FBI Illegally Tapped Phone Phreaks In 1969 296
xmedar writes "In his talks about the history of Apple, Woz has often recounted how the 1971 Esquire article 'Secrets of the Little Blue Box' set him on the road to phone phreaking. Now someone has obtained the FBI file of one of the phreaks, Joe Engressia (who later changed his name to Joybubbles), via Freedom of Information requests. The file reveals that Engressia was illegally wiretapped by the FBI and the phone company back in 1969. J. Edgar Hoover considered the blind college student a national security risk and wrote a memo about him to John Ehrlichman."
Incoming republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Claiming that illegal wiretapping must not be that bad if we've had it for 40 years without knowing.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The law works like this: If YOU break it, you BROKE it. If EVERYONE breaks it, it is BROKEN. If the GOVERNMENT breaks it, the government is BROKEN.
Just because the law has been broken for a long time does not mean it should be ignored now. Fix the government..
Start with voting against every single incumbent - except for the libertarian-leaning and third-party outsiders..
Re:Incoming republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:3, Insightful)
In other words, except for YOUR guys eh? Sure, completely benevolent and not self serving advice there...
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Actually, you are right. Only those that want to shrink government give a damn about the constitution. The rest want to use things as they are. Both main parties have seen it as ok to break the law as long as they win. It IS time to stop this. Unfortunately, the populace is not informed enough to change things this election. God himself only knows what evil will seep out of the whitehouse in the next four years. "It's evil, don't touch it" as was once said. There are days when I think an unexpected Nuke in D.C. would not really be a bad thing. Of course I don't mean that, but you get the gist. sigh
Re:If you are illegally hacking phone systems (Score:5, Insightful)
You don't really have much of a leg to stand on.
That level of ignorance is dangerous. In short, two wrongs don't make a right. If he was breaking the law, there is a procedure in place to deal with it. Investigate, go to a judge and get a warrant, go to a grand jury and indict. It was wrong then, and it's wrong now.
As soon as they make "dangerous thoughts" illegal, some asshole will be saying the same thing about you when they are violating your rights.
LK
Well, the telcos were phreaking out (Score:3, Insightful)
Security by obscurity, it does not work.
The FBI has got to be one of the most disliked (Score:3, Insightful)
But at least they have been consistent in violating American's privacy for the past half century.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
The problem with government and large government is that it tends to feed itself upon the hard work of the populace, while not actually doing anything, claiming all the "good stuff" (we created 100k jobs last year ....) while denying any of the bad stuff.
Hence the "Crisis" crisis (tm). Everything is a "crisis".
Health Care ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS! ... CRISIS!
Environment
Energy/Oil
Republicans
Democrats
Terroism
Drugs
Immigration
Do I need to go on??? Every Crisis listed above (and all the others) somehow cry for government involvement as if government has solved any crisis.
And all the reasonable solutions tend to be dismissed by those who are crying CRISIS!!!!! at every turn.
The problem is, they don't have any good solutions besides "more government". More rules, More laws, more policy!
NO MORE! All the rules and laws haven't solved a single problem, and many have caused more problems than they solved.
Government is not the solution, it is the problem. Man barely (if at all) is able to rule himself, what make you think that some other man can rule you better than yourself????
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
Screw that, voting probably won't help.* Do what I'm doing:
I never got around to finishing my bachelor's because, frankly, I was too busy working. Now I'm doing it. And once that's done, I'm going to law school. Once I have a few years of experience with the law, I'm running for office, and I'm going to do everything I can to fix what's wrong with our government.
If every decent, respectable, person on Slashdot did the same thing, we could make some real changes in this country.
*I say this because we're not guaranteed of getting the right kind of people in office, unless we are those people. Don't wait for someone to fix all the problems we have, start being a part of the solution.
If it CAN be done, it WILL be done (Score:5, Insightful)
No suprises there (Score:4, Insightful)
Illegally taped phones are pretty minor compared to some of the other things they did back then. Google cointelpro, mk-ultra.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
This just in, governments afraid of people thinking outside of the box and applying this to means the government does not approve. Film at 11.
