You just lost your job, you stupid, nosy son of a bitch, I thought.
"How do you know about that?" I asked. He evaded the question. I asked again. I said, "That's not an answer to my question. I haven't mentioned that fact to anyone else. Again, how do you know about that?" Again, a non-answer. Finally I said, "OK, you're just not going to answer. I understand, you can't. But you know what I'm talking about."
I figured that couldn't fail to get someone's attention. Well, whether that was the cause or not, after that, his games stopped cold.
NSA employees are supposed to only look into people when there's a legitimate reason for doing so. Sometimes employees snoop on people they know, illegally. The official position of the NSA is that it happens but it's also very rare. I doubt that, though. The agency uses various acronyms for different things. For example, "signals intelligence" is called SIGINT. Well, this misbehavior is sarcastically referred to within the NSA as LOVEINT, because it's usually people snooping on their significant others. The fact that there's a name for it implies to me that it happens more often than the NSA claims.
This guy probably was snooping on his spouse and playing games with her. She later divorced him, but I never found out if that was a cause of her disaffection. But he was doing it with others, too. I later found out from his brother -- who can't stand him -- that both he and his mother had been targets of his snooping, and they had both independently figured out what he was up to.
Yeah, the guy was going through Mom's personal records, seeing who she was talking to on the phone, et cetera. What an asshole.
That was in 1991. About fifteen years later, he told a story. At one point in the past, he had really screwed up at work. He came close to losing his job. But then this senior manager had stepped in and said, no, he's worth keeping and everyone makes mistakes. When he told this he tried to make it sound like the agency considered him to be such hot shit that he could fuck up massively, and as long as it was the rare exception to his usual level of super brilliance they'd consider his hyper-competence to be well worth that cost.
After the Snowden story broke, other journalists looked into the NSA. One looked into LOVEINT and wrote about it. It seems the NSA's standard approach is to take the miscreant aside, where two things happen. First, they show him all the paperwork he signed when he was hired, acknowledging that he was instructed on all the relevant federal laws regarding things he is and is not supposed to do. They inform him that he has committed multiple felonies. They tell him a few things about how his future life in a federal penitentiary will be.
They scare the shit out of him. They convince him his old life is over. They tell him they're off to meet and work out the precise details of his damnation, then leave him alone in a room with guards outside.
Then, after being left to stew in his own sweat for a while, he's told that some lone, upper level person went to bat for him in the meeting. Pleaded on his behalf, saying that he'd probably learned his lesson. And so, reluctantly, the upper management decided to take no action -- just this once.
Not surprisingly, that approach usually works. If that happened to me, upon arriving home I'd down a whole fifth of vodka with a few gulps. I read that story, thought of that guy, and laughed. Oh, you're so brilliant that the agency forgives you your occasional transgressions? Suuuure, dude.
Here's an interesting fact about US law. Everyone knows that law enforcement can't tap your phone and listen to your conversations without a search warrant. And most people understand that the burden of proof is upon law enforcement to show that a search warrant is necessary, and the level of proof required is moderately high -- "probable cause."
But law enforcement can also get access, in real time, to the information about what phone calls are occurring without tapping the phone. For example, without knowing who is on the phone or what is being said, knowing that yesterday at 1:36 PM my home phone received a call from (202) 456-1111 and that the call lasted 12 minutes. It's called "pen register" for outgoing calls and "trap and trace" for incoming ones, but when law enforcement gets that access it usually gets both.
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BullSchmidt (3189)
3 years ago
The burden of proof for that is so low that it's nonexistent. Someone -- a state level law enforcement officer or a federal attorney -- has to appear before a judge and say that it's relevant to a current investigation. That's all. There's no requirement that the person being targeted is the subject of the investigation, just that it's somehow relevant. There's no requirement that it's significantly relevant. There's no requirement that the person even explain to the judge why it's relevant. And unless I'm mistaken, the phone number need not even be in the LEO's jurisdiction -- a state trooper in Kentucky can ask for this information regarding a California phone number and get it.
When I found out about that, things started falling into place. Anyone who's ever played the Kevin Bacon game but with different actors wouldn't be surprised if they found out that Walter Matthau and Jack Lemmon had vacationed together, right? (I have no idea if they ever did.) So which phones call each other can tell you a lot. Naturally, the nation's intelligence community would gather this information and use it. I also knew, as a former network administrator, that there's no legal right to privacy for email -- at least that was the case when I had that job, and I doubt that's changed. So when Snowden later blew the whistle on the NSA, the things he revealed weren't much of a surprise to me.
How bad is it here? Tucker Carlson says that last week he was told by an NSA whistleblower that they had been hacking into his emails and texts, and showed him excerpts from both as proof. Some will dismiss his claims out of hand, I'm sure, because he's with Fox News and because he's not a reporter but a commentator. He's the person who took over Bill O'Reilly's time spot after his fall from grace.
But those inclined to think along such lines could not call upon those sorts of excuses to brush aside the statements of Sharyl Attkisson -- recipient of multiple Emmys for "outstanding investigative journalism," and the RTNDA Edward R. Murrow award -- who, while a reporter for mainstream media network CBS, stated that her personal and work computers had been quite illegally hacked into by the Department Of Justice and that they had forensic evidence to prove that.
I'm not doing anything illegal, and I really don't give much of a shit if the FBI or NSA prowls through my emails and phone records. They're welcome to all the spam and robocalls. But I do object generally to what's going on. So yeah, on principle I hang on to whatever privacy I can.
One final quick story about the NSA jerk I mentioned earlier, passed on to me by his brother. He's still at the agency, he made it his lifelong career. One night, a couple of years ago, he decided to save a little money. Instead of paying to see a movie he wanted to watch, he downloaded a pirated copy of it. An illegal act, and the NSA doesn't want its people to break laws other than when at work. Rightly so. That would make them vulnerable to blackmail.
Well, the very next day, when he arrived at work he was called on the carpet for it. They knew he had done it.
Now, if I worked at a place like that -- which I never would, not in a million years -- I'd accept that intensity of monitoring as necessary. But I'd also find it uncomfortable. What other ways are they using to keep an eye on me, I'd wonder. Hidden cameras and microphones in my home? Even in my bathroom, to make sure I wasn't placing documents there for foreign operatives to peruse via telescope through the window? A GPS tracker installed in my car? I'd think that anything was possible, and I'd find it pretty creepy. And I'm guessing that there are quite a few who work there for a while, don't like living like 1984's Winston Smith, whose every move was monitored by Big Brother, and leave for that reason.
He thought it was cool. He likes living his life with Uncle Sam's nose rammed four feet up his ass. I guess it makes him feel important. That's pretty warped, in my estimation. But that's the sort of person who sticks around the agency for the long term -- and I have to imagine the top bozos who run our national intelligence agencies are all like that.
Well, thanks for putting up with my rant. I still get angry when I think about that asshole snooping in my bank records and other things.
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