Newt wants to deport Americans who practice Islam

[Benton]

(07-15-2016, 03:57 PM)Millhouse Wrote: If I had to guess, I would say the NSA, FBI, and CIA already are to some extent, though they would never admit it.

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/homefront/interviews/klein.html

Quote:As it turned out, one of the key pieces of spy equipment they installed was in the Internet room, and I discovered that in the process of learning the job. When I got there in October there was still a guy there who had been there years and years and years. He was thoroughly familiar with the whole office, ... and he was showing me the ropes for the Internet room because he was, as it turned out, planning to retire, and he left a couple months later. But in those two months he was showing me the ropes, and at one point I asked him about this secret room, because the secret room is on the sixth floor; the Internet room is on the seventh floor. It didn't seem to be an obvious connection, and I had said to him, "Well, it seems to me that the secret room is right next to the phone switch room, so I assume they're listening to phone calls," and his answer was: "No. Internet." That was his instant answer. He said, "I'll show you."



...

The administration's first presentation of it is disingenuous. They present it as about phone calls. They're just watching a few bad people who make phone calls to Al Qaeda and the Middle East, and you notice they don't talk about the Internet hardly at all. That part of it hasn't been revealed, because if they did, Americans would realize it's not just a few people; it's everybody, because the data they're handing over is not selected out. When you run fiber optics through a splitter and you send all that data to a secret room, there's no selecting going on there at all. ...

There are more examples. Millions of Americans have had their rights violated for about 15 years and there's not much done. On the other hand we've had a couple dozen Benghazi hearings in the last year. Could be because we keep reelecting the same congress members who violated those rights.

That said, I do believe it's only as effective as the support given to the intelligence community. If we're sifting through tens of millions of phone calls and emails a day looking for potential threats, but then failing to spot terrorists when interviewed, I don't know how effective it is.