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Glen Greenwald is a litigator in NYC specializing in First Amendment challenges (including some of the highest-profile free speech cases over the past few years), civil rights cases, and corporate and security fraud matters.
a litigator in NYC specializing in First Amendment challenges (including some of the highest-profile free speech cases over the past few years), civil rights cases, and corporate and security fraud matters.One of the most revealing aspects of the NSA scandal has been the way in which Bush followers have been running around shrieking that national security has been damaged and treason has been committed by the New York Times. All of that is based upon the Times'disclosure that Bush ordered the NSA to eavesdrop without judicial oversight (rather than with it). Now that the initial screaming and demands for hangings are dying down a little, his followers are confronted with the fact that this accusation makes no sense whatsoever, since whether we eavesdrop with judicial oversight or without it can’t possibly be of any use to terrorists.
What has become unavoidably apparent is that their rage over this disclosure stems from the fact that it has embarrassed George Bush and harmed his political interests, not that it has harmed the national interests of the United States. But to them, George Bush is America, and whatever he does is, by definition, the national security of the U.S. Thus, to undermine or impede George Bush -- even to point out that he broke the law -- is, in their minds, to impede the United States and therefore to commit treason.
In any event, John at Powerline thinks -- after he and his comrades spent three weeks screaming "treason" at everyone -- that he finally found an explanation as to how the Times’ story "harms national security." But anyone with an open mind who reads John’s explanation can see that John literally has no idea what FISA is, or what this entire controversy is about. I don’t mean that he’s wrong in his analysis or that he’s interpreting facts incorrectly. I mean that he’s just ignorant of basic, undisputed facts regarding the matter about which he’s opining so pedantically. But, to his credit, John is at least the first person I have seen try to offer an explanation for the "treason" accusation, so it's worth exploring.
John begins his argument, fittingly enough, by citing the Myth of Osama’s Cell Phone:
First, there is apparently no dispute about the fact that when it was published in the American press [in 1998] that we were listening in on Osama bin Laden's cell phone conversations, he either stopped using cell phones or switched to a different technology.
Yes, John is right: there is "no dispute" at all about this cell phone story -- except for the lengthy and detailed article in The Washington Post two weeks ago demonstrating that the whole tale is an urban myth. It’s a cartoon story about gadgets and villains that someone fed to George Bush, who ate it up and then shared it with us at his Press Conference, even though it's plainly untrue.
But even if it were true, anyone who thinks about it for just a few seconds would realize that it negates, rather than bolsters, the accusation that the Times "damaged national security" with its story. According to the myth, the Osama Cell Phone caper happened in 1998. That would mean that it dawned on Al Qaeda at least seven years ago that we try to listen in on their calls and that we have the technology to do it. That, in turn, means that the Times story didn’t tell them anything that they, along with the rest of the world, didn’t already know.
John moves on to next argue that the terrorists didn’t know about this thing called "FISA" until the Times story treasonously spilled the beans and told them about it. Honestly, that's his argument:
These emailers [asking John how the Times story could have harmed national security] assume that al Qaeda members know about FISA. I think that is extremely unlikely. Very few Americans knew anything about FISA before the current controversy arose.
So the diabolical, unprecedentedly dangerous terrorists who pose an existential threat to the U.S. that is equal to or greater than that posed by the Soviet Union are, in John’s mind, so uninformed, unsophisticated and stupid that they never heard of or knew about the 30-year old public law that defines the powers of the U.S. Government to engage in surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes. They never heard of FISA or knew anything about it until the Times published its story.
And now the cat is out of the bag – now, thanks to the Times, they know that we have this law called "FISA" and have become aware that we do this thing called "eavesdropping" and now they will be able to thwart us. Is that supposed to be satire?
Recognizing that this may not be the most persuasive argument ever, John has a back up just in case the terrorists had heard of FISA. He argues that if the terrorists had heard of FISA, they were intimately familiar with how the FISA court worked. Thus, prior to the Times story, terrorists would have thought that it took a long time to obtain a warrant in order to listen in on their conversations when, in reality, as they now know (thanks to the Times), we were violating FISA and therefore able to eavesdrop immediately:
If the terrorists did know about FISA, they probably also knew that it would take days, weeks or months to obtain a FISA order. Thus, while they probably would be smart enough to realize that the cell phones they had used to try to contact their confederate were compromised and should be discarded, they would not realize that we had the ability to begin intercepting messages coming in to the captured cell phone almost immediately, and then begin intercepting messages to and from the phones that were calling the terrorist, also almost immediately.
This paragraph reveals an astounding ignorance. Anyone who has paid even the most minimal attention to this matter – let alone someone who holds themselves out as some sort of legal scholar qualified to accuse people of treason – has known for quite some time that FISA expressly allows immediate eavesdropping without a warrant under Section 1805. Thus, unless a terrorist were as confused and uninformed about the law as John still is, a terrorist who thought we were complying FISA (rather than violating it) would have already known that we could eavesdrop immediately and without a warrant. That's because FISA says in clear and unambiguous language that we can. The Times story reporting on Bush's illegal program didn't reveal that we could eavesdrop immediately because the Government has that power even if it complies with FISA.
