Hemisphere Project Summary: Office of National Drug Control Policy [pdf]
eff.org
eff.org
When a complete set of CDRs are subpoenaed from the carrier, then all memorialized references to relevant and pertinent calls can be attributed to the carrier's records, thus "walling off" the information obtained from Hemisphere. In other words, Hemisphere can easily be protected if it is used as a pointer system to uncover relevant numbers.
"However, when the mention of Hemisphere data in official documentation or court testimony is unavoidable ... Hemisphere analysts might advise the investigator on issues such as report writing, presentation to the prosecutor, and the trial phase." (p14)
Just extraordinary.
If you work for an agency like the NSA or ONDCP as either a contractor or a full-time employee, and you're aware of a program like this, and you do not act to disclose it to the press and/or subvert it, then...
Hell, I'm not even going to finish that thought. If I do, it will seem redundant to someone with a conscience, and legally actionable otherwise.
The oath to protect the constitution against all enemies, both foreign and domestic should take precedence over any oaths to individual institutions that derive their raison d'etre from the Constitution itself. Without the Constitution, there is no United States of America. Without the United States of America, there is no Department of Defense. Without the DoD, there is no NSA or ONDCP.
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/02/us/drug-agents-use-vast-ph...
Obviously, this is deeply fucked up.
Even while framing the constitution the controlling landowners of the US, i.e. the "US", were aware of the internal enemy that needed to be controlled.
"The framers of the constitution made the determination that America could not allow functioning democracy, since people would use their political power to attack the wealth of the minority of the opulent"
http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19970303.htm
Where the "opulent" are the class from which the framers originated.
This is not a new development.
My point wasn't that this didn't happen or the US was some magical egalitarian wonderland (though the foundational period of the US had a surprisingly level of wealth equality compared to some other periods).
Rather, my point was the manner in which they did this was to construct a system of law that protected the private individual from the instruments of government, and that we're slowly undoing that precise social contract - not stealing their wealth in exchange for restraint on government powers.
It's hard to argue even though the founding of the US wasn't perfect, and that these instruments largely came about as a protection for the wealthy, that it didn't significantly raise the profile of the citizen-as-having-rights-to-be-protected form of government or that the US doesn't have a long history of viewing such policies as important, even if there have been historic violations.
I think you'd even have trouble finding periods similar to the 50-70 year long ratcheting we've seen meant to undermine those exact same rights, or that their infringement has crept so far up the social ladder.
At the same time they purposefully sought to disenfranchise the majority so that they might change the rules at any time.
So the constitution within the constitution is that the government will protect the wealthy, and that makes sense given who was writing it.
It appears that the ruling elites now value control of the population over privacy. I see two possible explanations but perhaps there are others.
* They see the incredible growth of poverty in the US and there is no vast neighboring region in which to exterminate existing inhabitants and settle. Hence wealth protection from the masses is a higher priority than the privacy protections.
* Mass media has distorted the scale of the disenfranchising effects of our system (rich have more control and poor even less) and the wealthy realise they can use their control of the government to make huge fortunes. For example the profits of the banks are derived by transfer of wealth from taxpayers through implicit insurance since insurance allows highly profitable high risk strategies. They then choose short term profits over privacy / human rights.
In any case they choose to exercise their rights under the constitution within the constitution to change the laws to bring about repression and control.
I'm not really rebutting your point here. Instead I want to highlight that what is happening now IS consistent with the ideals of governance around during the formation of the US and what has changed is likely a lower level 'priority'
You must be excluding both the African slaves and indigenous American population from your analysis.
'Anyone who supports the war on drugs has abandoned liberty and freedom.'
Terms like "the rule of law" encourage a mentality that's unempathetic and unconcerned with many forms of tyranny and suffering. It encourages complicit behavior through blind allegiance and rhetoric. That allegiance will probably remain until the faithful are personally affected and destroyed by the rule of law they so thought they knew.
The rule of law is a process that should be (and usually isn't) viewed as deserving of great distrust, fear, and delicacy rather than of great admiration and worship. The largest atrocities and cruelest of societies may happen due to the rule of law. The United States' Bill of Rights is not enough. Legitimacy doesn't fear it. Meaning is created. Meaning overrides meaning. Freedom and free speech may be eternal flames in the hearts of free minds. I hope that will always be so. Legitimacy, meanwhile, paves a path with new terms while nationalists are left clinging to the rule of law.
