Americans want to support intelligence efforts to detect terrorism plots. But they also need assurances that intelligence-gathering methods are legal and don’t violate their constitutional rights. That’s what is missing with the National Security Agency programs to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails and to collect phone records of millions of ordinary Americans. President Bush assures that these programs are focused only on links to terrorists, but how do we know that without any court review and without any meaningful oversight by Congress? What happens, for example, if these programs turn up incriminating information about political opponents? Will government officials really ignore it? And those who say we should just trust the government have forgotten past abuses.
Posted by Phillip Brownlee
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27 Comments
Looks like Cheney was pushing for phone and email warrantless intercepts in days after 9/11, but NSA lawyers made him settle for one party being out of country. The Kremlin is now located in D.C., on Pennsylvania Avenue.
“Spying programs need oversight”
REALLY??? Have you been paying attention to the last year or so?? What the hell do you think has half the country in an uproar and the other half trying to give away the rest of their freedoms?!?!
Phillip,
Sometimes I think that reporters actually care about the truth and accurately representing things to the public…
and then I read posts like this.
Do you purposfully ignore the fact that members of Congress were breifed on this?
Do you purposefully ignore the fact that the NSA is staffed by people that provide oversight and they have checks and balances in place?
Or was this your coy attempt at acknowledgement:”meaningful oversight by Congress”
Give me a break, you make it sound like Bush is sitting in an NSA office reading looking at your personal phone records.
Do you have no comprehension of data mining?
Nathan, were ALL members of Congress briefed on this?
Uh, no. Just the ones who could be “trusted” by an administration, that according to the Constitution and congressionally-crafted statutes, totally turns upside down and usurps the lawful operation f the NSA. The Congress, not a President, CREATED NSA and defined its scope, and is required under law to exercise COMPREHENSIVE OVERSIGHT of the Agency. You don’t get that with 2% of the Congress being briefed, and being warned not to tell their 98% fellow representatives.
Read the Constitution fella.
Nathan,Yes, I comprehend data mining; my son worked for a while data mining nearly everyone on the country for a private company who sold their data to marketing companys. Much of the original information came from those little surveys that are attached to warranty cards mailed back to companies, and much was added to it from local governments, the internet, and other sources. He was shocked by the amount of information they could acquire on a person. If he pulled up a file on a woman, they knew her educational level, her yearly income, what she spent it on, what her bra and jeans sizes were, whether she had gained or lost weight in the previous year, and how much. They knew her hobbies, her political affiliations, what books she bought, what prescription drugs she took, damn near everything about her current and past marriages, when her children were conceived and whether she was married at that time, and every motel she ever checked into, and with whom.All this information was being used to target her for sales people, so they would know all her weaknesses, and how to use them to sell her their products.Combine all this data with every phone call she makes, and if it’s a cell phone with a GPS chip, everywhere she goes, and if she uses a credit or debit card, everything she buys and when and where she buys it. There are people that will use such knowledge in ways that will damage, rip off and destroy her. Knowledge is power. We, of course trust our president when he says those people are not in the intelligence community or the administration.
Nathan, I first learned of the “Bad intel” before the 2004 election by a slide of hand. One of those in congress whom was briefed saw how the administration was manipulating the N.I.E. of 2002. Now was the problem, those briefed are by law not allowed to disclose what they are briefed on. To openly point out what was going on, is illegal they could be told that in the nation’s best interest that a blood sacrifice of a new born was in order and they could not break the news. So what could be done was, a demand of Bush to release the N.I.E. was made. Finally an adducted version of it was release, devoid of the parts that would be contra to the administration’s view of the need to invade Iraq. But the conclusion that said that there was no evidence that Saddam had continued to make, possess or work toward WMDs. That there was no evidence that Saddam had any link to Al-qaeda or any other terrorist group. That stated that there was no evidence of Saddam having any connection to 9-11. All this was withheld, only projections as to what Saddam would have based on 1993 levels if he had continued to make and acquire WMDs. Only a report of a meeting between key members of Saddam government and Al-Qaeda. a single report that was from a person that the CIA even stated that was of question and they thought was simply after money. Willing to say anything that one would wish to hear if he got paid for it.
