid any more flaming than I'll already get for this).

"Speaking of polls, polls also universally show Americans are in huge support of securing the soouthern border too."

You mean at the Ohio River and the Mason-Dixon Line?

Where did you take English, piglet? dook?

When I said southern, I was referring to a direction. The only time to capitalize "South" is when referring to an area . . . The South, The North, The Wild West, etc. Points on a compass are not capitalized.

I find it difficult to believe that readers here are actually under the impression that the NSA data mining program, as told in the USA Today story, involves listening in on phone conversations. Yet another reason why you should get your laughs, not news, from comedians. The alleged NSA program collects numbers that are called, not content or personal identifiers. See Smith v. Maryland (1979), for the Supreme Court's holding that telephone users have no legitimate expectation of privacy regarding the numbers they dial. The program doesn't appear to be unconstitutional at all, on its face.

The WaPo/ABC poll found that 63% of Americans have no problem with this, meaning the program is twice as popular as the President himself, at present. I haven't seen an MSNBC poll, but the USA Today one that came out, yesterday, I believe, found slightly lower approval numbers because it obscured the details of the program, playing into the misperception that the government is listening in on kids whining about being picked up from violin lessons (they worded the question as "based upon what you've heard or read about the program..." rather than actually providing any factual information about it, like WaPo/ABC did.

Data mining is just one of many useful tools the government is employing to prevent future terrorist attacks from occuring in this country. If Ian can't see this, how it might be effective, then his imagination isn't worthy of the credit I give it. Honestly, this program doesn't bother me from a civil liberties standpoint. If the government were listening in on purely domestic conversations -- a warrantless domestic surveillance operation, for example -- that would be an entirely different story.

Dean got a postcard? I can't wait to check my mail tonight!

Uh oh, Now you've done it Matt.... you've gone and ruined a good rant with actual facts.

Wow, I knew double-chinned Ian was a left-wing stooge, but now he admits he gets his news directly from the left-wing hack Jon Stewart. Only a month ago, Ian was writing in his blog about personal and private e-mails that was sent between Duke lacrosse players and describing what was contained in those e-mails, Ian did not seem too worried about privacy then. What a hypocrite this double-chinned stooge is, no different than his constant bragging about the cross-country trips he takes and then when he reaches his destination the stooge starts complaining about peak oil and global warming.

The government would need to have over 30 million NSA employees to monitor all phone calls and listen to these conversations about violin lessons as Ian says. Don't flatter yourself Ian, the NSA is not listening to some Zoloft pill-popping lying fat pig on the phone talking about the latest episode of the West Wing.

Matt, don't try to educate Ian about the law, Ian is just a drama major that never attended law school, he doesn't know anything about the Constitution. All he knows is what Jon Stewart and NPR spoon feeds him. In the coming days I will be starting a satirical blog about Ian's life, his family, his weight issues, his pill-popping, his lies, his unsupported allegations, his endless cross-country driving, his global warming delusions scare tactics.... I'll be sure to come back here next week and give the URL to everyone.

J.Boogie?

Die. Pure and simple.

You already smell like it (yes, I can sense your tangible tang from here) and your pronouncements are almost as interesting and informed as the opinions of an actual corpse.

Oh, and - Matt?

"I find it difficult to believe that readers here are actually under the impression that the NSA data mining program, as told in the USA Today story, involves listening in on phone conversations."

I'm sure you'd have no trouble believing that we were under the impression of whatever words you want to put in our mouths, as always, Matt.

No one here said that this "involves listening in on phone conversations". I'm plenty pissed enough that they're wasting resources/tax money on this inevitably fruitless program; how's that hunt for bin Laden coming along? They have his cell number yet?

To change the subject, Ian, be sure to check out Brooklyn's newly opened Fairway Market, famous for fresh groceries, not golf gear. We've got one on this Long Island in Plainview (an apt description of the vista here).

Jump, Shout, Boogie, Woogie, Woogie, resident commenter arse-hole is starting his own blog. I'll be sure and post there often too.

Regarding invasions of personal privacy, I always thought that college campuses should list hook-ups in much the same way as that old Columbia Co. paper:
-Lily Giftgiver enjoyed a shameful pre-dawn walkback to Cobb Dorm after an assignation (sp?) with an unknown male Co-ed in Granville Towers East.
-Little John Stud shamelessly skipped across the quad at 5:20 a.m. after a midnight rendezvous with Emily Lampost in her dorm room.
-etc..

It's time for J. Booger to be picked and flicked. Permanently.

Ian, if you don't block J Boogie from ever posting here again, I will stop reading your blog. And then your little sister will never know what is going on in your life.

I'm totally serious. Him or me, big brother.

I hear you - he's gone. I'm leaving that one last post of his as a testament.

Joe, read the post again and tell me that no one here is alleging that phone calls are being listened to. And I find it highly amusing that you can be so confident that the program is useless.

Jboog, don't think you have an ally in me. Jerk.

"Joe, read the post again and tell me that no one here is alleging that phone calls are being listened to."

Sure, Matt. Actually, I'll change my position - if anyone here wants to allege that phone calls are being listened to, that's fine by me.

Six months ago if any of the Liberals here had suggested that the NSA was listening to domestic/international calls, you'd have pooh-poohed them.