It's hardly news that governments, no matter of what time and day, are mostly absorbed with the will to retain power and don't really enjoy giving away any to its subjects. That's why most governments are actually so keen on retaining the "power monopoly", i.e. being the only ones able to tell what's "right" or "wrong". That's the business they're in.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
You're absolutely right, every solution that our politicians are offering is just "more government", even though it's never been shown to solve anything.
I was listening to some idiot on talk radio tonight, talking about how passing more laws would stop illegal aliens from coming into the country (never mind that they're already breaking one immigration law, why not two?) He seemed to think that requiring even more paperwork and proof of citizenship from new employees would accomplish something. I was struck by how far this country has come, when the concept of requiring huge amounts of papers to prove you have the right to a job is now a respectable enough position for people not to be shouted down over it instantly. Who in their right minds thinks that requiring (people claiming to be) citizens to produce evidence of their citizenship just to earn a living is a good thing?
People need to stop thinking government has the answers. It barely even understands what the questions are.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:4, Insightful)
For a long time, our laws were very ... "flexible". They were more like guidelines rather than exact definitions. Sure, there were things like "kill someone, go to jail 'til you die", but usually, laws required a judge to interpret them.
The good thing about this was that people didn't look for loopholes. Flexible laws have none. When you're tried, you end up in front of a judge and those people COULD definitly see through your plot. When they smelled you trying to tiptoe around some legal definition, they'd whip out some obscure legal detour to jail you. At the same time, they let you off the hook when they noticed that, yes, you broke the law, but it was accidental.
Our judges were actually quite good at sorting these things out. And behold, the jails were filled with crooks.
This changed somewhere in the last 20 years. Now our laws are written down without much leeway to a judge. So now we have a lot of people in jail that didn't really do anything wrong but literally being in the wrong spot at the wrong time, while at the same time we have crooks ripping you off while dancing around the loopholes those rigid laws created, without a judge being able to do anything against it.
Personally, I prefered the old version.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
An election is a job interview. When you elect a lawmaker, you are picking somebody for the profession of making laws. Naturally, if a person is good at that profession, he will make as many laws as possible. Every two, four, or six years, he has to re-interview for his job, so he wants to be able to get in front of people and explain what a good job he did making laws.
Lawmakers offer "more government" because a careful (s)election process proved that the majority of people thought that person actually would be good at making more government. It's the whole point.
Of course, if I ever run for office, I'll pledge to be incompetant at the job.
Re:Incoming republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
Just because Bush is worse than Nixon doesn't mean Nixon wasn't really bad. He was.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah but unfortunately the percentage of people who understand this is in the single digits at the most and this is why democracy sucks.
Anyone who has studied history knows that the masses can be easily swayed and what that means for the rest of us...
illegal acts to find illegal acts? (Score:5, Insightful)
Did anyone expect otherwise from the Nixon Administration? :)
Funny... "illegal wiretapping" of an illegal activity on the phone wires. There's an irony in here somewhere.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Riiiiight.
Fact of the matter is, every other politician started out with the same goals as you. But once you actually get into office, corruption will set in. You will find that lobbyists and special interest groups will be more influential than the voters, because they are both much easier to satisfy and you stand to receive much higher rewards as a result of choosing to cooperate. You will want to either continue the government's current state of affairs or expand upon it; to do otherwise would be a conflict of interest. To think that you are somehow immune from this when every other politician is not is just ridiculous. You are just as human and faulty as everyone else. The only question is how long it will take you to fall from your ideals and inevitably become what you were trying to fix and/or prevent in the first place.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Ok, then how's about people start voting for leaders who will _lead_ rather than the guy they'd most like to have a beer with. I really don't want to hang out with the chief executive of my country, I'd rather he was busy doing his DAMN JOB!
--The FNP
The Middle Way (Score:2, Insightful)
It is a bad idea that government should be whittled down to almost nothing, so much so that it would cease to function. The idea that the democrat wants to turn the USA into a communist country is just plain propaganda. It is fear mongering.
The republican is just afraid that what they have might be taken away from them or be expected to play fair. And whatever tools are available are used to keep you in check. The republican is guilty of using the fear of socialism all the way to claiming it is a gods plan to push their agenda. It is ironic that many of the ideas that are spewed from these people end up being more socialist than what they accuse the other side of doing.
