Delftsman

C0-inky-dink?

I'm beginning to wonder if my stance on the monitering of telephones was incorrect....

We had taken the plunge and dropped our land line service with AT&T(may bees PISS upon them!) and gone to a service that uses the net (like Vonage) to give us an alternative to the lousy cell phone we get here. Always pays to have a plan B...

So I called my dad to let him know our new phone number, and try to catch up on how things are going for him and my mother.

As usual, we had a rambleing discussion in search of that one topic that could get us going at each other like a pit bull going for an intruder.
This time, it was call monitering...I believe that it is a necessary to security program, dangerous to privacy, yes, but with proper oversight, the best of a couple bad choices.

I thought my dad would have similar ideas....but no, he was enraged by the whole idea.

Then I discovered why. Seems that yesterday he had had a very long discussion with his sister still residing in the old Homeland of the Netherlands. She is very ill, and she was wanting to talk, and my dad was more than willing to humor her, so it ended up being roughly almost a two hour call (I HATE to think of his next phone bill!!). About ten minutes after hanging up, he got a strange call, just asking for "Mr. Meyer?"; he thought it was a phone solicitation and promptly hung up. Another minute, and the phone rings again.."Mr. Meyer?"...he told the voice "I'm not interested in anything you're selling" and slammed the phone down. THIRD time the phone rings..voice says, "Mr. Meyer, this is Agent so&so of the FBI, please don't hang up on me again, or we will be forced to come to your home in person"

My dad told him, "why didn't you identify who you were on the FIRST call?" Agent so&so just stated that it wasn't important, but that he had a few questions for my dad; he could answer now over the phone, or "agents could be sent to bring him in to the office and the questions asked there".

Seems that he had just gotten off of what was a very long phone call to a foreign country that was well known to have a large immigrant Muslim population, he was speaking in a language (Dutch) that no one in the office was
capable of translating, and could he please divulge what the conversation was about?

Dad just said, "it's none of your damned business, but I was talking to my sister about her illness and a number of other contemperary things. That "strange language" is Dutch, and I'm sure you can fine someone to translate it for you easily; you want to know anything else, get a warrant and come get me". Then slammed down the phone.

I don't know yet if they will go to such lengths or not, but the thing that concerns me is; my dad was the first person I called on the new phone line (Lila had placed a couple prior to mine), and within half an hour after I hung up with him, we have been unable to place or receive a call on that line....we get dial tone, but nothing else. We have two calls in to the help center, but haven't gotten any reply from them as yet.

I know it's probably paranoia to believe the the FBI really has anything to do with the loss of service, but still, in the back of my mind, I wonder. It hadn't been up long enough to really develop a glitch, and the three calls total we had made on the line prior to the call to my dad were trouble free....maybe it has had to be rerouted to moniter?

Just makes me go Hmmmm.

Posted by Delftsman3 at June 13, 2006 01:12 PM | TrackBack