We have a problem. The American people support the NSA’s program to track every phone call we make.
The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.
A slightly larger majority–66 percent–said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found.
What this means is that the Bush administration has succeeded in scaring the American people sufficiently that it is a difficult political position to take to stand up for our fourth amendment rights. To be clear, the program that was revealed by USA Today yesterday is not a clear-cut violation of the fourth amendment. And it is not a clear-cut violation of FISA. The problem is that there is no court or Congressional oversight, and that the information gathered under the program can be easily cross-referenced with other databases to violate our privacy and our rights.
In other words, it is not the program itself that is the problem, but the program in concert with other programs. It’s also probably true that the telecommunications companies that cooperated violated privacy agreements they made with their customers (but that is not a constitutional issue).
It’s a very disturbing reality that the American people support extreme invasiveness into their personal privacy. This allows Bush a wide berth to abuse the system and not pay a political price. It also intimidates Democrats that would otherwise raise holy hell. But, there is only way to deal with this problem, and that is to join up with libertarians and fight back with everything we’ve got.
Thanks BooMan. Jeff Huber has a diary with a good take on this poll, near the top of the recent diary list.
I wrote a letter to my local newspaper this morning. Here it my LTE. Please comment on it and I will edit it and send it out to more newspapers.
Dear Madam and/or Sir,
Regarding the newspaper article “Agency’s use of call logs chastised”, the majority of Americans are willing to give up their personal freedom for security. Like many Americans, I do not mind the government tracking my calls or listening in on them. However, there are many brave Americans that do our country a great service by contacting journalists and reporters when some wrong doing by companies or our government has occurred. When big brother has the ability to track which phone numbers have contacted a newspaper or television program, this will prevent future whistleblowers from speaking out. When the political party in charge has the power to blackmail anybody in the United States, this can affect a way a politician will vote on an issue, the way a newspaper will endorse certain candidates, the way a reporter will cover any issue, this will even prevent a prosecutor from making charges against any person in power who has committed a crime. During the KGB era in communist Russia, they would monitor everything their ordinary citizens would do or say for their own “safety”. How are we any different? We have now become our own worst enemy.
I don’t like this part, but the rest is fine.
I’d change it to;
I was wondering about that. I wanted to make the point that I could understand people’s viewpoint that their phone calls are really not worth listening too. I thought if I could hook that particular audience, they would read the rest of the editorial.
This is truly depressing.
I called Cingular this morning. Since they recently merged with AT&T, I wanted to know what their policy was. The young customer service person did not have a clue as to what I was asking about. Apparently they are not being swamped with complaints.
chroist who are these people?
Remember that how the question is asked is important.
The WP/ABC poll asks:
I would guess that the numbers might change if the question included the absence of appropriate congressional oversight, or that we simply don’t yet know the extent of this program because of lack of oversight.
that’s an important point. And it also feeds into my point that we have to hit back with the facts to counter the spin on these programs.
More and more this past year I’m reminded of what I was taught as a kid-or rather the question was asked about how could the German people let Hitler do what he did with no uprising on their part? This has a weird deja vu quality for me. We have now almost daily revelations of more and more lies and criminal acts by this administration and it’s almost as if only the real lefty blogs on the internet care what is happening.
The general public seems brainwashed by the repeated terrorist bogeyman scare-add to that a real public apathy that has been brewing for decades and we now have a not so instant dictatorship in the making in our very own front yard-maybe not in the making but definitely here.
I think the only thing that will get the public’s attention is something like 6 dollars for a gallon of gas sorry to say-all the rest of it the general public seems to be following Scarlett O’Hara’s dictum of ‘I’ll think about all this tomorrow'(or more likely not think at all)..yeah bit of paraphrasing there cause I can’t remember the exact quote.
On a less measured note-WTF are these people thinking anyway..so it A-fucken-O.K. to just spy on the whole country and it’s just peachy keene..dammit all to hell.
but did you check out the wording of the questions? It’s practically a push poll — first setting up a false dichotomy of safety vs. privacy:
44. What do you think is more important right now – (for the federal government to investigate possible terrorist threats, even if that intrudes on personal privacy); or (for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats)?
Then following that up with the specific question — which has no mention of legal issues, warrants, so forth, and is designed to make the program sound as harmless as possible.
45. It’s been reported that the National Security Agency has been collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans. It then analyzes calling patterns in an effort to identify possible terrorism suspects, without listening to or recording the conversations. Would you consider this an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism? Do you feel that way strongly or somewhat?
And that, to me, isn’t even the worst of it. A one-night poll on the night of the event on which it’s supposed to be finding opinions is always, always, always going to be bunk.
The media reporting on this poll as though it is unquestionable truth should be fucking ashamed of itself.
And while we’re at it, I’d like to call attention to the ad in the sidebar re: “Don’t Regulate The Internet” – Susie points to this post unveiling who is behind the blogads.
I am confused by the whole thing. Can someone explain this to me in clearer terms?
I’ll try. No guarantees.
The Internet was designed to handle all traffic equally. Packets containing this post get no special treatment from Comcast (my ISP). They’re treated just like any packet from USA Today’s web site, or the website of the Minutemen Militia, or from the White House, or from the radio broadcast I might be listening to from Japan.
The problem is that several of the big internet providers want to shed their de facto common carrier status. They are going to Congress to try to get a bill passed that would allow them to set different prices for different services, so that for instance you could pay them to have traffic from BT given precedence over Daily Kos.
The problem with this should be obvious. Imagine you’re a Democratic congressman. You start getting complaints from AOL that people who get their web access through AOL can’t reach your website. Your techie starts checking it out and finds that AOL doesn’t like your politics and will give you access to their faster Internet service for an exorbitant price. Otherwise you swim in the kiddie pool.
