spying

Security Authorities Mistake Geocaching for Terrorist Acts

And in future bone-head spastic terror panic of the month news, the Department of Homeland Security will be arresting your 10 year-old brother after mistaking him for Osama bin Laden. Really, people. This is pretty damned stupid.
According to CNN:

Scot Tintsman found that out when he stashed a green bucket under an Idaho highway bridge last September, intending to fill it with goodies for other players to find using Global Positioning System units. But before he could finish adding the requisite trinkets and log books and posting its GPS coordinates on the Internet, a bridge inspection crew found it.
Rounding a corner on his motorcycle to finish rigging his cache, he was greeted by a barricade of police cars and a bomb squad. He struggled to explain the misunderstanding.
“I got off my bike and three officers approached me very cautiously, hands on their holsters,” he said. “I was trying to turn off my MP3 player and I think they were worried I was going for a detonator.”
…
Tintsman, whose geocache sat high above the whitewater of Idaho’s Payette River, was charged with placing debris on public property, a misdemeanor punishable by six months in jail and a $300 fine.
County prosecutor Matthew Williams said that he is not seeking jail time but that he would like restitution for the expense of the law enforcement response.

No word on whether Tintsman will in turn seek $300 from Authorities as a fine for “Public Displays of Utter Idiocy.”

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Illegal wiretaps gained no successful information at all

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According to the New York Times, today:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 – In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.
But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.
F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans’ international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.
…
“We’d chase a number, find it’s a school teacher with no indication they’ve ever been involved in international terrorism – case closed,” said one former FBI official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. “After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration.”
…
F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor, who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs, said intelligence officials turning over the tips “would always say that we had information whose source we can’t share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Al Qaeda operative.” He said, “I would always wonder, what does ‘suspected’ mean?”

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Are we in more danger today than our founding fathers were?

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Al Gore makes a damned good point in his recent speech… our founding fathers were tough enough to fight for our country without compromising freedom, so why are we doing it now?

Fear drives out reason. Fear suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction. Justice Brandeis once wrote: “Men feared witches and burnt women.”
The founders of our country faced dire threats. If they failed in their endeavors, they would have been hung as traitors. The very existence of our country was at risk.
Yet, in the teeth of those dangers, they insisted on establishing the Bill of Rights.
Is our Congress today in more danger than were their predecessors when the British army was marching on the Capitol? Is the world more dangerous than when we faced an ideological enemy with tens of thousands of missiles poised to be launched against us and annihilate our country at a moment’s notice? Is America in more danger now than when we faced worldwide fascism on the march–when our fathers fought and won two World Wars?
It is simply an insult to those who came before us and sacrificed so much on our behalf to imply that we have more to be fearful of than they. Yet they faithfully protected our freedoms and now it is up to us to do the same.

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The Truth Comes Out: NSA spying on Christiane Amanpour

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Reporters are starting to ask the question… have they been spied in these illegal wiretaps that were done without warrants or judicial oversite. And specifically, one journalist’s name has come up as having been monitored — CNN’s Christiane Amanpour.
Americablog.com examines what the ramifications of that might be.
NBC confirms that they’re investigating whether Amanpour was being spied upon by the NSA.
And then there’s the speculation that Amanpour’s husband, James Rubin, might have been the real target of the wiretaps.

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