“We do not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval,” Bush said in a White House news conference with Australian Prime Minister John Howard.
-from Hatch: Court Briefed on Bush Surveillance, Breitbart.com, 16 May 2006.
What exactly does it mean to listen to a phone call? I get the feeling that Bush is playing with the word “listen.” I described my thoughts when commenting on a post over at TheLeftCoaster.com entitled Bush Still Insists NSA Wiretapping Legal; Specter Caves Once Again. My comment was:
“I think one of the key words to scrutinize is ‘listen.’”
“Before there were recording devices, there were only ears. If you wanted to tap a line, it was for the purposes of acquiring information crossing that line.”
“Today, we don’t have to ‘listen’ (in the sense of ears-only attention) to a call in order to get information from that call; today’s technology allows us to ‘data-mine’ the call, which includes recording every word spoken by either party and feeding those words into a database where other sophisticated software will examine those words, looking for patterns.”
“So in the human sense, they probably are not ‘listening’ in the conventional, ears-only sense but make no mistake: they ARE obtaining information electronically.”
“In today’s world, the outcome is the same: the acquisition of information from a call.”
“The fact that no ONE person is using his/her ears to LISTEN to that call is [in my opinion] irrelevant.”
I think it would be useful for the President to clarify exactly what he means when he says nobody’s listening to phone calls. Ambiguity be damned! I want to know what the hell is going on in my government, and I want truthful and specific answers NOW.
5 responses so far ↓
1 Maurice // May 17, 2006 at 9:42 am
Rich,
I think you’ve once again struck to the heart of the matter. I too do not believe that the NSA is actively listening to our phone calls so much as recording and processing the data. It’s the same as Google: they constantly analyze trends in the data that’s searched and all of the information that comes into them to make their searches more efficient. That doesn’t mean that someone’s hanging on every word I enter into their system, but they’re still tracking it.
I don’t find it as disturbing with Google because they are a private company and I have choices, I can vote with my feet and walk away from them, plus they have no direct law enforcement capabilities. But the NSA doing this, with their stated willingness to hand over whatever they find to other government agencies chills me.
2 MauriceReeves.com // May 17, 2006 at 9:45 am
Is The NSA Listening In On Domestic US Calls?…
My friend Richard Harlos has an insightful blurb on his blog regarding the NSA wiretapping and whether or not they’re listening in on domestic phone calls. He asserts that it all hangs on how you parse the word “listen”. Read……
3 Richard // May 17, 2006 at 11:02 am
Thanks, Mo.
Given that much of the public comments by government agencies and corporations are given in a legal context, I think the American people would be wise to wear their “think like a lawyer” hats when evaluating any of these public statements.
Precision in language is one of the tactics employed in law (as well as philosophy, medicine, etc.) and for those who merely take for granted that they “kinda sorta think they know what something might possibly mean,” well, they’re the audience that such ’spin’ is engineered to affect.
Ok, everyone, let’s put on our lawyer hats now and think! :)
4 RichardHarlos.com » Blog Archive » Public statements almost always legally crafted // May 17, 2006 at 1:20 pm
[...] Because my comment is so similar to my earlier blog post, What does it mean to listen to a phone call?, I thought I’d share that comment here, too, as food for thought and discussion. I wrote: [...]
5 Deb // May 18, 2006 at 1:07 pm
Bush is a huge Boob.
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