Shouldn’t this be extremely embarrassing to John? FISA is not really that long of a law, and it’s pretty straightforward. It’s been three weeks since this scandal began. He obviously has no idea what FISA even says. John could have made the argument he just made only if he was completely unaware of the fact that FISA itself allows immediate eavesdropping – a fact which not only is readily apparent from the law, but also has been mentioned by pretty much everyone who has discussed this matter since it first arose.
This really is the level of argument which is coming from Bush followers on this issue. It is wildly incoherent and uninformed. That’s because they begin with the premise that anyone who says anything that is harmful to George Bush, particularly with regard to his terrorism policies, is a subversive and a traitor, and only thereafter, in each individual case, do they go out in search of rationale to justify the accusation. The fact that none exists doesn’t stop them, or even give them pause, in insisting that those who criticize or impede George Bush should be imprisoned.
And as I've pointed out before, while the Times story told the terrorists nothing about our intelligence-gathering methods, George Bush -- in order to get re-elected and then to argue for renewal of the Patriot Act -- has revealed ample information, in detail, about all the ways we are successfully monitoring and tracking their communications and their movements.
And it's always worth noting that all of this is independent of this question: if George Bush were violating criminal law in ordering this FISA-bypass program, should the Times have informed the public about it? Does George Bush have the right to violate the law if he decides doing so strengthens U.S. national security? Those are questions Bush followers never address, but does anyone need to hear them address them in order to know their answers?
UPDATE: In an update to his post, John posts an e-mail from a reader who sets forth a completely different explanation: that all of these disclosures about our "encryption" and "switching" technologies signal to the terrorists how to avoid detection. It's no wonder that John's e-mailer is a fan of Powerline since he has simply invented facts to have an argument.
The Timesstory revealed nothing about encryption or switching, only that eavesdropping was being conducted without the judicial oversight required by FISA. Moreover, as the e-mailer himself acknowledges, both encryption and switching technologies have been publicly discussed for years. They are hardly new. Multiple reports have indicated that Al Qaeda long ago realized that they cannot safely rely on telecommunications and rely on other methods, such as couriers, for transmission of their messages. And George Bush's speeches, as noted above, have revealed far more details about our surveillance programs.
Finally, and it is this point which is always dispositive, if new technologies were created which made FISA oversight infeasible, the solution in a society which lives under the rule of law is to amend FISA, not to secretly and repeatedly violate it.
UPDATE II: In Comments, Jukeboxgrad makes a very compelling, perhaps irrefutable, demonstration that Powerline's failure ever to acknowledge FISA's 72-hour warrantless window is deliberate and dishonest. They have repeatedly argued that Bush was justified in by-passing FISA on the ground that there is sometimes a need to eavesdrop immediately (i.e., without having time to obtain a FISA warrant), but they have never once disclosed to their readers that FISA expressly permits eavesdropping for 72 hours without a warrant. That sort of argument is not just misleading, but outright deceitful.
Jukeboxgrad makes another excellent observation in a different Comment as well.
Finally, in light of the intellectually bankrupt pro-Bush argument by Powerline featured here, it's only fair that I acknowledge this very well-crafted argument by Doctor Biobrain made in defense of Bush.
Last Saturday, I went to a town hall meeting on the Iraq War and impeachment in Madison, Wisconsin. This one was sponsored by Veterans for Peace. More than 150 other events around the country on January 7 were co-sponsored by Progressive Democrats of America and afterdowningstreet.org.
In Madison, about 350 people crammed into the Labor Temple to show their enthusiastic support for bringing the troops home. But what really got the crowd going was the drive for impeachment.
The event opened with longtime peace activist Robert Kimbrough asking people to speak up so we all could hear them. But not for the sake of the NSA or the CIA or the FBI or the Pentagon, he said, adding that they all have recording devices that will pick everything up anyway.
Someone shouted behind me, “Bring it on!”
Ed Garvey, a great Wisconsin progressive, addressed the dismissive attitude that prevails in Washington and among the cynics: that impeachment is impossible, and that we’re just wasting our time talking about.
The same was said about the women’s suffrage movement and about the civil rights movement, he observed, adding that when he’s done he’d like to echo Rosa Parks, who said, after the bus boycott, “My feet may be tired but my soul’s at rest.”
I’m telling you, my friends, there’s something going on at the grassroots that the mainstream media isn’t getting.
And that’s this urgent desire by millions of Americans to defenestrate Bush from power and reclaim our democracy.
There were other overflow crowds in Sacramento, Chicago, and Livonia, Michigan, according to an inspiring report on afterdowningstreet.org.
The move in Congress, headed by John Conyers, is also picking up co-sponsors here and there.
“A total of eight U.S. House members have co-sponsored Resolution 635 to create a select committee to investigate the grounds for impeaching President Bush,” according to Atlanta Progressive News. “The co-sponsors are Rep. Lois Capps (D-CA), Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee (D-TX), Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), Rep. Donald Payne (D-NJ), Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA), and Rep. Lynn Woolsey (D-CA).”