I could drag on but my point being that the briefing of key members of Congress a disclosure does not make. If I were to tell you of a crime I had committed or plan on committing. Yet you are not allowed to repeat my confession, have I really disclosed my intent or simply made you an accomplice. And by your now knowing, does that mean you now approve of my intent?
BTW, pleasure meeting you, go Marines!!!! (And I may take some hits on this one)….And the young Republicans! You are the future of the party, use your common sense and remember to try and make both the best interest of the party and the country one in the same. But always put country above party, if the country does well the party will not be far behind.
Republican by choice, American by the grace of God.
Results from yet another NSA story poll:
“According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA’s surveillance program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy,” while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism.”
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12771821/site/newsweek/
What else will we find out?I wasn’t surprised to find the phone giants were paid to give up our privacy.I was surprised to find the three US car manufacturers gave into the government on tracking devices on new cars over the last four years.What’s next?The people who bury their heads in the sand and tell themselves it’s just what we have to do to keep ourselves safe are as bad as the corporations that aid the spying.
While the Valerie Plame case is showing us the very people at the top (Cheney, Bush, Rove) outed Plame, While doing so they crippled the Iran intelligence gathering with little concern for anything other then their immediate private agenda.
These are people who need oversight.
A little bird pointed me to a gap in the firewall of a certain Gray Lady, where I found this.
**********************************
Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
By FRANK RICH
“WHEN America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we’ve more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.
This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration’s die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.’s secret “black site” Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.
President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a “shameful act” that is “helping the enemy.” Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.
We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It’s the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press’s exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That’s where the buck stops, and if there’s to be a witch hunt for traitors, that’s where it should begin.
Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention “secrets” secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees “to countries that routinely use torture.” Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that “plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes’ movements.” These articles, capped by Ms. Priest’s, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can’t afford to lose.
The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved “thousands of lives.” The White House’s journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times exposé “may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs.”
Surely they jest. If this is one of our “most effective” programs, we’re in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring “traitors” like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.
Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It’s often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.
Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In “Breakdown,” a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee’s “investigation” of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.
Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate “poker parties” swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn’t play games with the nation’s defense during wartime.
Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss’s only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. “There’s a leak every day in the paper,” he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because “that’s all we’d do.”
What prompted Mr. Goss’s about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to “support the administration and its policies in our work.” His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of “Jawbreaker,” the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen’s account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen’s team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss’s management disasters.
Soon to come are the Senate’s hearings on Mr. Goss’s successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He’s “the right man” to lead the C.I.A. “at this critical moment in our nation’s history.” That’s not exactly reassuring.
This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss’s appointment in the autumn of 2004.
Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they’ll fail to investigate the nominee’s record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 — “Tomorrow is zero hour” for one — and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden’s N.S.A. also failed to recognize that “some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose,” as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and “for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores.”
If Democrats — and, for that matter, Republicans — let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.”
NOW can we impeach the motherfucker(s)?
First of to call it “spying” on Americans is a joke. To have a database where you can track phone calls once you know a terrorist has called a certain number is necessary. In this war on terror we need our government to actively defend us by tracking down the web of terrorist within this country using this data. If they don’t do it they are leaving us exposed in the war on terror and that is what is indefensible.
Bill Clinton put together a program that monitored emails and phone conversations of Americans. The very same phony liberal media did not raise any questions against their man Bill. This is politics and nothing more.
At least what is happening today is not the reading and listening of the actual phone conversations it is only the tracking of the phone call traffic not conversations.
Ruby,
These sorts of surveillance are completely useless when it comes to terrorists. Al Qaeda doesn’t use the phone or emails. They use couriers and operatives when there are messages to be sent.