I agree the state should not be responsible for everyone's does and don'ts, but a measure of reason is in order. The state should be "not too much government and not too little either". The middle way.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:illegal acts to find illegal acts? (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah its sorta like how if the police break into your home and find drugs but forget the warrant... Its illegal and because they used illegal methods to get the evidence they cant throw you in jail forever even if you have a monsterous drug lab supplying the entire country with .
Same goes for wiretapping, if they dont get a warrant they cant use the evidence they obtain through that wiretap in a court of law which includes getting other warrants theoretically and even if they did once a lawyer dug up this they'd throw the case out.
Re:If you are illegally hacking phone systems (Score:3, Insightful)
Thats ok, in the post 9/11 world you just declare them enemy combatants and send them off to the Gitmo.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I think you'll find that, in your melancholy world of long ago, when men were men and real judges put real crooks behind bars, that blacks were arbitrarily lynched for perhaps looking at a white woman, and that people went to jail for ten years for stealing an apple. Legal trends come and go, and good judges live among the bad during all those times. What changes is the way the rest of society is perhaps better able to understand the process, and that other people make statistics around verdicts to see how we stack up. We aim to get better, that's the whole idea.
Re:8038's? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
The reasons for the fall of the GDR (and the east bloc in general) are many. Most of them having to do with the "west" being there. First of all, they couldn't keep up with the arms race. Basically, the arms race between east and west was an economy war. Who could waste more resources on weapons that weren't meant to be used?
And second, the people in the GDR had a prime example of a better world. They could see that their peers in the west were better off, driving better cars, living better lives and generally have it better than they do. Such a display of a preferable way of living does make people unhappy.
We lack such a "better" country today. We don't have a Federal Republic of Germany to compare ourselves too and see first of all how inapt our governments are and second, that there is a better way to live.
That's sorely lacking.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:5, Insightful)
I never got around to finishing my bachelor's because, frankly, I was too busy working. Now I'm doing it. And once that's done, I'm going to law school. Once I have a few years of experience with the law, I'm running for office, and I'm going to do everything I can to fix what's wrong with our government.
Many politicians start off with the same idealism like you are describing. Chances are that when you reach your goal, you will have been robbed of it. It's naive to think that you can stay true to your ideas and still become successful (i.e. appear appealing to as many voters as possible).
Re:How about nudging a likely future leader on FIS (Score:4, Insightful)
What wrath? It's not like you can do anything to them once they're in office.
And before they get in, they promise you the sky to get your vote. After that, the sky is everything you may keep after they're done stripping you.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:2, Insightful)
That's like saying a good writer is one that writes a lot of text.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Is that the same social norm that makes people treat alledged "sex offenders" as subhumans no matter whether they were actually guilty or what they have really done?
Just going by a gut feeling works in a simple society but as society grows in complexity you'll find more and more cases where that gut feeling is wrong and can cause horrible damage to others.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Personally, I'm still amazed that, in a nation so plentiful, owing so much of its good fortune to the diversity and quantity of people who just sort of showed up on a boat, so many people have a problem with free immigration.
Absurd and ironic come to mind, but the word which I think best describes this blighted mindset is "disappointing."
I don't mind immigration at all. The problem I have is that many refuse to learn the language, go through the proper steps to obtain a green card/citizenship and pay their taxes like the rest of us do.
With that being said, it doesn't help that system to get the green card/citizenship is a royal PITA. But tens of thousands of immigrants manage to go through it successfully every year. I just hate wasting our government resources on the ones that don't. We all end up paying for it.
Re:illegal acts to find illegal acts? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Oh, now it's time for the Nixon haters! (Score:5, Insightful)
And their rationale for breaking the laws, whether it's the FBI, Nixon, or Bush, is "It takes a crook to catch a crook ..."
Though with Bush and his attacks on the Constitution, it needs to be updated to "It takes a terr'rist to catch a terr'rist."
Re:Incoming republicans (Score:5, Insightful)
"Just because Bush is worse than Nixon doesn't mean Nixon wasn't really bad. He was."