What do we make of the President boldly proclaiming that he has “spy powers?” Does he have X-ray vision too?
When he and his cronies crawl up into Cheney’s bunker with the sign on the door “He-man Woman-haters Club. No Girls Allowed (except Condi),” do they synchronize their spy decoder rings and decide what new absurd folly to unleash on the world?
Illegal invasion of Iraq, suspending writs of habeus corpus, secret CIA torture dungeons, or election rigging? Most people outgrow such childish games and fantasies by the time they’re ten years old. And by age twelve, most understand that the President is not a king. Or a dictator. That U.S. citizens have inalienable rights.
That there are such things as search warrants. If the executive branch of government is going to conduct surveillance on the American people, they have to get a warrant from the judicial branch specifying what they’re looking for and the reasons for the search.
The Bush administration’s utter contempt for the U.S. Constitution and the specific information we now know about its use of the National Security Agency (NSA) surveillance network should further call into question Bush’ 2004 presidential “election.” In a recent revelation, we have learned that the NSA shared the fruits of its illegal spying on behalf of Bush with other government agencies.
What are e-voting machines and central tabulators that pass the voting results over electronic networks from the internet to phone lines? No more than data easily spied on and tapped into. The Franklin County Board of Elections, for example, tells us that it was a “transmission error” in Gahanna Ward 1B, where 638 people cast votes and Bush, the Wonder Boy, received 4258 votes. It’s not magic, nor is it an accident or an act of God. If the vote total wasn’t so hugely illogical, no one would have caught it.
A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.
The Congressional Research Service's report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president's authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.
President Bush's rationale for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants rests on questionable legal ground, and Congress does not appear to have given him the authority to order the surveillance, said a Congressional analysis released Friday.
.....
The analyses of the Congressional Research Service, part of the Library of Congress created in 1914, are generally seen as objective and without partisan taint, said Eleanor Hill, staff director of the Congressional inquiry on the Sept. 11 attacks.
Because of its importance, the report was repeatedly reviewed by senior staff members at the research service for accuracy and bias before its release, officials there said.
WASHINGTON - The nonpartisan research arm of Congress on Friday questioned the legal foundation of President Bush's decision to order eavesdropping on Americans without court warrants.
An analytical report by the Congressional Research Service is likely to provide new ammunition to critics who charge that Bush acted outside the law in ordering the National Security Agency to monitor the international e-mail and telephone calls of Americans suspected of belonging to al-Qaida or supporting the terrorist network.
The 44-page analysis cautioned that a conclusion about the legality of the program "is impossible to determine without an understanding of the specific facts involved and the nature of the president's authorization, which are for the most part classified."
By Brock N. Meeks
Chief Washington correspondent MSNBC
Jan. 6, 2006
WASHINGTON - In the 50 years that Grant Goodman has known and corresponded with a colleague in the Philippines he never had any reason to suspect that their friendship was anything but spectacularly ordinary.
But now he believes that the relationship has somehow sparked the interest of the Department of Homeland Security and led the agency to place him under surveillance.
Last month Goodman, an 81-year-old retired University of Kansas history professor, received a letter from his friend in the Philippines that had been opened and resealed with a strip of dark green tape bearing the words “by Border Protection” and carrying the official Homeland Security seal.
A couple of days ago, I wrote a piece on American intelligence agencies, a brief run-down of all the different organizations and what role they played.
In the course of doing the research for that story, I came across a unit I'd never heard of before, the DIA's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CFA), and their program the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN).
When I went to the internet to do find more information about JPEN, I was surprised to see that Google had a total of only 293 hits, one of which was from my own blog. You know darn well that when Google doesn't return several thousand hits that you're dealing with something relatively unknown. Yet my investigation has discovered that JPEN is tied into the recent NSA wiretapping scandal.
In short, JPEN is a simple computer program that runs across an internet-like interface (via ordinary browsers) that is very simple to use. It was brought online by the Pentagon shortly after 9/11/01 in a very rapid manner because it used commercial software that was only slightly modified.
You can read the full description of what JPEN does here. When you strip out the military jargon, JPEN is essentially a database of gossip used by Department of Defense employees, especially those who staff the entrances to military bases and facilities.
For example, if a "suspicious car" approaches the entrance to Fort Belvoir (outside of D.C.), a military police (MP) officer can log the license plates. Then if the same car approaches Andrews Air Force Base (also near DC), the MP's there can log onto JPEN and see that the same car was involved in a suspicious event.
The theory behind JPEN is that just about any DOD employee can log onto JPEN, using its simple and easy-to-use internet interface, and cross-check or add information about suspicious events. The military term used is "nonvalidated domestic threat information", which in more common language means "anything and everything that someone thinks is suspicious".