I’m not picking on AOL necessarily here, I’m just giving you an example. The fear is that this bill will divide the technological haves even further from the have-nots by giving the haves preferential treatment. This becomes even more problematic when you consider that some of these haves are major players on the internet backbone — the massive ubernetworks that tie the Internet together.
Check the EFF web page for more information. It really is a bad, bad idea.
Omir- I understand that part of it, but I don’t understand what is being alleged about the ad running on this site.
Looks like its a fifth column. I’ll be damned who’d have thought. When you go to the hands off site they are pimping a bill by Stevens of alaska as a compromise. Booman you may have been had they are saying net neutrality is too much government regulation.
Is this the same bill that Stevens is trying to sneak the broadcast flag and analog hole flag through? The two Hollywood wet dreams of content control?
Forget that. Like copyfighter Cory Doctorow says, no one ever woke up in the morning and said, “You know all that music I bought on CD? All those TV shows on my TiVO? Gee, I sure wish I had a way to do LESS with them.”
Someone needs to take a baseball bat and beat the idea of a “broadcast flag” to death. Hollywood tried this before in the Betamax case, and guess what? Not only did they not go swirling down the drain, they ended up making even more money by selling DVDs to rental stores (which could not have come into existence had the Betamax ruling never happened). Bastards. grrrr grrrr grrrr
“McCurry’s powerfully deceptive cartoon is a part of this telco scheme. It’s designed to convince bloggers and net users to support a plan that goes against their best interests.”
As I understand it Mike McCurry, the lobbyist/spokesperson for the telphone industry, is at the head of the group putting the ads out onto the blogs through a front website, dontregulate.org, and the funding for the ads are coming from PR efforts by the telecoms and their special interest partners ergo non-transparent and pushing their anti-net neutrality message. I guess it’s like Phillip Morris putting out their own ‘Don’t Smoke’ ads?
Who’s behind the ad here via their site – Alcatel, AT&T, Bell South, American Conservative Union, Cingular…
I’ll bow to albert and selunga in their analyses.
Basically, the research I’ve done on so-called net neutrality (which is not exhaustive) leads me to this conclusion: Net neutrality is just a smoke screen word for “common carrier status.” Once you explain to a congresscritter that ISPs (the companies that actually carry the bits) should be regulated as common carriers, just like the phone companies, you cut through all of the obfuscation and use terminology they are much more likely to understand. Especially if they are on any committee that deals with the FCC.
as it appears on poll.
I’d suggest taking a look at the wording of the questions and then think about how this 63% came about.
We all know the wording of poll questions can lead people in one direction or the other.
emphasis mine – NDD
However, the poll numbers do indicate a need to educate the public on this issue. We ought to give them some concrete examples of how this could eventually directly affect their lives.
I suspect wording like this would get very different results.
When it comes to polling, it’s all in the wording.
Do they, really? Who the hell knows? Glenn Greenwald does a good job of calling that into question here.
You expect me to believe they already got a full survey out to the callers and then back completed between the time the story broke and when this was published?
This is a complete fabribri-freakin-cation. There aren’t 51% of Americans that approve of the way Bush parts his hair, never mind 51% that approve of Bush’s handling of privacy.
hey you just gave me my first laugh of the day..just imagining a poll on the way bush parts his hair-Faux news viewers give his hair an unequivocal thumbs up.
There’s a sucker born every minute and now we know that 63% of America falls into this category.
we ain’t using them anyway…
Ben Franklin may not have said it, but it still applies: “Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.” And I still think the Founding Fathers would be appalled at the total disregard for the Constitution and the Rule of Law practiced by this misAdministration…
Why would anyone think a hasty poll of only 502 people done on a story that just broke in the news on that same day would have any significance at all?
Certainly it’s a tragedy that so many fellow citizens seem to accept the idea that it’s ok for our own government to violate the law, ignore the constitution they’re sworn to defend, and transgress upon our basic civilfreedoms as citizens, but I see the significance of this idiotic and disingenuously contrived poll in the fact that it indicates that the Bush regime’s new Chief of Staff Josh Bolten is very aggressive in his efforts to thwart the truth with as much propaganda as he can muster as quickly as he can get it out into the compliant media.
And there is no surprise there.
The issues has to do with oversight and warrants. Under the Fourth Amendment to the Bill of Rights, there is a standard for a warrant. There not only is no judicial oversight, according to reports from January it is NSA supervisors who are making the decisions without oversight of their management chain. Imagine being the ex of one of these folks.
And it is not tens of millions, it is all of the subscribers of Verizon, ATT, ….except Qwest.
If it’s so legitimate, why has Qwest not been compelled to comply. Simple answer: Qwest would take it to court.
As for the poll, if you look at the question it’s really a push poll.
Here’s a paragraph from the New York Times editorial today:
The effect takes some explanation. For that matter, so does the Fourth Amendment. And so far there’s nobody out there explaining. It’s all “reacting.”
Why would people answer this poll in the affirmative? First, because once you know the government is spying on people, you don’t want to attract anyone’s attention so they spy on you.
So you agree with them so they’ll let you alone.
Second, and this goes to a larger issue: People have a high opinion of their own virtue. If they aren’t making phone calls to terrorists, why would they care if the government monitors? And why should anyone care who isn’t similiarly virtuous?
It takes examples of real world consequences, usually through stories, to get people to understand what the problem is.
Finally, this poll is not consistent with other recent polls on warrantless wiretaps. They too tended to show people in favor at first, but now the numbers are reversed.
The poll was a telephone poll.
The NSA is listening. How would you answer?