Patriotic Telecoms

Also posted at Planet Orange.

We’ve been hearing from Bush at least since October–Congress must listen to him to keep America safe:

Today the House Intelligence and Judiciary committees are considering a proposed bill that instead of making the Protect America Act permanent would take us backward

He goes on to make sure we know that:

Keeping this authority is critical to keeping America safe

And that those patriotic telecoms were acting in America’s best interest:

And it must grant liability protection to companies who are facing multi-billion-dollar lawsuits only because they are believed to have assisted in the efforts to defend our nation following the 9/11 attacks.

So what do we find out today?

Those patriotic telecoms were ‘patriotic’ to the extent they were getting paid.  When the bills went due, wiretaps came down:

In at least one case, a wiretap used in a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act investigation “was halted due to untimely payment,” the audit found. FISA wiretaps are used in the government’s most sensitive and secretive criminal investigations, and allow eavesdropping on suspected terrorists or spies.

“We also found that late payments have resulted in telecommunications carriers actually disconnecting phone lines established to deliver surveillance results to the FBI, resulting in lost evidence,” according to the audit by Inspector General Glenn A. Fine

Sad to see there are bounds to that Patriotism.  These corporations were so concerned with our safety that they allowed Bush to wiretap without warrants, then cut them off when the funds ran out.  Sick.

4 comments

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    • kharma on January 10, 2008 at 20:23
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    how much I’m gonna get out of it.  How about you?

  1. Trade magazines I get for the electronics industry have consistently revealed a push towards new technologies.  The majority of these are aimed at shoving as much as possible through serial protocols.  In English this means they want to deliver commercials on your cell phone.  Ya, you might get some semblance of the net.  A rather a small piece of what you might need from the net after severe dilution and censorship by your “provider”.

    The other Satanic technology is something called digital watermarking and will most definitely serve to prevent you from making copies of DVDs which don’t work even when brand new out of the box.

    Reports are already coming in about ISPs filtering service, removing those “undesireables”, content not appropriate for zombinals.

    http://www.google.com/search?h

    We call it Smurf Patrol and it does block by category most things of real political value and all of my favorite real news sites.  Yes, Faux is easily accessible!

    In short if you hate, loathe and think all US media is a social engineering project inspired by Satan for the specific purpose of bringing down America, justs wait.

    They are getting ready to deliver the same 300 channels of mind numbing one-way crap to your own personal handheld devices.

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