I'll forgive Nixon for detente with China (vastly more important than any crimes his underlings committed, and we can't blame any POTUS for Hoover...) and getting us out of Viet Nam.
Nixon was not nice, but he was shrewd and tough (with enough street cred to negotiate with Mao). I'd take him over Shrub any day.
So much for democracy, freedom and fairness. (Score:5, Insightful)
Given the way things are going, in a few years, its going to be 10's of millions of automated wiretaps, in every country regardless of political party. These wiretaps will then feed into automatic data formatting transcriptions of all data of whatever form (on phones and Internet) about anything that is said and done. Then the formatted transcriptions will feed into automatic profiling systems to work out overall types of views on subjects. Then anyone expressing any views of any political or other ideologically different opinions will be automatically placed on watch lists. Then anything the governments want to do, will be able to refer to the watch lists, to workout what sort of person they are dealing with.
So any dealings with government will be biased by the watch lists. For example, try to set up a business and it turns out you were critical of the current government, ah sorry, no business grant for you. Try to ask for a grant to help with your house or anything else, ah sorry, no grant for you. But then, if you have don't nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry away. But the problem is, who defines what is wrong?
People who seek power over others want the power to dictate the rules by how others live. That is power, but that underlying nature of power has always opposed democracy and freedom. (Power seekers don't want fairness, they after all, want to dictate the rules and have the power to dictate rules). But democracy cannot truly exist when the ones in power know the views of the voters. Its the principle of the secret vote, which prevents political manipulation of the voters to try to get them to vote in a certain ways. The more we move towards vast automated profiling, the more we undermined democracy, freedom and fairness.
So a time of 10's of thousands of wiretaps is nothing compared with where we are going, especially as the 10s of thousands were mostly targeted against criminal gangs, whereas the 10s of millions will be mostly innocent of any crime. Then again, expressing any view different from the ones in power, is considered a crime by some people who want others to follow what they tell them.
Researchers have already shown its possible to profile people from what they say. Its not long before we will have automated transcriptions of data into a form that's easy to profile. So give it a few years, almost everyone worldwide is going to be "wiretapped/watched" in everything they do. Where they drive, where they travel on buses, trains and planes. What they buy. What friends they have (phone and email records) and what views their friends have. What news papers they buy. What they say on the phone to everyone. What they say in emails. The news website articles they read. (Combined with the profiles of the people who write the news articles, which gives an automated measure of their views). They will also know what Internet streamed TV shows you watch, including any political documentaries, especially ones critical of the current government. They will know everything you like and dislike and it will be cataloged and listed and readily available of use in political campaigns.
But that's just the beginning. Once you can profile individuals, you can extend that to profile groups of people. For example, profile the kinds of people working for a company. Workout what sort of views they hold. Workout if a company, is the sort of company the current government wants to help or wants to hold back?. That in turn will put pressure on employers to refer to the profile watch lists, to avoid employing anyone who could give their company a bad image to the current government.
I don't see how democracy, freedom and fairness is going to survive in such a world?. But I suspect and fear the unfairness is going to build up to a point where it forces large numbers of people to stand up to their governments and we will be back to the bad old days of political revolutions, only this time, the watch lists will prevent anyone standing up to any government until things get really bad. So much for progress, democracy, freedom and fairness. All we seem to be doing, is repeating the mistakes of the past, but this time, automating the processes involved.
Re:How about nudging a likely future leader on FIS (Score:3, Insightful)
Lee Harvey Oswald would disagree with you.
Re:Incoming republicans (Score:1, Insightful)
_IF_ the USA PATRIOT act is legal...
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:3, Insightful)
a) get a group of people who regularly go through the laws and remove the crap. b) have most of your laws expire after a certain time unless manually renewed - the lifespan is linked to how many legislators required to pass that sort of law. c) all of the above.
Isn't that essentially the job of the Supreme Court? I like the second idea especially and would propose that the timeframe be 2 years to reflect the newly elected officials. I would also recommend that the laws could not be renewed until a month prior to their dismissal.
Re:No they can't, have you been paying attention? (Score:4, Insightful)
Moot? So the people who have been sitting in their cell for 5 years without trial are vindicated now, and justice has been restored? I don't think so. Do their family even know if they are alive or dead yet?