However, if one wants to crack down on domestic political opposition and run a campaign of silent intimidation, the NSA’s program is the way to go.
Once again, the Administration proves its total lack of interest in securing the country against real threats, terrorist or otherwise, and its continuing interest in consolidating Executive power.
CF–This is along the lines of Harper’s cover story “Stabbed in the Back,” how every time a right-wing wacko idea goes horribly wrong (Vietnam, Pinochet, Shah of Iran etc.), they blame their traitorous opponents who “stabbed them in the back.”
Ruby, how do you know what is happening today?
ANS: you can’t.
I also do not understand how anybody can see how bad these guys are government, inept they are, and then go on to think that all of a sudden they can track digital traffic (1) effectively, and (2) within the law.
Operating within the law is important because otherwise our civic life, our system of laws, breaks down. For example, if Republicans accuse Democrats of being traitors (and they have), then do you not see that Democrats have every right to assume the NSA is spying on them?
This is TERRIBLE news for the USA.
Even you and others on this blog have made statements like “I would be disappointed in my government if it weren’t analyzing digital traffic patterns secretly.” Surely you must agree that spying on traitors is necessary as well?!?
Sheesh, this is like talking to a 6th-grade civics class, I can’t believe Americans don’t see this.
Do you argue that President Bush doesn’t have to stay within the law because he’s probably incapable of pulling that off – but that it’s ok because he needs whatever leeway possible to keep us safe?!?
These guys are TERRIBLE at governing. Has nobody paid attention to the performance of the federal government for the past 6 years?
What in the world would make you think that all of a sudden, out of the blue, they can be experts?
Notice how Nathan attacked Phillip on this instead of directly addressing the issue? Second post out, and he’s off! Perfect Republican tactic.
Sorry. Nathan was 3rd. K was 2nd and did somewhat the same. Come on, guys.
Rich:”Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States.”
Ruby:”To have a database where you can track phone calls once you know a terrorist has called a certain number is necessary.”
What a juxtaposition: Frank Rich and Ruby. :-)
How would either Ruby or Rich know what they are claiming above? Truth is: neither one of them could possibly know. These programs operate in secret, with precious little congressional oversight. I don’t know that I need to know the operational details of these programs (certainly, secrecy has its place), but congress does need to know what is being done — it is their job!
“First of to call it “spying” on Americans is a joke. To have a database where you can track phone calls once you know a terrorist has called a certain number is necessary.”
Ruby, keep up with stuff, will ya? The NSA didn’t gather info from the telephone companies on certain terrorist numbers. It gather information on BILLIONS of numbers. ALL numbers of the customers of those companies.
“The very same phony liberal media did not raise any questions against their man Bill.”
Must’ve been before that liberal media was bought off by the conservatives.
And the latest on Hayden…
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/051306A.shtml
I don’t know about anybody else, but I hardly have time to read one article and give it some thought before the next arrives. TEE HEE
The sad matter is that most of us just want to live and let live. But a tiny minority of Americans are driven by greed and powerlust. Most of them are unhealthily driven to prove themselves to fathers who neglected them and/or mercilessly criticized them. So, they are psychoemotionally maladjusted. They suck the rest of us into their pathology.
North America has more than enough natural resources and brainpower to achieve energy independence. Our Founding Fathers warned us against “foreign entanglements”. Our economy has been oil-dependent for less than 100 years. That’s a blip on the timeline of human history. Oil reserves will give out within another 100 years, unless humanity wisely decides to use them to synthesize new products, rather than unwisely burning them up.
Look at skyrocketing healthcare costs. Look at 160 cities that have built bike lanes that are used by fast-growing numbers of commuters who are getting healthful exercise. And reducing fossil-fuel energy usage. Where is Wichita in this? Locked in obsolete, defective thinking. If people can ride bikes to work in Chicago, they can do it in Wichita.
Most of the good points about why this “data mining” is potentially very dangerous to free America have already been made. I’d add this.
