So... we think it's Eschalon or a derivative that Bush is talking about

[liveoaktx]

Can someone verify, yes or no, whether Eschalon has the legal authority to collect information on US citizens without legal process?

[ananda]

1. Why do you think that?

Link?

[liveoaktx]

2. LINK

http://www.hermetic.ch/crypto/echelon/echelon.htm

"At the same time, that capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology...

"I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return."

Senator Frank Church

[electropop]

3. Echelon has no magical "super-Constitutional" technology

that would make it all OK. Breaking the law is breaking the law, no matter how many computers and satellites and optical fibers you use.

[liveoaktx]

5. What I'm getting at is this: Eschalon has been around for some years

and, while it might not be at the top of most people's radar, it doesn't appear that anything has stopped it. IF it has been, because of the very nature of indiscriminate transmission it picks up, it's been collecting information on US citizens, it can hardly have been known widely to citizens.

Assuming that's it's already been doing this TO American citizens without explicit warrants, one would assume that 1. Congress knows about it and has approved or 2. Congress doesn't understand it or 3. Congress winks about it.

It would, though, if it were Eschalon, shift the debate to aggregation of data in general, since it's much more difficult when you are doing data-mining to exclude Americans.

[liveoaktx]

4. Link to a DU post that shows that Wiretapping is not the issue, Eschalon i

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=104x5639121

[peacetalksforall]

6. They get around the laws of partner companies, supposedly, by spying

FOR EACH OTHER. Echelon belongs to the U.S., U,K., Canada, Australia, New Zealand - all white English-speaking countries except for their indigeneous people and some immilngrants. The U.S. spies on the U.K. for the U.K. The U.K. spies on Australia for the Australians.

If true, it means that they don't consider passing the data as breaking the law - since those doing the spying are not spying on their own.

Spying for each other? True or false?
Not against the law? True or false?

[Garbo 2004]

7. Boston Globe article may be of interest.

''The whole idea of the NSA is intercepting huge streams of communications, taking in 2 million pieces of communications an hour," said James Bamford, the author of two books on the NSA, who was the first to reveal the inner workings of the secret agency.

''They have a capacity to listen to every overseas phone call," said Tom Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which has obtained documents about the NSA using Freedom of Information Act requests.

The NSA's system of monitoring e-mails and phone calls to check for search terms has been used for decades overseas, where the Constitution's prohibition on unreasonable searches does not apply, declassified records have shown.

But since Bush's order in 2001, Bamford and other specialists said, the same process has probably been used to sort through international messages to and from the United States, though humans have never seen the vast majority of the data.

Full article here: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/washington/articles/2005/12/23/wiretaps_said_to_sift_all_overseas_contacts?mode=PF