Is the headline trying to mislead?
A) Phone records are not wiretaps. B) They weren't warrantless.
However, secret warrants can be misused, and gathering data on domestic calls needs further scrutiny than this collection of every call.
A) Phone records are not wiretaps. B) They weren't warrantless.
However, secret warrants can be misused, and gathering data on domestic calls needs further scrutiny than this collection of every call.
Unfortunately that is par for the course here on HN, if you pay attention to the political threads. It so often is just the same political truth-twisting, logic-bending contortions that I often saw applied by the GOP or creationists, where logic becomes subservient to the objective, instead of forming your objective based on logic.
And in this case it's completely needless! Why use propaganda techniques to mislead when the truth is persuasive on its own? I'm not even shocked about collection of metadata per se, but it should not be a secret program run by secret courts issuing secret warrants. If it's important and useful the people will allow it, if not then let us live with that choice too.
It is important to be specific and accurate with claims made so that the culprits can't just pick one inaccurate claim and deny that loudly and repeatedly while ignoring the things that they actually have done.
They don't only have access to phone records; they also have access to our communications, and they have had that access for at least the last 6 years without a warrant, not even one from a FISA court.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...
As a 'non-[US]-citizen living outside the US', I'm a bit disturbed by the implication that it's somehow less bad for the US government to demand any data they like about non-US citizens (from private companies based in the US) than data about US citizens. Non-US citizens do make up 95% of the world's population, and they use Google etc. too.
Most European governments seem to recognise that the contents of 'human rights' documents, if they're to mean anything, should apply to, well, humans, not just the citizens of those countries. (Hence e.g. the ECHR blocking the deportation of illegal immigrants if they might be tortured in their home countries). It seems to be mostly just the US that has this strange idea that, despite one of its founding documents talking about 'all men being created equal' and 'inalienable rights', those rights shouldn't apply to non-US citizens.
I'm a bit bemused at the level of cognitive dissonance required to loudly assert both that something is an 'inalienable human right' and at the same time that it doesn't apply to non-citizens. Perhaps the US government uses 'inalienable' and 'human' to mean something different to everyone else?
America should be leading by example rather than hypocritically condoning China (et al) for their spying then turning around and doing the same thing themselves. And most importantly, America (and every other country for that matter) should be comparing themselves to the best examples - constantly trying to better the nation - rather than comparing themselves to the worst and saying "we're less bad than those governments".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NSA_warrantless_surveillance_co...
This is not what you do if you're only going after call records. This is what you do if you're siphoning off communications.