General Richard B. Myers, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave a speech on May 11, 2004 which discussed JPEN:
How many of the folks in this room know anything about JPEN? If you don't know about JPEN, then you've got to go take a look at it. The Joint Protection Enterprise Network, it can be focused on anything, but right now, we're focused on security at military installations. We figured out some years ago that we didn't really have a good way to share information between our militaries on force protection issues. For example, if a suspicious-looking vehicle is denied entry to Fort Belvoir, that event will be logged by the United States Army at Fort Belvoir. What do you think the probability of that information getting to Fort Myer, or Andrews or Bolling is? It's not easy to get there - it might be in an email or letter somewhere or a report. So, we had some really smart people come up with a solution, JPEN. If you haven't seen it you really ought to go see it. It's really quite interesting.
It was relatively cheap; it was also off-the-shelf software that was modified. It was born Joint from the beginning. It took 90 days to get from the idea to a prototype and another 60 days to get 30 bases and headquarters equipped. NORTHCOM is operates it. I think we need to continue that type of information sharing outside the military; it's got to go beyond just military installations. It's sharing information that is already out there, the kind of information you'd like to know if you're an installation commander somewhere.
The bolding was added by me. General Myers knew that JPEN was considered a valuable tool because so many people could add information to the JPEN database and so many people could access it. And he wasn't kidding about his dreams for expanding its usefulness beyond security for military installations.
In an effort to improve the security of US military installations and personnel around the world, the Joint Staff has created the Antiterrorism Enterprise Portal, an evolving web-based portal that aggregates the resources and programs required to support the DOD Antiterrorism Program. This portal is fast becoming DOD's one-stop location for antiterrorism/force protection information. A program that complements this portal capability is the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN). Operated by NORTHCOM, this network provides the means to share unclassified force protection information rapidly between military installations in the Continental United States, increasing their situational awareness and security significantly. Although currently operating only on military installations, JPEN has the potential to be expanded to share terrorist information with Federal, State and local agencies as well.
The WOT requires collecting relevant data and turning it into knowledge that will enable us to detect and preempt the plans of an elusive, skilled enemy dispersed across the globe. Although many obstacles remain, we are making significant progress in the area of information sharing. The Joint Intelligence Task Force for Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT) at DIA is a prime example of effective intelligence cooperation in the WOT. In the area of counterterrorism, we are making significant progress toward transparency and full information sharing. JITF-CT has experts from 12 intelligence and law enforcement organizations, and JITF-CT personnel are embedded in 15 other organizations, including some forward deployed personnel.
Got it? JPEN started out as a kind of internet for MP's to cross-reference information about suspicious activity between people who guard military bases. However the military loved its flexibility, scalability and usefulness so much it became something they wanted other groups to use.
General Myers spoke accurately when he said it has the "potential" to share "terrorist information" with other federal agencies as well as local law enforcement. Notice how "unverified reports" suddenly have transformed into "terrorist information"?
JPEN is officially under the command of NORTHCOM, the division "responsible for all U.S. military operations in the United States, Mexico, Canada and the northern Caribbean". In other words, it is in charge of the domestic affairs of the military and has nothing to do with Iraq, Afghanistan or any other overseas mission.
"JPEN represents a significant ability to quickly share vital antiterrorism information in direct support to those on the front lines of force protection throughout this country," said Maj. Gen. Dale Meyerrose, USNORTHCOM director of architectures and integration. "This system directly supports the USNORTHCOM mission of deterring, preventing and defeating terrorism against our Department of Defense assets."
Noting homeland defense relies on actionable intelligence sharing at all government levels, Meyerrose said the information sharing culture must change from "the need to know to the need to share."
Information shared in JPEN includes reports of suspected surveillance of military facilities; elicitation attempts and suspicious questioning; tests of security; unusual repetitive activities; bomb threats; and other suspicious activity. Additionally, JPEN can report incidents such as chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear alarms or alerts; fire and bomb explosions; vehicle turn-rounds; and force protection conditions.
"Information sharing provides military force protection personnel immediate access to the current threat environment and how it might affect their installation which allows them to respond more rapidly to changing threat conditions," Meyerrose said.
The general noted USNORTHCOM plans to expand JPEN DoD-wide within its area of responsibility over the next two years.
"JPEN will become one of the tools in our standard antiterrorism and force protection toolkit used by all services and the 16 DoD field activities within the NORTHCOM area of responsibility."
In other words, the DOD wants to roll out JPEN throughout all of its facilities in the United States so it can share unverified reports about just about anything, including "suspicious activity".
So far that seems like a fairly good thing to do. After all, its the military's job to guard its own bases and facilities. The problem of course is that colossal databases (of unverified reports) are just too juicy not too share.
And friends, that's just what they did. From a January 1, 2006 article by Walter Pincus in the Washington Post:
Information captured by the National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping on communications between the United States and overseas has been passed on to other government agencies, which cross-check the information with tips and information collected in other databases, current and former administration officials said.
The NSA has turned such information over to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and to other government entities, said three current and former senior administration officials, although it could not be determined which agencies received what types of information. Information from intercepts -- which typically includes records of telephone or e-mail communications -- would be made available by request to agencies that are allowed to have it, including the FBI, DIA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security, one former official said.
At least one of those organizations, the DIA, has used NSA information as the basis for carrying out surveillance of people in the country suspected of posing a threat, according to two sources. A DIA spokesman said the agency does not conduct such domestic surveillance but would not comment further. Spokesmen for the FBI, the CIA and the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, declined to comment on the use of NSA data.
