Wednesday, May 17, 2006

How To Find Terrorists

LITTLE BROTHER WILL BE WATCHING YOU - Yahoo! News: "The CIA estimates that there are between 2,000 and 10,000 al Qaeda members worldwide. Even if there are dozen or two 'sleeper cell' members in the United States, they don't use the phone unless they're complete idiots. NSA data-mining will never uncover a terrorist or terrorist plot.

Then why--why really--are government spooks sorting through our phone records? Because information is power. Calling logs, coupled with analogous databases of e-mail, wire transfer and fax transmissions, could give the
FBI the information it needs to pressure a reluctant witness to turn state's evidence in a crucial case. The SEC could scan for calling clusters between corporate officials and investors in its investigations of insider trading. Politicians could neutralize their rivals by threatening to reveal their personal indiscretions.

If the NSA were truly interested in monitoring and capturing Islamist terrorists, it wouldn't give a damn about your call ordering a large pizza, half pepperoni/half onions. It would buy records from outfits like the satellite telephone company Thuraya, the dominant telecommunications provider in the remote regions of Middle East, Central and South Asia where America's enemies live. Mullah Omar, leader of the Taliban, uses a Thuraya.

It's hard to accept but the truth is obvious: our government doesn't want to catch the 9/11 murderers. After all, Bush could simply call his friend Pervez Musharraf, the military dictator of Pakistan who seized power as a Taliban ally, and ask him to pass the phone over the dinner table to Osama so he could get a Hellfire missile lock from a nearby Predator drone plane. . ."

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