I seem to recall these sorts of things being strongly correlated with secret police, etc, and not being in a society with stable laws that it adheres to.
Conflating secret law with law being the basis of our large scale interactions doesn't make for a strong argument, unless you can show that one necessitates the other.
Similarly, rule of law has nothing inherently nationalistic about it.
I'm curious what you'd propose as a stable large scale social structure that doesn't fundamentally depend on us establishing a mutual rulebook that we all agree to play by. I don't mean that sarcastically, I honestly want you to suggest one.
> "I seem to recall these sorts of things being strongly correlated with secret police, etc, and not being in a society with stable laws that it adheres to."
Those societies didn't have "secret" police. They had police who operated (sometimes in secret) legally. Every nation is as fueled by law as the next group seeking legitimacy. This shouldn't be a point of contention. No one's conflating "secret law" with "law." In a land where "secret law" becomes increasingly legitimate, it becomes a fool's errand to stress over shallow semantics, as dire reality takes shape (e.g. a prison, surveillance, military economy legitimately escalating).
> "Similarly, rule of law has nothing inherently nationalistic about it."
Allegiance to "rule of law" is entirely nationalistic in this context of nations. I'm not talking about the 'laws' of physics. The violence that inherently serves as the foundation of all national laws isn't magic. Zeus and his jack-booted thugs aren't appearing out of the sky to magically enforce words written on paper. Maybe you're trying to say that one person's interpretation of a nation will vary from another person's interpretation and, therefore, this means that one particular nationalist is not the same as another particular nationalist in the same nation. That's true. Yet, it doesn't mean much. It's usually a source of delusion ultimately.
There are 'law enforcement' agencies that operate outside the law, and they fight to keep their very existence from being exposed in court. Thats crazy.
I wonder who's using the phone data to buy and sell stocks? Maybe that's what they'll get into once we legalize marijuana.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_traffic...
The CIA is very different from local law enforcement agencies, and they don't just rely on the material support of siezures of cash and other things which go to auction, but a substantial portion of all of their staffing budgets come from federal drug grants, which means that there are individuals who need to protect the drug war in order to protect their jobs.
There are scarcely easier ways for law enforcement to fund itself than to sieze cash from marijuana farmers and distributors. Even legalization campaigns to tax and regulate come across as shockingly close to protection schemes, since not supporting them is effectively supporting the continued risk of militarized police encounters.
In his affidavit to the World Court, former contra Edgar Chamorro testified
that "The CIA did not discourage such tactics. To the contrary, the Agency
severely criticized me when I admitted to the press that the FDN had
regularly kidnapped and executed agrarian reform workers and civilians. We
were told that the only way to defeat the Sandinistas was to...kill, kidnap,
rob and torture..." [4]
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%22Freeway%22_Rick_Ross
[3] http://www.narconews.com/darkalliance/drugs/start.htm
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contras#Human_rights_violations
They didn't want the average Law Enforcement schmuck calling operations! Instead you had to contact your POC. They were probably afraid of being overwhelemed by call volume. Turnaround looks like a couple of hours on a good day. In addition, they were doing one of those "train the trainer" things where they were looking at using the POCS to create "super users" to work the system and work with the local folks. Must have been a real concern about volume and support. Gad, how many people were (are) using this thing, anyway?
Email was the preferred medium of response, so no online app, at least as far as end-users go. In addition, there was a section about "deconfliction" which was a bit confusing to me, but I never took the training. Was there training? I wonder if, along with this deck, there wasn't a 1-day or 2-day class? If so, who was sent to take it?
It always surprises me that when you see something really bad, how normal it all looks and acts. I can just see a conference room at some Holiday Inn full of regular-looking middle-aged folks, slurping up bad coffee and stale donuts, wondering if they were going to be let out early while some other guy putzes around with a MacBook and a projector and an assistant hands out TS/SCI forms.
Now contrast that with monstrosities like the Affordable Health Care Act, thousands of pages long, nearly impenetrable, and executed without any of the legislators involved actually reading or understanding it.