DIA personnel stationed inside the United States went further on occasion, conducting physical surveillance of people or vehicles identified as a result of NSA intercepts, said two sources familiar with the operations, although the DIA said it does not conduct such activities.
The military personnel -- some of whose findings were reported to the Northern Command in Colorado -- were employed as part of the Pentagon's growing post-Sept. 11, 2001, domestic intelligence activity based on the need to protect Defense Department facilities and personnel from terrorist attacks, the sources said.
Northcom was set up in October 2002 to conduct operations to deter, prevent and defeat terrorist threats in the United States and its territories. The command runs two fusion centers that receive and analyze intelligence gathered by other government agencies.
Those Northcom centers conduct data mining, where information received from the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, state and local police, and the Pentagon's Talon system are cross-checked to see if patterns develop that could indicate terrorist activities.
Talon is a system that civilian and military personnel use to report suspicious activities around military installations. Information from these reports is fed into a database known as the Joint Protection Enterprise Network, which is managed, as is the Talon system, by the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the newest Defense Department intelligence agency to focus primarily on counterterrorism. The database is shared with intelligence and law enforcement agencies and was found last month to have contained information about peace activists and others protesting the Iraq war that appeared to have no bearing on terrorism.
Connecting the dots, the NSA did surveillance on Americans, including peace activists, and this information was then plugged into JPEN and other databases, which led to the DIA conducting physical surveillance on these people. That "data mining" that Northcom does is JPEN, run by the Pentagon's CFA agency, effectively meaning the military is running a massive counterintelligence operation on American soil.
Pincus also adds these key paragraphs:
Military officials acknowledged that such information should have been purged after 90 days and that the Talon system was being reviewed.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, deputy director for national intelligence and former head of NSA, told reporters last month that the interception of communications to the United States allegedly connected to terrorists was, in almost every case, of short duration. He also said that when the NSA creates intelligence reports based on information it collects, it minimizes the number of Americans whose identities are disclosed, doing so only when necessary.
"The same minimalizationist standards apply across the board, including for this program," he said of the domestic eavesdropping effort. "To make this very clear -- U.S. identities are minimized in all of NSA's activities, unless, of course, the U.S. identity is essential to understand the inherent intelligence value of the intelligence report." Hayden did not address the question of how long government agencies would archive or handle information from the NSA.
So not only is illegal NSA wiretapping information being collected, it's being distributed via the JPEN network to other federal agencies and local law enforcement and it's being archived longer than the legally permitted 90 days. Which means that Mr. Innocent Quaker Peace Activist's name is now floating around a military counterterrorism database, which Joe Trooper can pull up whenever he makes a traffic stop.
Props go to William Arkin, who was on the case a few days before:
The Department of Defense now says that analysts may not have followed the law and its own guidelines that require the purging of information collected on U.S. persons after 90 days. The law states that if no connection is made between named persons and foreign governments or transnational terrorist organizations or illegal activity, U.S. persons have a right to their privacy and information about them must be deleted.
Thanks to RL, I now know that the database of "suspicious incidents" in the United States first revealed by NBC Nightly News last Tuesday and subject of my blog last week is the Joint Protection Enterprise Network (JPEN) database, an intelligence and law enforcement sharing system managed by the Defense Department's Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA).
What is clear about JPEN is that the military is not inadvertently keeping information on U.S. persons. It is violating the law. And what is more, it even wants to do it more.
Follow-up reporting on the Pentagon spying story -- both by this newspaper and by the New York Times -- mistakenly refers to the suspicious incidents database that I obtained for the time period July 2004-May 2005 as the TALON database, for the Threat and Local Observation Notice reporting system.
TALON, according to the Pentagon, is merely a non-threatening compilation of "unfiltered information."
The data on incidents is used "to estimate possible threats," DOD says. "It is in effect, the place where DOD initially stores "dots," which if validated, might later be connected before an attack occurs," the department says in a written statement prepared for reporters.
"Under existing procedures, a "dot" of information that is not validated as threatening must be removed from the TALON system."
But JPEN is more than just a compilation of TALON's. It is a near real-time sharing system of raw non-validated force protection information among Department of Defense organizations and installations. Feeding into JPEN are intelligence, law enforcement, counterintelligence, and security reports, TALONs as well as other reports.
So now the larger picture is emerging. JPEN is the military's "mother of all databases" of domestic terrorism information and it is now archiving those reports beyond the legally permissible 90 days. And remember folks, this database is chock full of unverified information.
The fact that George Bush has been using the NSA as his own private spy network, bypassing even the need to consult a secret court or judge, is certainly bad. But it's even worse to know that this information is being funnelled into the military, who now has an entire agency focusing on domestic spying and surveillance, based on an enormous data mining project.
I'll leave you with a quote from the 9/11 Commission Hearing (1/26/04):
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Does NORTHCOM have an intelligence capability? Does it have its own intelligence unit?