Some on the right say that this is just “data mining”. We are told that all that is being looked for is patterns in phone traffic that would suggest a potential terrorist threat. Buyt isn’t just that worrisome as well?
Consider a soldier deployed in Iraq or elsewhere. If that soldier has a girlfriend back home who calls him frequently, wouldn’t her frequent calls to Iraq constitute a red flag for the NSA looking for terrorist traffic?It is ususally true that if you go into something looking for trouble, your very prejudice is gonna make sure you find it whether it is valid or not.
Oops. I did a Nathan on Ruby. My bad.
What is funny to me is that all of the right-wingers, the true-believers, are people who will continually vote for Republicans regardless of their blatant and horribly costly mistakes. To get a sense of what I am talking about, you should check out today’s editorial page of the Seattle Times. The author of “The Emerging Republican Majority” now realizes just how dangerous these (for lack of a better term) brainwashed people are to democracy. Basically, he lays it on the line: these people, who are, in effect, being pimped by Wall Street, practice a very simplistic form of Christianity, without any really deep level of understanding other than ‘Us good, they bad.’ Motivated by this sense of (self-) righteousness, they will, as aforementioned, vote for the party that tells them what they want to hear, not the facts and reality. To put it bluntly, these are stupid people whose minds cannot accept the possibility that they are wrong, and they are trying to impose this base form of, and mindless acceptance of, a simple Christianity, an aggressive (nearly imperial) foreign policy, acceptance of a society where taxes are cut for the top one percent of the wealthy while scores of millions are without even basic health insurance (and btw, the proportion of wealth that the top of society holds is approaching the levels that were present before the Great Depression, and real wages for average Americans have not risen in 30+ years) ignoring Jesus’ saying about the rich man, the camel, and the eye of the needle, and where corporations, more than the actual citizens of this nation control our government. Lord knows that most of these ‘pious,’ simplistic right-wingers have been hurt by the new economic ‘arrangements,’ but of course this of less importance than judging others behavior (once again directly contradicting Jesus’ ‘log in your own eye’ commandment). And now we get that those who expose our government wrong-doing are traitors who are helping our enemies. What a sad state of affairs our fine nation has fallen into, when those who violate Congressionally passed laws and the spirit, if not the letter, of the Constitution (Fourth, Fifth, Ninth, and Fourteenth Amendments) are regarded as heroes,albeit by a small proportion of our society, judging by recent polls. Until we as a society realize just how much these people of little education and even less critical thinking skills are destroying the fabric of our nation and turning us into a near-fascist dictatorship, with liberty and justice for the wealthiest and the lawbreakers at the top of government, we will continue to descend into the dark abyss of theocracy and dictatorship. Unfortunately, those that are the true believers will NOT allow facts, new revelations, and reality sway them. If the needed change is not accomplished in this year, we may be waiting forever for the rule of law and SANITY to return to our nation. I, for one, will not be one who surrenders my freedoms to these forces of backwardness, (religous) hypocrisy, and hatred lightly, and hopefully, others of a like mind (who I believe are the vast majority in this nation) will stand for the things that made, and continue to make, America great in the coming months and years.
Wow, great posts y’all. Ruby must be dizzy from all that spinning.
RD, you provide me with many tee hee’s as well. Nice to have met you.
Ever notice how anybody that didn’t worship the ground on which Sen. Joe McCarthy walked was “Soft on communism,” anyone who supported the Bill of Rights was “Soft on crime,” and anybody that criticizes our Fearless Leader is “Soft on terrorism?” Isn’t it past time for the ultraconservatives to coin a new cliche? Or would that be “Soft on slogans?”
Jed,I prefer “bored out of their gourd with nothing better to do than come up with assinine slogans”.
They definitely need some new blood in the Marketing Dept., Julie.
KFG, I truly enjoyed meeting both you and your partner. And I love reading your posts, finding tons of things to tee hee that you’re right on about.