Six weeks ago, if anyone had suggested the NSA domestic call database existed, you'd have pooh-poohed them.

Let's revisit this six months from now and see where we stand, shall we?

"And I find it highly amusing that you can be so confident that the program is useless."

Matt, if you're talking about it being useless as regards combating terrorism, then I'll offer there are few things I'm more confident of.

As for whatever other uses this administration has for such programs, well, I'll leave that up to you; I'm sure it is *very* useful to someone.

I'm interested in the difference between "collecting a database of all calls" and actually listening to them. I assume that certain calls are flagged and listened to, but since we have no control over that process, it's basically AS IF all calls will be monitored, since our privacy is gone regardless.

Either way, as I said, this isn't really my fight. I'm just interested in the nuts and bolts of such a huge database.

Matt, you should have had my postcard for a while, unless postcards take like 10 days (like they did in the '70s). Your address is pretty humongous, though!

"Six months ago if any of the Liberals here had suggested that the NSA was listening to domestic/international calls, you'd have pooh-poohed them."

No, I would've been surprised and upset if the NSA wasn't listening in on the international telephone calls of suspected terrorists. The Supreme Court has defined such eavesdropping as foreign counter-intelligence (in Keith, 1972), not domestic serveillance.

"Six weeks ago, if anyone had suggested the NSA domestic call database existed, you'd have pooh-poohed them."

No, this latest NSA program was written about in the NYT 6 months ago*, to say nothing of the more creepy communications databases created under Clinton and Carter. Or of the fact that this database is collected and maintained by a nongovernmental source and the government has never needed a warrant to get such basic information.

"Let's revisit this six months from now and see where we stand, shall we?"

Sure.

* http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html?ei=5090&en=016edb46b79bde83&ex=1293080400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all

Matt, that's two cites of the NYTimes today - are you sure you're not a closet liberal?

"No, I would've been surprised and upset if the NSA wasn't listening in on the international telephone calls of suspected terrorists."

I would, too; too bad they see your grandmother and bin Laden as equally suspect, isn't it? What a pathetic misallocation of resources.

Thanks, Ian. If you sent it to my work address it could take weeks to reach me, since we just moved into a new building.

As for the NSA program "flagging calls," I'm sure their application does something like that, but there are no recordings of conversations lying around waiting to be listened to. At least that's not what is being alleged. According to the story that appeared in USA Today, all personal identifiers are stripped from the logs. It's just numbers and times. If some pattern emerged from the data mining that interested the NSA, whatever else they could do with it would not include listening to a recording because it reportedly does not exist. There's a lot of obfuscation going on in the reporting of this story, conflating the terms "monitoring," "eavesdropping" and "data collection." If I have something wrong, by all means, please help me out.

Joe, I read the NYT because it's good to know what liberals are up to.

"too bad they see your grandmother and bin Laden as equally suspect, isn't it? What a pathetic misallocation of resources."

This seems exactly like what is going on in airports across America everyday, which is a great deal more wasteful than data mining, which is comparatively efficient.

"This seems exactly like what is going on in airports across America everyday, which is a great deal more wasteful than data mining, which is comparatively efficient."

Nice attempt at change of subject, Matt. "Comparatively efficient"? Whatever.

I'd wager that NSA data mining is considerably less cost-effective than even those insipid airport searches. Who do you wastes more of your tax dollars an hour (and with the same negatable results), the TSA guy or that spook looking at your phone records?

C'mon, Joe, you know human eyes aren't looking at billions of phone records. Put your thinking cap on for a second. . . Some pay phone in Pakistan calls a number in the US, or vice-versa, then that number calls other numbers, which also happen to be getting calls from a suspected al Qaeda member in Libya and from numbers in other suspected terrorist circles, and so on. Eventually a pattern may emerge. I'm not saying this is how it happens, but it's probably something along those lines. And a computer program doing this work could hardly be as much waste of time as the TSA guy confiscating nail clippers and looking at grandma's socks as she stands in an airport terminal. I haven't changed the subject. These are ways we choose to fight the war. The people who are so determined to take away these tools used to connect dots are the same ones who will be complaining that the dots weren't connected after an attack happens.

jb's eloquence and perspective and rhetorical style puts him on a level similar to that of a brandon davis. I wish him only the best, and hope that he finds a more constructive outlet for his antisocial tendencies and twisted worldview, which I maintain has absolutely nothing to do with politics, nor has it ever.

it is so easy to think this is just a teeny-weeny invasion of privacy because if all your calls to dear sweet granny in omaha are logged, what's the big deal?

and what if granny is in tehran? i guess you just *deserve* the invasion of privacy by virtue of your birthplace/ethnicity?

remember the big round-ups of young muslim men in the US not too long ago under the new special secret INS registration process? guess not...

"The program doesn't appear to be unconstitutional at all, on its face."

Yeah, and neither does the Air Force. That's because the framers never addressed such a thing.

Well, xuxE, I recall that after 9/11 hundreds of Arab foreign nationals were detained for over-staying their visas and remaining in the country illegally. Rounding up people who did nothing more than break the law. Where will it end?

Oliver, careful there, you wouldn't want to unintentionally make an argument that there is no constitutional right to privacy.