Or the tax code, which is incapable of returning idempotent values when the same functions are applied to identical inputs.
To hell with these people.
That will accomplish absolutely nothing, except to legitimize those who have overseen this reprehensible development, and all the other political and social catastrophes of the past 30-40 years.
Our...political...system...is...fundamentally...broken.
Voting, writing your congressman, and helping elect another corrupt politician are all activities that do nothing to improve the status quo. Voting in particular helps maintain the facade that America is a functioning democracy, when in fact our only choices are two sides of the same coin.
The sooner the citizenry understand that, the better we'll all be.
Instead, work toward educating your fellow citizens about these problems, and why they're happening.
Refrain from spending your money on companies that back up the status quo. It's a hard task, but there are some major offenders (defense industry and banking industry are two big ones).
If you're entrepreneurial or technical, consider developing technical solutions to these political problems, that work around the problems or help solve them. This recent ycombinator company offering "justice-as-a-service" is a good example of this approach:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/20/tech/mobile/fixed-app-parking-...
They're starting small (parking tickets), but you have to start somewhere.
And there's lots of room for growth in the injustice sector.
For the majority of American history, the system was fundamentally broken for women. That wasn't fixed by women sitting out and saying boohoo.
I say get more engaged, but be pragmatic and protect yourself emotionally. I do believe that many, but not all, representatives would respond to increased personal communication. All of my conversation with former DC staffers has done nothing by reinforce this view for me.
But don't leave it there. Support causes you believe in, and if you can use technology or commerce to enact change positive change then that's even better.
Further, it's not the case that actions like those done by the NSA happened in a vacuum. The reality is that most of the country demanded, following one stinging terrorist attack that this must never happened again. The men and women of our military fulfilled that wish: at the cost of $20 billion a year, they delivered to us most of the globe on a silver platter, completely electronically dominated and ready to be watched to stop even a whiff of such a threat.
That our social demands (in aggregate) are childish, insane, bipolar, etc isn't their fault. They simply did what society demanded it needed to feel safe, what they saw as their duty.
The simple truth is that the current state of affairs is exactly what we've asked for, in large part, and that the most realistic way to reform it is to engage with other citizens and help them understand why their contrary and silly demands are contrary and silly.
All that pulling away from the political exchange will do is lead us down the path of a civil war (or other turmoil) as people who refuse to be part of the rule making also refuse to follow the rules.
I think this is untrue, or at least not the major factor. First-past-the-post voting seems to result inevitably in the situation the US finds itself in, with two main parties with no significant differences on most major issues, where voting for a third party candidate causes a spoiler effect.
http://truth-out.org/news/item/26159-local-and-state-police-...
In the mainstream media, no less.
Here is the 'powerpoint':
http://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/782287/database.pdf
You have nothing to hide...
They use this database to find cycled phone numbers that have similar calling patterns. (Phone number 1 tends to make and receive calls from number 2, 4, 9 and 13. in geographic area X) Phone number 1 stops making calls, and phone number 50 starts making/receiving calls to 2, 4, 9, and 13 in area Y. So they can assume that whomever owns 50 is the same person that used to own 1 and now they're in area Y.
Maybe Im just being clueless today, but can anybody explain to me what is so chilling about this system? I don't see where it can really be abused unless you've got some stalker that works for LA's DEA and they're trying to find out their estranged ex-wife's new phone number?
I suppose the folks at the "Hemisphere Regional Data Center" could theoretically match up the names to the phone numbers (not AT ALL trivial - I used to work with credit header data and telco record data - the data quality is an absolute shitshow), but that power certainly is not in the hands of any local law enforcement.
It perverts the justice system when the police and prosecutors hide their investigation methods.
Executive Order 13556 "Controlled Unclassified Information" required a public registry of such information and that the registry and implementing directives would be available to the public.
The submitted title was "DO Not mention Hemisphere in any official reports or court documents". That broke the guidelines, certainly by being baity and arguably by editorializing as well.
In the absence of any good title, subtitle, or caption, it's ok to pick the sentence from the article that best and most neutrally represents it as a whole. But that is not the same thing.