MR. VERGA: It has its own intelligence analysis capability, as do all our Combatant Commands. The J-2 in military jargon is the intelligence officer for the command, and they take intelligence product and analyze it based on the particular command's mission. We collect intelligence only in accordance with the applicable laws, which restrict the collection of intelligence inside the United States, principally to counterintelligence in conjunction with the FBI.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: So if I understand you correctly, the Department of Defense interprets its mission on NORTHCOM with respect to force protection or any other traditional intelligence component of a command, such as NORTHCOM if it were outside the United States, to restrict the military from the collection function.
MR. VERGA: Yeah. From the gathering and collecting of intelligence inside the United States, that's correct.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: And it is, however, a customer of collected intelligence. Is that correct?
MR. VERGA: That's correct as well.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: In looking at your detailed statement, at page 8 you list a pretty good shopping list that goes on to page 9 of examples of technology transfer specific to the areas of border and transportation security, where the Department of Defense is making a contribution. Do you anywhere indicate the data-mining project that was initiated at DARPA or was then brought through this Total Information Awareness which became Terrorist Information Awareness under Admiral Poindexter?
MR. VERGA: I did not indicate that in my written statement, nor have we passed that technology on to any other agencies as of this time. There are two very similar programs, that one which is the opportunity to use -- I don't like the term data-mining, but data correlation I think is probably a more appropriate term -- data correlation techniques to do exactly what the Commissioner talked about doing manually post-9/11 but doing it in an automated basis. We also have a joint protection enterprise network which is a DOD network which we use for force protection purposes, which is the ability to exchange relevant information among the military commands associated with force protection inside the United States.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Was there some -- that program that had been initiated in DARPA, is that continuing?
MR. VERGA: The research on that is continuing as of now.
MR. BEN-VENISTE: Okay. And if Northern Command is a customer for collected intelligence, does that include intelligence about U.S. citizens?
MR. VERGA: Only to the extent that it's permitted by law for NORTHCOM to have information about U.S. persons. We conduct all of our intelligence activities inside the United States or outside the United States in accordance with the applicable law, and there are --
MR. BEN-VENISTE: I understand.
MR. VERGA: There are restrictions on the types of information that the Department of Defense can collect or hold on U.S. persons. If it's relative to the protection of U.S. installations or property, equipment, a criminal investigation or a counterintelligence investigation, then military intelligence activities could keep and hold that information, otherwise they're not permitted to.
Mr. Verga is Peter F. Verga, the Principal Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Homeland Defense, whose boss is Paul McHale. Verga also served as a liaison between the DOD and the Department of Homeland Security.
You might remember that Senator Feingold, Corzine, Wyden and Nelson on January 16, 2003 introduced a bill to freeze all data-mining by the DoD and DHS as part of their "Total Information Awareness" program. So now the military has used JPEN to circumvent the stigma of TIA (which was heavily criticized) and now feeds both gossip and NSA intercept data into its system.
I guess it's just too great a temptation for the government not to attempt to track and monitor its citizens, with the excuse that we're in a "War on Terror". You might remember my article a few days ago about how the Department of Justice went fishing for a judge to give them the authorization to track you via your cell phone without a warrant.
Clearly these reports are just the tip of the iceberg, the grand daddy dream to know what all citizens are doing, all the time. The only way we're ever going to escape this authoritarian behavior is to raise awareness about this issues.
I knew when I saw that JPEN only brought 293 hits in Google that it was time to write this article. The military's spying on Americans is something that needs to be more widely known!
Every time George W. Bush gets caught in a tight spot, he does the same thing : He plays the 9 / 11 fear card, wraps himself in the flag, emits jawdropping falsehoods and all but accuses his critics of treason. So it is with the stunning revelation that the White House has ordered the illegal, warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in brazen defiance of federal law and the U. S. Constitution.
If allowed to stand, Bush’s actions will have taken the United States a long way down the road to military dictatorship. Indeed, that’s essentially what his legalistic enablers, starting with Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and Vice President Dick Cheney, argue : that in wartime, the commander-in-chief can take any action he deems appropriate to protect the nation, bypassing Congress and the courts to assert the primacy of the presidency until declaring victory in the “war on terror.”
As terrorism is not an enemy, but a tactic—a vile, cowardly tactic, but by definition not subject to being defeated—the metaphorical war against it could last indefinitely. And as long as it lasts, the commander-in-chief rules by fiat. Our constitutional rights exist at his sufferance.
If the president, any president, can unilaterally declare the Fourth Amendment forbidding unreasonable search and seizure null and void, why not the First Amendment protecting a free press ? Why not the Second Amendment ? We can’t let terrorists have guns, can we ?
Far-fetched ? Today, maybe. Tomorrow, maybe not. This drugstore cowboy won’t be president forever, you know. Anyway, I take it to be roughly those things that Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, a Vietnam war veteran, meant when he emphasized that “I took an oath of office to the Constitution. I didn’t take an oath of office to my party or to my president.”