Can they even afford to sue the government in U.S. courts? I can't. It wouldn't even matter if they could, the U.S. government lost several court cases involving softwood lumber from Canada, and they just completely ignored the ruling and went on imposing their tariff.
Being given the right to sue the government is supposed to make up for this gross hypocrisy?
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:3, Insightful)
Got a citation for that? I'd call trying to keep the PATRIOT Act from getting pressed through the Senate mostly unreviewed a noble act.
FBI as criminals (Score:3, Insightful)
When the only distinguishing characteristics between a so-called law enforcement agency and a criminal enterprise is a government seal of approval and non-profit status (sometimes not even that apparently), it's time to disband it.
The FBI has consistently demonstrated little regard for the law or the citizens it is charged with protecting. Much of that has been attributed to J.E. Hoover, but I can't imagine that he lead the organization so long without imprinting his casual disregard for the law and the Constitution on all levels of the organization. That would naturally include the promotion of agents who fit his mold.
After Hoover's death, there did not appear to be the sort of massive re-organization that would be required to purge itself of such criminals in the guise of law enforcement.
It's hardly surprising that decades later, the organization still demonstrates a casual disregard for the law more befitting organized crime.
Given the problems that have been discovered within the organization including a crime lab that thinks voting is an acceptable scientific procedure, were it not for the pass that our courts routinely give law enforcement, I would think the FBI's testimony should carry negative credibility by now.
While I'm aware that cops are people too and that we can't expect (nor would we necessarily want) Dudley Do-Right, I don't think respect for the law, the Constitution, and the citizens is too much to expect of law enforcement. A sense of proportion would be a good thing as well.
Re:Well... (Score:2, Insightful)
Counterpoint: Canada.
Re:whither now, 2nd amendment? (Score:5, Insightful)
Firearms allow you to challenge jack-booted thugs that are smashing down your front door to take you away to a concentration camp.
This is how the second amendment keeps you free.
The correlary of this is that as long as no jack booted thugs show up at your doorstep, you have nothing to worry about.
If you can't defend against it with a firearm, then it can't really be a threat, right?
Re:whither now, 2nd amendment? (Score:4, Insightful)
Spirit of the 2nd (Score:5, Insightful)
The second amendment was put in for a very good reason; to grant the citizens the power to overthrow a corrupt government. However, as with a number of things in the Constitution, culture and technology has outpaced the implementation of that reason. Guns cannot currently overthrow the government.
Rather, the government is propped up by two things; it's ability to arbitrarily hide information about what it's doing (severely weakening the idea of 'for, of and by the people'), and massive economic support of corporations who have insane control over people's lives, and who similarly have the power to hide what they're doing.
In the modern age, one or ideally both of these things need to change to protect the individual, and thus the People. The easiest to change is the governmental ability to hide stuff. Any law that reduces the amount of oversight or government transparency is something that works directly against the best interest of the people.
If I could have a single constitutional amendment, it would be forcing the government to have a balanced budget. If I could have a second, it would be 100% transparency, the torpedoes be damned. I don't care if the 'terrorists' know what we're doing, I think our country's better angels would prevail if we could see what was going on: simply because we could overthrow anything that worked against our interests - and that's the spirit of the 2nd anyway.
Re:Doesn't mean it should be fixed.. (Score:3, Insightful)
I know 'elite' is a bad word in politics. But the job you're applying for, if you get it and it goes well, they might carve your head into a mountain. If you don't actually think you're better than us, then what the f**k are you doing? In fact, not only do I want an elite president, I want someone who's embarrassingly superior to me, somebody who speaks 16 languages and sleeps two hours a night hanging upside down in a chamber they themselves designed.
- Jon Stewart, The Daily Show, 4 April 2008
Re:whither now, 2nd amendment? (Score:3, Insightful)
A firearm is pretty much useless against a tank rolling towards you, yet I'd consider that pretty threatening.
Which, of course, is why we won in Viet Nam and the Soviets won in Afghanistan.
Re:Incoming republicans (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, 6 years and thousands of casualties later than he should have.