After hearing account after account from friends and acquaintances of rude and sometimes abusive behavior by federal officials in Immigrations, TSA, and others, I spoke by telephone to a fellow at TSA in Washington. He was agreeable and helpful, which is not a response one always gets in the capital. Anyway, I subseqquently wrote him a letter, reproduced below, which addresses matters that in the past have been of interest to readers.

http://fredoneverything.net/TSA.shtml

Thank you. Well said. I am going to send your letter to my sister who has recently admonished me for being so anti-TSA and speaking out, to the best of my ability, against the use of scanners, ID=security, and the TSA in general.

You write very well. Great stuff.

Great stuff indeed. I wish I was Fred. I'm a curmudgeon, but he is the Jedi Master of curmudgeons.

You lost a reader right here - and if I were the person reading this letter it would have gone straight to the shredder at this point:

Believe by WHO exaclty? This sane educated person and most that I know don't really believe this. I would suffice it to say that the majority of the people that believe these conspiracy theories are largely uneducated. Technically speaking this is largely an impractical task as well as it would require coordination with millions of ISPs and email providers worldwide. Now do I believe it does happen in some areas like free mail accounts? Sure. Regardless if it was widespread as to say all email is monitored we would have outrage from many different ISPs world wide.

Tinfoil hats unite!

You had sex with a Thai tranny prostitute???

Ciao,
FH

Umm ECHELON is massive government run data-mining program that can read e-mails.

Don't forget about the FBI's Carnivore.

While there is too much data out there to sift thru it all, I think enough evidence has been shown that NSA has done some "overcollection." I don't think the gov't would have been pushing so hard for telco immunity if something weren't going on. Collection is already permitted and legal if a warrant is issued. They wouldn't need immunity for that.

Emails that pass through it. Echelon is believed to largely be a satellite telecommunications listening device. They say that it also listens on telco trunks, but mainly listening to voice transmissions. Now is it possible that it monitors specific internet pipes into and out of a country - sure. However the logistics and such behind monitoring every US based ISP for example make it pretty darn impractical. There is absolutely no way in my mind that they monitor all the emails sent around the US. Too many ISPs would speak up and it's not like there is a central backbone that ALL internet traffic goes across. The only time you get that is on connections in and out of a country.

So my original point stands - educated people don't wear tinfoil hats.

Now Carnivore was truly meant to target specific users electronic communications. It was nothing more than a packet sniffer that filtered based on a target users IP address. Carnivore was never anything globally implemented, but it could be used just like a wiretap. You get a court order and the user's ISP plugged this device into their network (unless the ISP would cooperate without a court order) and off it went.

But given the FBI's abuse of things like National Security Letters and things like that to avoid getting a search warrant, are you 100% convinced that things like Carnivore are only being used benevolently?

Many "sane and educated" people in this country also believe that they will eventually become a victim of a terrorist attack; many of the same people also truly believe that any government health care plan will involve death panels. Are those two facts true? No, but many, many people believe them.

In that they are correct. The terrorist is our own government.

Hardly sane and educated on the first point, but I would argue very sane and educated on the second point. While it might not be officially called a death panel at some point someone will have to make tough decisions based on what a person's life is worth. It will be a sad day in this country if we have a government run health care system - I could provide you tons of data that shows the downfalls in other countries based on this. We even have a GREAT example right here in the good 'ole USA. It's called the VA. That's government run health care - and it's just an awesome picture of what bureaucracy does to health care. Government sponsored healthcare may be great the first year, but after that it's going to make a HMO look like a godsend.

http://zapatopi.net/afdb/