E-mail Quotes
He thought that he was sending the e-mail to one of his staff but he sent it to a listserv by mistake. From there, it spread throughout his district and when he ran for Re-election in what had been a very safe seat, he lost by a 3 to 1 margin.
at the NSA collection of every American’s private e-mails, phone calls, and other digital communications. Referring to the NSA program of collecting information on all electronic communications of all American Citizens. See {636963} for more on the case.
The then attorney general had begun a series of investigation which discovered that most of the major Wall Street brokerage houses were engaged in systematic frauds to cheat small investors. One dramatic fraud he uncovered was that the research expert analysts of major firms would recommend the stock of businesses that their firm was doing investment banking for even when they knew that the companies were not doing well or were even in deep financial trouble. See {591389} .
This quotation provides insight into the mentality of the senior administrators of NSA. See {637046} for another quotation by Alexander showing the predilection for massive, 100% surveilance.
While it is true that almost all nations have intelligence agencies and collect intelligence about both friends and foes, our allies did not bug the personal phones of leaders of friendly countries and were very distressed when they discovered that the US NSA had access to the personal calls of world leaders including the leaders of Brazil, Germany and France. Rubio and others believed that they only reason our allies had not done so is that they did not have the technical capability to do so; otherwise they would have been bugging our Presidential and cabinet level phones. President Obama ordered the practice stopped with respect to our allies.
When discussing and planning redistricting What makes this quotation so noteworthy is the fact that to the expert at redistricting, security is so important and E-mail an anathema. The reason is that most redistricting by a majority in a state legislature has little to do with fairness and protecting the meaning of peoples’ votes. It is very often motivated by something that is illegal (eg diluting Black’s voting impact) or untoward, embarrassing and scandalous (eg getting rid of a Congressman the party leaders do not care for—not being ideological enough. Very often, courts or the Justice Department overturn redistricting schemes or the media embarrasses the party who controlled the redistricting. In almost all these cases, the “smoking gun” is the statements or writings of the redistricting leaders. (For an example, see {634844} .)Therefore some redistrictors behave in methods similar to the Mafia, foreign spies, or an illegal monopoly conspiracy.
