Cant Keep Quiet!

The ACLU held a town hall meeting last night called Spying, Secrecy and Presidential Power. The panelist for the meeting were John W. Dean, former White House Counsel; Ann Beeson, ACLU Associate Legal Director; James Bamford, spying expert and ACLU v. NSA plaintiff; Nazih Hassan, CAIR-MI, ACLU v. NSA plaintiff. I’ve never been to an online town hall meeting before and this one seemed like it would be very interesting and informative.

That first paragraph was written before I “attended” the town hall meeting. It was very intersting and informative.

The first speaker was James Bamford. James Bamford is an investigative reporter. He’s written two books on the National Security Agency; The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets. He’s very knowledgeable about the NSA and has defended the NSA in the past against charges that it was spying on a foreign company for an American firm.

Bamford gave a brief outline of the history of the NSA. It was started in the 1920s in New York City. At that time it was called The Black Chamber. When it started it had the telegraph/telegram companies sending them all the telegraphs/telegrams sent in the United States. In the 1960s, when this information was kept on computer tapes, they would “borrow” the telegraph companies tapes every night and duplicate them. The originals were returned before the start of business the next day.

All of this was done without a warrant and without authorization.

At one point, Nixon authorized the NSA to py domestically (the Houston Plan), but J. Edgar Hoover got Nixon to revoke the authorization. The NSA, however, did not shut down their operations.
More »« Less

Go! Watch the video. There will be a test on this tomorrow.

I’ve been thinking about dropping the mulligan moniker and going with my first name, Laura. It’s not like you couldn’t find out my real first name anyway.

I started out blogging using “mulligan” instead of my real name for one reason: anonimity. I am a special education teacher and I do work in an elementary school. While I have not used a specific person (adult or child) in any of my posts (well, maybe one but principals shouldn’t count), I didn’t want anyone to be able to come back at me and say that I have violated the privacy regulations in the school district.

I happen to take privacy very seriously and I would never violate the privacy rights of students or their families. Using the pseudonym helped add a buffer just in case.

For some time now, I’ve been thinking of dropping the pseudonym and going with just my first name. It happens to be a fairly common name so it doesn’t really remove too much of the buffer afforded by the mulligan moniker. I have decided that I will do that for anything I write on Bring It On I’m still not sure, though, about this site.

What do you recommend? Should I continue using mulligan? Or should I switch to Laura?

A commenter to my last post stated that

You seem to believe that your liberties include an absolute proprietorship over all knowledge of what you’ve done. But by all logic and several precedents, the fact that a communication has occurred is a public fact. The content of the communication may be private, but the event itself is not — any more than it’s a private matter to check a book out of a PUBLIC library.

I can think of at least two laws that dispute this person’s claim.

The first is part of the Communication Act which was first passed in 1934. It’s been updated many times, btw, so please don’t say it’s out of date. Anyway, Section 222 of this act prohibits phone companies from giving out information about their customers’ calling habits.

Prohibit means you can’t do it. Calling habits include the numbers you call and when you call those numbers and for how long you speak to that number.

If a phone company gives this information out without a warrant, they have violated Section 222 of the Communications Act. AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth have violated this law by providing the information to the government without court order.

Yes, I already wrote this in my previous post, however the commenter seemed to miss this information.

More »« Less