Big business and big government are in bed together to spy on you without your permission. There is a law that is called the Stored Communications Act.
This act states that the telecoms cannot turn your records over to the government except in about half a dozen cases, none of which appear to apply in what we hitherto know of the NSA's Catch All program. We're not legal scholars at SMC but per way of the legal opinions conveyed to us by Ivy Leagued legal eagles we have come to understanding the pending legal situation in the following, albeit simplified, manner:
If there exists a court order, a warrant, a letter of consent from yourself, an ongoing process involving the government's enforcement of telemarketing laws, or an administrative subpoena then the government can demand that the telecoms turn over your records to them.
It might be worth noting that the NSA does not have subpoena powers.
From what little is still publically known about Catch All it does certainly appear that Federal law is indeed being violated.
President Bush said just the other day that the government is only targeting Al-Qaida. We know this much and that is that the President's statement is unequivocally and categorically false.
SMC broke the Catch All story long before it hit any other media. In the next few days SMC is planning to break what lies at the heart of the Catch All program. We plan to also break some of its hitherto unreported abuses.
For a summary of our previous postings on the program we have collected a few of them below.
We were first out of the box to break the story of the NSA's Catch All program back in February with this post.
We followed it up in our irreverently lazy fashion with this post.
We spotted the first public breaking of the story with this post.
And we continued to monitor further breaking developments with posts like this.
Of course we wouldn't be SMC if we didn't we sit and gestate on the Catch All story long before we broke it a mile ahead of the regular press. We had to be sure that what we were feeding you was the God honest truth - though we couldn't help but throw out the occasional teaser such as this post from last January.
But hey, don't think that means we are going to start proofreading our posts here at SMC in an anal retentive attempt to reel in all of our syntactic abberations, typos, and just outright cretinous misspellings. That would quite simply kill all the joy of hanging around here. And a meatball just ain't a meatball anymore if it takes longer than 15 minutes to roll.
4 comments:
Meatball: That was a friendly tip. Thank you. If you'll check today's Burkean post on Bush's address you'll see that [ target=" _blank" ] worked like a charm. I guess that astounding East Coast educational pedigree of yours has come in handy. Well written and especially precise directions, to boot. You have some magician's training somewhere in that long resume of yours, eh?
Que, Senor Professore?
East coast pedigreefication be not the primary way of higher infibulation for the Meatball of One. No Senor Professore, the most chosen way was the way of Euroskanky scholarly pursuits. Twas more fun and seemed less futile.
You're funny!
At times even a Meatball of high unity must consider accepting at value facialis the words of an esteemed and esteeming Burkean of noble letters.
But grow ye not too accustomed to it, Senor Professore.
Certitudifal reckoning is the way of SMC and amicable dispositions of the bourgeoisie shall never put in check our mission of Godly commissioned uncongeniality vis-à-vis the odious opiner.
Journey well. Journey true.
M1
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