Hasn't the US government (whatever party) always been spying on us?

[mwooldri]

Two things I could mention: Carnivore & Echelon.

Carnivore is the way the NSA monitors the Internet, Echelon monitors all forms of communications and is tied up with other countries (mainly of Anglo origin) - originally meant as an anti-Soviet spying system but still used.

Maybe I am just being naieve here but please help me debunk this and help me understand why this is a big matter that the President is authorizing the NSA to spy on us. Haven't they been doing it all the time anyway?

Mark

[niyad]

1. well, it's about the first time they have PROUDLY admitted it

[w13rd0]

2. Well, if we want to get technical...

...the systems you mention look for keywords, and then store "contextual" information containing those keywords. This is an automated process. The government (FBI, NSA, whatever), still has to aquire a FISA warrant to access portions of that database as its keyed to a suspect/target. They've actually used this argument in legal challenges to the technology, that it's the "machine" that does the warrantless searches (and thus acting without bias or potential corruption), but a warrant must be obtained to retrieve actionable intelligence from the collated resource, thus preserving the "constitutionality" of the methodology.

[silverweb]

4. Thank you for clarifying that.

I've been wondering how to respond to comments about Eschelon and Carnivor, and the accusation that "Clinton did it, too." Do you have any good reference links that explain this automated kind of key-word monitoring?

[acmejack]

3. As I understand it, those programs vacuum up everything

and they filter for keywords to identify potentially interesting message traffic. What they are doing with these illegal intercepts is monitor all traffic to/from the subject.

[niyad]

5. I used to love playing with them when I worked with the military--there

are about 1,000 words (if I remember correctly) that will trigger the programs, and one could always tell when they were monitoring.

[soothsayer]

6. How can you tell?