But there are a great many Americans who either don’t comprehend what’s at stake or cannot bring themselves to believe it. And many in Congress, Democrats and Republicans, who hesitate to order breakfast without consulting opinion polls. That’s the reason for Bush’s deceptive sound bite during a recent visit to an Army hospital in San Antonio, where he claimed that the only communications the National Security Agency monitors are from foreign terrorist cells to the United States.
Adopting a pseudo-folksy tone that makes him sound as if he’s reading “My Pet Goat” to third-graders, Bush allowed as how “If somebody from al-Qa’ida is calling you, we’d like to know why.... I think most Americans understand the need to find out what the enemy’s thinking.”
Well, no kidding. No sane person opposes that kind of surveillance. A couple of years ago, I found myself receiving suspect messages emanating somewhere in the Middle East using a hijacked, defunct e-mail address. I went directly to the FBI. Who wouldn’t ? For that matter, I’m pressing the authorities to shut down my own pet stalker, a nameless coward making what he imagines are anonymous threats.
Of course, the secret FISA court (for Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act ) required by federal law to authorize wiretaps would issue a warrant in 30 seconds flat to monitor al-Qa’ida-related communications, even several days after the fact. It’s rejected roughly a half-dozen of almost 20, 000 applications since it was set up in response to the Nixon administration’s illegal spying upon war protesters, civil rights activists and political opponents.
Indeed, the Bush White House had to “clarify” the president’s remarks, which he repeated several times. Bush’s wiretaps are known to monitor both incoming and outgoing calls, but are exponentially larger in scope. Moreover, as The Washington Post has reported, NSA has been not only “data mining” millions of communications foreign and domestic, but passing on the results to other government agencies such as the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security.
Responding to this post, a CNN spokesperson released the following statement:
"Neither CNN nor Christiane Amanpour is aware of alleged eavesdropping by the government on Ms. Amanpour and we are unable to confirm this story. We are looking into it."
WASHINGTON - The top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee told President Bush Wednesday that the White House broke the law by withholding information from the full congressional oversight committees about a new domestic surveillance program.
In a letter to Bush, Rep. Jane Harman (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., said the National Security Act requires the heads of the various intelligence agencies to keep the entire House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed of the intelligence activities of the United States."
Only in the case of a highly classified covert action can the president choose to inform a narrower group of Congress members about his decision, Harman said. That action is defined in the law as an operation to influence political, economic or military conditions of another country.
"The NSA program does not qualify as a 'covert action,'" Harman wrote.
NSA Destroyed Evidence of Domestic Spying
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Thursday 05 January 2006
The National Security Agency, the top-secret spy shop that has been secretly eavesdropping on Americans under a plan authorized by President Bush four years ago, destroyed the names of thousands of Americans and US companies it collected on its own volition following 9/11, because the agency feared it would be taken to task by lawmakers for conducting unlawful surveillance on United States citizens without authorization from a court, according to a little known report published in October 2001 and intelligence officials familiar with the NSA's operations.
NSA lawyers advised the agency to immediately destroy the names of thousands of American citizens and businesses it collected shortly after 9/11 in its quest to target terrorists in this country. NSA lawyers told the agency that the surveillance was illegal and that it could not share the data it collected with the CIA or other intelligence agencies.
The lawyers said the surveillance could result in numerous lawsuits from people identified in the surveillance reports, two former US officials told the Houston Chronicle in an October 27, 2001, report, and was illegal despite any terrorist threat that existed in the days following 9/11.
By law, the NSA cannot spy on a US citizen, an immigrant lawfully admitted to this country for permanent residence, or a US corporation. But, with the permission of a special court, it can target foreigners inside the United States, including diplomats.
James Moore is an Emmy-winning former television news correspondent and the co-author of the bestselling, Bush's Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential. He has been writing and reporting from Texas for the past 25 years on the rise of Rove and Bush and has traveled extensively on every presidential campaign since 1976.
There are times in which it is easy to be suspicious. We can get to that feeling fairly quickly if we even pay slight attention. I've been trying to get over this odd emotion for at least a year. I can't find any rationale for letting it go, though I want desperately not to have these thoughts.
This week last year I was preparing for a trip to Ohio to conduct interviews and research for a new book I was writing. My airline tickets had been purchased on line and the morning of departure I went to the Internet to print out my boarding pass. I got a message that said, "Not Allowed." Several subsequent tries failed. Surely, I thought, it's just a glitch within the airline's servers or software.
I made it a point to arrive very early at the airport. My reservation was confirmed before I left home. I went to the electronic kiosk and punched in my confirmation number to print out my boarding pass and luggage tags. Another error message appeared, "Please see agent."
I did. She took my Texas driver's license and punched in the relevant information to her computer system.
"I'm sorry, sir," she said. "There seems to be a problem. You've been placed on the No Fly Watch List."
"Excuse me?"
"I'm afraid there isn't much more that I can tell you," she explained. "It's just the list that's maintained by TSA to check for people who might have terrorist connections."
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, January 5, 2006; Page A02
The members of a secret federal court that oversees government surveillance in espionage and terrorism cases are scheduled to receive a classified briefing Monday from top Justice Department and intelligence officials about a controversial warrantless-eavesdropping program, according to sources familiar with the arrangements.
