Uncle Sam Inside Your BlackBerry
January 29, 2008, 6:53pm
Sen. Russell Feingold has been a leading voice against the Bush administration’s surveillance tactics in the war on terrorism. In this interview with the blog Open Left, the Wisconsin Democrat said he illustrates the depth of the surveillance by telling audiences that even e-mail he reads on his BlackBerry from his daughter in England is subject to government monitoring.
“[T]he government can suck up all your e-mails and all your phone calls, whether it be to your son or daughter in Iraq or your child that’s [in her] junior year abroad … and there’s no court oversight of it at all,” Feingold said. “It’s just ‘Trust us’ by the administration.”
Categories: Wisconsin, Russell Feingold, Security, Technology, Civil Liberties, Terrorism, Communications, Intelligence
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January 30th, 2008 at 11:26 pm
Like… duh. Email travels across a public network. All email entering and exiting the United States via Network Access Points have been under surveillance by the NSA since Al Gore invented the Internet. Before that, it was telephones. Privacy has been a facade for years and given lip service only when it is politically advantageous. The sad part is that “my guess” is that credit bureaus know more about you than the government because is subject to some laws. Corporate data mining isn’t subject to any privacy laws. Everytime you swipe that credit card, the items you purchased and how much you paid is logged along with the date and time. They can cross-match that with where you live and get a good feel for how much you make in a year based on public census data and sampling pools by statistics companies. They can tell you if are living a healthy lifestyle or if you are over-extended and vulnerable to get-rich-quick schemes. they know that I reply to blogs and they can take this post, cross-match it to hurricanejobhunter.com and thus to the registration address for that domain. They can cross-match the address and all transactions for that address and pretty much track where I shop, where I hang out (Starbucks or Borders) and pretty much sell anything of this information to anyone willing act like a company and willing pay the invoice. Privacy is a facade. Get used to it.
January 30th, 2008 at 11:28 pm
wow. my grammar and spel Czech really didn’t werk.