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Saturday, May 13, 2006
Is Big Brother Watching? The latest controversy about the NSA spying on Americans once again takes facts, twists them to the breaking point, and then panics that the sky is falling. The sole source for this program has been the USA Today article that alarmingly says the NSA is spying on Americans. The program was voluntary According to the USA Today article, giving the information to the NSA was not required. In fact, one carrier (Qwest) declined to participate. This means that the federal government did not require these companies to participate, it merely asked them. In fact, it paid the companies for the information and it was provided “under contract”.
The government is not prevented by any law from buying records that companies willingly will sell. If those companies violated their privacy policy, an entrepreneurial lawyer will have a cause of action in litigating the phone companies for their breach of privacy policy. However, the government is not “spying” when it buys records that are put out on the common market, even if there is only one buyer. Data-mining in not spying Once again, data-mining is not the same as spying. What the NSA received was a list of phone calls with call durations and source and destination phone numbers. That’s it. Spying would be listening to the call. Spying would be recording the call. This was not spying. The continuing use of the most inflammatory language possible indicates an agenda and an attempt to drum up fear that “Bush will kill us all” Don’t believe everything you read It is important to note that the first draft of these so-called scandals that get run by the MSM tend not to hold up much more than a week after being scrutinized. The press has to gain readership to raise their advertising income. They tend to do this two ways, by making their readers afraid or making their readers angry. This influences how they write their stories. In this case, the inflammatory language is misleading and the legal question rests not on whether or not warrants were needed, but whether or not the phone companies should have sold the information in the first place. Certainly in the complete absence of any coercion. Blogger News Network is advertiser-supported, and your visits to our advertisers help BNN to meet its expenses. Help keep us afloat! posted by John C. A. Bambenek at 4:16 PM |
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