Hope the guy makes it to the hearing, if you know what I mean.

Independent Illinois Grassroots: IllinoisDemNet.com

1. Real-time data collection of call detail records, which include
your location during the call.
2. Recording of those records for later data mining and analysis, which not only can show where you were, but who else was there.
3. Correlation of those records with electronic purchases (VISA, AMEX, etc.)
4. At will recording/playback of call content, including text mail, images sent/received, browser activity on the phone. All Blackberry content for example.
5. Your name, address, credit card numbers. The numbers are easy to get if you compare cell phone location in call records with purchase locations.
6. Your travel patterns.
7. Who you like to talk to. Who they like to talk to. Who they might vote for based upon who they like to talk to that is in their registered database of known Republican voters. Helps with the target marketing they are so effective at.

Getting your attention yet?

From EFF's website - the government's case for direct access to your credit card transactions:

"But the most interesting part of the Government’s response is what it reveals about the DOJ’s expansive use of the All Writs Act in other cases. Without citation to any case supporting the invasive surveillance of credit cards without probable cause, the Government notes:
Currently, the government routinely applies for and upon a showing of relevance to an ongoing investigation receives “hotwatch” orders issued pursuant to the All Writs Act. Such orders direct a credit card issuer to disclose to law enforcement each subsequent credit card transaction effected by a subject of investigation immediately after the issuer records that transaction.
This is a revelation since these so-called “hotwatch” orders have not been previously mentioned in court cases, law review articles, or DOJ materials. While the cell phone tracking case is still ongoing, our litigation has unveiled yet another step taken towards the surveillance society."

Fastest way to get these is to record them as they happen, on their way to the credit card company. Check out www.narus.com to see the gear that will do it.

Since each transction has a vendor ID that has a geocode associated with it, it becomes possible as you make calls and perform credit card transactions to link you to your credit cards.

I went to Austin yesterday and on the way home decided to check out Cabela's, a huge outfitter store. I spotted a knife sharpener I wanted. At the checkout I was asked for a phone number.

Regretfully I gave it to them.

This tracking system is not only government-run but also appears to include corporate co-conspirators.

When you consider phone companies are playing...

I did inhale.

Raw Story

original:
Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling - ABC;The Blotter

An intelligence expert predicts we'll soon learn that cellphone and Internet companies also cooperated with the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on us.

By Kim Zetter
May 15, 2006

When intelligence historian Matthew Aid read the USA Today story last Thursday about how the National Security Agency was collecting millions of phone call records from AT&T, Bell South and Verizon for a widespread domestic surveillance program designed to root out possible terrorist activity in the United States, he had to wonder whether the date on the newspaper wasn't 1976 instead of 2006.

Aid, a visiting fellow at George Washington University's National Security Archive, who has just completed the first book of a three-volume history of the NSA, knew the nation's bicentennial marked the year when secrets surrounding another NSA domestic surveillance program, code-named Project Shamrock, were exposed. As fireworks showered New York Harbor that year, the country was debating a three-decades-long agreement between Western Union and other telecommunications companies to surreptitiously supply the NSA, on a daily basis, with all telegrams sent to and from the United States. The similarity between that earlier program and the most recent one is remarkable, with one exception -- the NSA now owns vastly improved technology to sift through and mine massive amounts of data it has collected in what is being described as the world's single largest database of personal information. And, according to Aid, the mining goes far beyond our phone lines.

The controversy over Project Shamrock in 1976 ultimately led Congress to pass the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and other privacy and communication laws designed to prevent commercial companies from working in cahoots with the government to conduct wholesale secret surveillance on their customers. But as stories revealed last week, those safeguards had little effect in preventing at least three telecommunications companies from repeating history.

Aid, who co-edited a book in 2001 on signals intelligence during the Cold War, spent a decade conducting more than 300 interviews with former and current NSA employees for his new history of the agency, the first volume of which will be published next year. Jeffrey Richelson, a senior fellow at the National Security Archive, calls Aid the top authority on the NSA, alongside author James Bamford.

Aid spoke with Salon about how the NSA has learned to maneuver around Congress and the Department of Justice to get what it wants. He compared the agency's current data mining to Project Shamrock and Echelon, the code name for an NSA computer system that for many years analyzed satellite communication signals outside the U.S., and generated its own controversy when critics claimed that in addition to eavesdropping on enemy communication, the satellites were eavesdropping on allies' domestic phone and e-mail conversations. Aid also spoke about the FBI's Carnivore program, designed to "sniff" e-mail traveling through Internet service providers for communication sent to and from criminal suspects, and how the NSA replaced the FBI as the nation's domestic surveillance agency after 9/11.

Having studied the NSA and its history extensively, were you surprised and concerned to discover that, since 2001, the agency has been amassing a database of phone records, and possibly other information, on U.S. citizens?

The fact that the federal government has my phone records scares the living daylights out of me. They won't learn much from them other than I like ordering pizza on Friday night and I don't call my mother as often as I should. But it should scare the living daylights out of everybody, even if you're willing to permit the government certain leeways to conduct the war on terrorism.

We should be terrified that Congress has not been doing its job and because all of the checks and balances put in place to prevent this have been deliberately obviated. In order to get this done, the NSA and White House went around all of the checks and balances. I'm convinced that 20 years from now we, as historians, will be looking back at this as one of the darkest eras in American history. And we're just beginning to sort of peel back the first layers of the onion. We're hoping against hope that it's not as bad as I suspect it will be, but reality sets in every time a new article is published and the first thing the Bush administration tries to do is quash the story. It's like the lawsuit brought by EFF [Electronic Frontier Foundation] against AT&T -- the government's first reaction was to try to quash the lawsuit. That ought to be a warning sign that they're on to something.

I'll tell you where this story probably will go next. Notice the USA Today article doesn't mention whether the Internet service providers or cellphone providers or companies operating transatlantic cables like Global Crossing cooperated with the NSA. That's the next round of revelations. The real vulnerabilities for the NSA are the companies. Sooner or later one of these companies, fearing the inevitable lawsuit from the ACLU, is going to admit what it did, and the whole thing is going to come tumbling down. If you want some historical perspective look at Operation Shamrock, which collapsed in 1975 because [Rep.] Bella Abzug [D-NY] subpoenaed the heads of Western Union and the other telecommunications giants and put them in witness chairs, and they all admitted that they had cooperated with the NSA for the better part of 40 years by supplying cables and telegrams.

The newest system being added to the NSA infrastructure, by the way, is called Project Trailblazer, which was initiated in 2002 and which was supposed to go online about now but is fantastically over budget and way behind schedule. Trailblazer is designed to copy the new forms of telecommunications -- fiber optic cable traffic, cellphone communication, BlackBerry and Internet e-mail traffic.

Much more at link (free site pass needed)