On Wed 21 May 2008 4:18:10 pm Paul Ferguson wrote: > -- "John C. A. Bambenek,GCIH,CISSP" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >I didn't say TSA policies were efficacious to begin with. > > I think you mean "effective." :-) > > >But that's hardly a fair analogy when comparing it to say, tracking who is > >calling Al Qaeda. > > And how do you determine that? Does al Qaeda have a phone number? > > That's a strawman argument, that is in effect, ridiculous on its face. > > - ferg
That's not a strawman argument. Of course AQ operatives have phone numbers. The difficulty is in correlating the millions of phone calls every day (to speak nothing of IP traffic) to interesting operatives instead of everybody else. I think it's fairly absurd to assume that our intelligence agencies are incapable of figuring out a set of suspect phone numbers to monitor. The problem, and the entire political debacle behind "illegal wiretapping", was what happens when one, or both, of the known/suspected operatives with known phone numbers are inside the US? What if you have to get the warrent issued by a moron who watches Law & Order or Boston Legal and assumes that, like on TV, every possible use of government wiretapping is blatant racism? It makes a lot of sense, at that point, to have a way to bypass the local jurisdiction BS and politics and just do the dang wiretap. Now, do I support the program? Not necessarily. It's easy to defeat...but claiming that it's ineffective because AQ doesn't have a phone number is intellectually dishonest. Wes _______________________________________________ Fun and Misc security discussion for OT posts. https://linuxbox.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/funsec Note: funsec is a public and open mailing list.
