Did Bush say that al Qaeda phones Americans 650 million times a day?

[BrendaStarr]

Wait a minute and I'll explain myself.

Yesterday Lil' Churchil said that all that wire tapping was 'limited'.

And with his statement "If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why." he indicated that the only time a person gets a wiretap is when they get a call from al Qaeda.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/01/AR2006010100428.html

It's kinda like the 9/11 and Saddam connection. He didn't really say it, but he strongly implied it.

So you are probably going to get hit with the argument from the wingnuts that the NSA was only tracking al Qaeda calls.

Well, in yesterday's Post, there was another article in the Tech section reporting that NSA admits it catches 650 million intercepts a day.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/30/AR2005123001594.html

So when your wingnut friend or neighbor tells you they are only tracking terrorists you have a ready answer.

There are obviously not 650 calls from al Qaeda daily.

In fact to catch the ones from al Qaeda you would have to sniff through all of them wouldn't you?

Another fact they are hiding pretty well is that the warrantless communications spying was only started last year, not in the panic of the months after 9/11.

In fact, John Ashcroft refused to endorse it in the Spring of 2004, leading to a deal in the summer with Ashcroft's underling, Comey. His reasoning was exactly that. It was really too far away from 9/11 to be using that event as justification for such an expansion of spying powers.



I put both these interesting tidbits on Fele's Blog at: http://www.livejournal.com/users/feleg/ yesterday, but I thought I'd share them with people who might need some facts for arguing.

Unfortunately, livejournal doesn't have a way to put links to other bloggers (outside of the LJ system) on the sidebar that we can see, so Fele, and I (refugees from Eblogger) will be looking further for a good spot though LJ had some good things (though not so much the designs or colors available for free).

Okay, lets say they were able to get us where we wanted to be fast. Unfortunately, reading the details of the deal there, it looks like it's not going to be a good blog host for us even if we paid, which we were considering doing.

[MnFats]

1. great God in Heaven look at the moronic photo they run with..

...this story. that's as scary as anything. well, maybe not.

[niyad]

2. question: if they KNOW which calls are coming in from al-qaeda, then

WHY haven't they picked up all these people?

[madeline_con]

4. Who says they haven't?

Seeing how they're doing all this for our own good, there may be dozens of citizens in GITMO or some obscure Euroasian gulag as we speak. We'd never know, because of "national security". :eyes:

[madeline_con]

3. It's the volume that I can't fathom.

All these recorded conversations. Some of them, I'm sure, are in languages other than English.

So, they have to be translated and filtered for "key words".

On top of that, any terrorist worth his salt is going to use some sort of code to hide the fact that he's talking internationally on a cell about blowing something up, sending money, what have you.
How's the guy at NSA supposed to decide if the "shipment of rugs" coming into LAX might really be something else entirely?


Also (hypothetically), what if someone in the States is related to someone overseas who's in turn related to someone else the gov might have interest in. Is the someone in the States being spied on? :shrug:

[w13rd0]

5. There have been some good threads...

...on the nature and methodology of this technology. Take a look around. It's not "a hundred monkeys sitting at desks"...

[Ken Burch]

6. And the worse thing is, the Al-Quaida guys keep calling Dubya

and asking if he has Prince Bandar in a can.
650 million times a day.

[madeline_con]

7. ROFLMAO!!!

:rofl: Stop!!!

[rman]

11. much of key-word recognition is automated

Computer technology has come a long way.

15 October 2004
Want to know the hardware behind Echelon?
By Chris Mellor, Techworld
http://www.techworld.com/storage/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2430

<snip>

TMS has a TM-44 DSP chip which has 8 GFLOPS of processing power - that's eight billion floating point operations per second. The processing uses floating point arithmatic operations to supply the accuracy needed for the analysis. A DSP chip turns analogue signals from a sensor or recorder into digital information usable by a computer. Digital cameras will use a DSP to turn the light signals coming through the lens into digital picture element, or pixel, information.

A SAM-650 product is called a 192 GFLOPS DSP supercomputer by TMS. It is just 3U high and has 24 DSP chips and is positioned as a back-end number cruncher controlled by any standard server - a similar architecture to that used by Cray supercomputers. There are vast streams of information coming from recorded telephone conversations. The ability to have the DSPs work in parallel speeds up analysis enormously. Spinning hard drives can't feed the DSPs fast enough, nor are they quick enough for subsequent software analysis of the data. Consequently TMS uses its solid state technology to provide a buffer up to 32GB that keeps the DSPs operating at full speed.

<snip>

[Hello_Kitty]

8. Ya mean it started during the height of the election season? Stop!

Uh...I'm sure it was because they sensed there would be a huge upsurge in Al Qaeda calls right about then. :eyes:

[radfringe]

9. "thank-you for calling _____ customer services.....

this call may be monitored for National Security purposes...."

You have a problem with your computer, credit card, or something else - so you call the 800 number for customer services. Chances are your call is directed to an OVERSEAS location....

Is the NSA listening to it too? Makes you wonder....

[A Simple Game]

13. Calling one of those numbers is pretty scary lately.

A lot of them sound like they could be terrorists. Well they would if you could understand them.

[madeline_con]

17. If it's rerouted to India, probably....

All those darn Muslims and whatnot.

[rman]

10. How do they know you get a call from al Qaeda?

There's only one way to know whether or not you get a call from al Qaeda:
the wiretap is already there - so that they can "detect" it when you get a call from al Qaeda.

[mark11727]

12. I'm sure I'm getting calls from al Qaeda ...

...it's always during dinner, and as soon as I answer, they hang up.

Bastards.

[spooky3]

14. "Mr. Lamar" keeps ignoring my being on the DoNotCall.gov list.

Just the kind of thing those terrorists do to harm Murkins.

[instantkarma]

15. How many days are in a year?

Bush said the program that allows warrantless (international) wiretapping comes up for review every 45 days. He also said he has reauthorized the program "over thirty times." 30 times 45 equals 1350 days. If you multiply 45 times 33-34, you get a number that falls sometime within the period of Sept. 11, 2001/ passage of the PATRIOT Act. My interpretation is they've been doing comprehensive wiretapping (of every communication, not just selected ones) every single day since then and Ashcroft's revelation means they were also doing it in the absence of DOJ approval. Perhaps what Ashcroft is really talking about is an expansion of the program to include domestic spying (especially upon political enemies)? As one poster put it, "just in time for the elections."

[izzie]

16. Some one needs to put the buzz words out so we can all do this

Every one call over seas in one day and uses the buzz words. We could drive the spooks nuts trying to find us all. I do not trust Bush and these spooks at all. Dem. are top on their list or I will eat my hat. And you can put in Rep. that do not do the party line I am sure. Heck they hate them more than they hate us.

[madeline_con]

18. It shouldn't be too difficult...

Call me
I'll call you
cell
send money
lap dances aren't cheap
use my other email address
that idiot in the WH
that other idiot running the country
no exit strategy
humvee
kalishnikov
shipment
boom
bomb
blow up
blasted
we got blasted
he was so blasted
this shit wil get you blasted...

[BillE]

19. Madeline

They are probably monitoring this forum too.

[madeline_con]

20. Scared? n/t

[ddeclue]

21. NSA Wireless - Can they hear you now? How about now? (An ad parody)

Here's the full size version suitable for wallpaper..


http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x2346815

Doug De Clue
Orlando, FL