As we celebrate our nation’s Independence, it is important to remember the principles on which our nation was founded.United States Nation Archives has high-resolution images of the Declaration of Independence, the United States Constitution, and the Bill of Rights.

If you have not read these documents in a while, I highly recommend giving them a look.

In a world where Bi-Partisan politics consumes our government and media, it is important to remember the goals for our founding fathers as they separated from England to form our nation.

View the charters

Yesterday, Brian Ross, of ABC News posted a startling entry to his blog.
An anonymous government source warned him that the NSA was looking at his call logs to find the source of leaks inside the CIA.

“Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters
for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post,
are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.”

Shockingly, today he reports that the FBI admits to monitoring phone records of reporters.

“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration,” said a senior federal official.

….

“Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL).

The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.”

This catches the administration in yet another lie. Time and time again, we are told that the wiretapping is solely used to catch terrorist, and is only used on foreign calls. Yet, here we see that they are indeed monitoring domestic calls, and they are using the technology for other purposes than finding terrorists, because if the CIA leaks are coming from terrorists, we have larger problems on our hands.

This undermines everything this country was founded on. Since it is apparent that the current administration apparently failed to do their homework in high school and read the Bill of Rights, I will post the relevant Amendments below:

Amendment I

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.”

Amendment IV

“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”

Now for translation:
The First Amendment is basically saying that the government may not limit free speech, and that press can not be silenced. Yet, here the government is watching the press, trying to scare informants from talking with the press, and worse, shrouding the whole thing as “Classified Information”, so that the press can be threatened with prosecution.

I am not advocating for one moment, that government officials who leak classified information that endangers American lives should not be prosecuted for treason. However, this is not the heart of the matter of this issue. For starters, no warrant was obtained. The CIA could easily file for a warrant for the reports phone records over a specified period of time. This prevents the government of have free reign and simply mining for information as is the case here. Secondly, there has to be some oversight in the government, otherwise the executive branch could just deem everything classified, even if it did not affect national security. The current administration knew that congress and the courts would not approve these actions, so it decided to simply side-step congress and the judiciary entirely. This prevents any sort of oversight which protects the rights of innocent Americans. It also shifts and unprecedented amount of power to the executive branch, as it allows the president to declare anything he doesn’t want congress or the judiciary to know as “Classified.”

The Fourth Amendment states that everyone has the right to privacy, in their homes, papers (which would include telephone calls), and other personal belongings. It specifically states that a person’s belongings (in this case telephone data and records) cannot be searched without a warrant. The administration is side-stepping the warrants using National Security Letters. This prevents judicial (or any other form) of oversight, and threatens the separation of power provided by the Constitution.

Let’s, assume for a moment that you truly believe the NSA is only collecting phone numbers, not other call information. If this is the case, why can’t they subpoena this information as it is contained in your phone bill? Instead, the major telephone companies have this Narus hardware installed. As outlined in this excellent article by Hannibal from Ars Technica on May 11, 2006, the Narus hardware has the following capabilities:

• Law enforcement has shown that they consider any
  transactional data arising from voice communications—either POTS (plain
  old telephone system), cellular, or VoIP—to be fair game and to be covered by a much lower threshold than “probable cause.”
• In
  the absence of up-to-date laws, the POTS-based definition of
  “transactional information” is being stretched to fit new forms of data
  arising from new forms of communication (e.g. location data arising
  from cell phone calls).
• The NSA, for its part, has gone
  further and demonstrated that they consider such transactional data to
  be theirs to snoop, aggregate, and mine without any kind of court order
  at all.
• This transactional data can be correlated to
  specific end users by indexing their phone number(s) into a wide array
  of commercially available databases that cover many other aspects of
  our financial and private lives.
• The NSA also has in place
  the ability to collect “transactional information” for IP-based
  communications, like Web sessions, email, FTP, VoIP, and more.

As you can see they are mining much more than simply phone records. Anyone who believes they are not really needs to review the Narus Product Page, then wake up and smell the coffee.

Americans are facing a massive erosion of rights and I am afraid many of us are asleep at the wheel.

For those of you who believe that the government should arrest the informants, because they are in someway jeopardizing national security by revealing “Classified” government programs, I will leave you with a quote spoken once again by Hannibal over at Ars Technica in a new article he wrote this morning. Please read his articles, as well as Brian Ross’, for more information about the topic of this post.

“I just want to make a quick point, in response to the inevitable objection that what Arkin and others have done is “treason” because they’re revealing secret information on tools and methods that could be used against the country: when it comes to infosec, security through obscurity is a small peg on which to hang the safety of a nation.”

The author raises the question of what we will tell our kids about the Internet, if the telephone companies are successful in creating a multiple tier internet.

Although this is humorous, it is also the very sad reality of what the major telephone companies want to achieve.

Bell South, AT&T, and Verizon have all shown interest in providing a multi-tier Internet, in order to extort money from website owners.

The telephone companies look ready to take their plan to Capital Hill.

Keep a watch out for bills regarding this and other Internet freedom issues at the Electronic Frontier Foundation website.

Dave