Several judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court said they want to hear directly from administration officials why President Bush believed he had the authority to order, without the court's permission, wiretapping of some phone calls and e-mails after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Of serious concern to several judges is whether any information gleaned from intercepts by the National Security Agency was later used to gain their permission for wiretaps without the source being disclosed.
By Bill Gertz
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
January 5, 2006
A former National Security Agency official wants to tell Congress about electronic intelligence programs that he asserts were carried out illegally by the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Russ Tice, a whistleblower who was dismissed from the NSA last year, stated in letters to the House and Senate intelligence committees that he is prepared to testify about highly classified Special Access Programs, or SAPs, that were improperly carried out by both the NSA and the DIA.
"I intend to report to Congress probable unlawful and unconstitutional acts conducted while I was an intelligence officer with the National Security Agency and with the Defense Intelligence Agency," Mr. Tice stated in the Dec. 16 letters, copies of which were obtained by The Washington Times.
The letters were sent the same day that the New York Times revealed that the NSA was engaged in a clandestine eavesdropping program that bypassed the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. The FISA court issues orders for targeted electronic and other surveillance by the government.
President Bush said Sunday that the NSA spying is "a necessary program" aimed at finding international terrorists by tracking phone numbers linked to al Qaeda.
President Bush and his minions keep offering up "new and improved" (though already disproved) defenses for the NSA domestic spying operation.
David Sirota offers a terrific breakdown of the shifts from "it was legal" to "we needed to act faster" to "the paperwork was too hard."
Now we have a new White House strategy: straight-up lying. (Here's what Holden had to say about it).
Of course, GOP loyalists have been quick to follow the administration's lead. In fact, over the holidays I ran into many prominent Republicans who dutifully mouthed the administration's talking points.
So, in case you, like me, run into Republicans in the course of your life -- or even if you only run into them on TV -- and feel the need for a quick response to set the record straight, here is a handy pocket guide.
Lie #1:
Trying to prove that he wasn't acting unilaterally and without oversight, the president has taken to claiming that the spy program was "constantly reviewed by Justice Department officials" -- making it sound to all the world that the initiative had received the law enforcement community's seal of approval.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
As the New York Timeshas reported, there was widespread concern about the legality of the program at the Justice department, with a number of high-ranking officials raising objections to it, including deputy attorney general James Comey, who refused to sign off on its continuation. Comey's refusal prompted Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales (in his role as White House counsel) to go to the bedside of then-Attorney General
John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery. But even Ashcroft had his doubts about the constitutionality of the program -- which tells you all you need to know about how dicey it really was.
Their concerns led the White House to add some restrictions to the program -- but these restrictions weren't actually very restrictive since they still allowed the NSA to listen in on whatever calls it wanted without having to get the specific approval of Justice Department officials.
So when Bush and company try to sell the idea that Justice was part of the no-warrant team, don't buy it. The program may have been "constantly reviewed" but it wasn't "approved."
Lie # 2:
Lie #2 is a companion to Lie #1's implication that everybody was on board with the spy program. It's the president's insistence that it was "reviewed by members of the United States Congress" and that it's "a program to which the Congress has been briefed."
Again, it sounds like the legislative branch was consulted and signed off on what the White House was doing. Again, not true.
Here are the facts: a very, very limited number of Senators and House members were briefed on the program -- with 14 of 535 senators and representatives receiving briefings over the last four years. What's more, those receiving these highly classified briefings were strictly prohibited from speaking about what they heard -- which kind of puts a crimp in one's ability to mount any opposition to the program. Former intelligence committee counsel Suzanne Spaulding offers chapter and verse on this "Congress has been briefed" smokescreen.
And getting briefed is a far, far, far cry from exerting oversight -- or even offering an opinion. As Tom Daschle puts it, "We were told we were being informed and not consulted."
Indeed, as Media Matters points out: "Of the seven Democratic lawmakers known to have been briefed by the program, three objected at the time and three more say they weren't given adequate information about the program." Jay Rockefeller put his objections into a letter to Dick Cheney, saying the program raised "profound oversight issues." Nancy Pelosi also put her concerns in writing. Bob Graham says his briefing left out any mention that the NSA would be listening in on calls of U.S. citizens. Even Jane Harman, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and a supporter of the program, told me over the weekend that she wants to introduce legislation to curb its excesses.
So much for the idea that Congress actually had a hand in this.
Lie #3:
Bush has repeatedly attempted to underplay the reach of the spy operation. "This is a limited program," he claimed recently, "designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America. And I repeat, limited. And it's limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States."
Hogwash. First of all, it's not true that the program was "limited to calls from outside the U.S." Even the White House admits that the NSA listened in on calls initiated in the U.S. too.
Second, I don't know about you, but the fact that the NSA has eavesdropped on thousands of people doesn't strike me as "limited."
And how does that stat jibe with the president's claim that the warrantless wiretaps were "limited" to "known numbers of al Qaeda members or affiliates"? Are there really thousands of known al Qaeda members or affiliates in the U.S.?
Plus, the program allowed the NSA to tap into our telecommunication system's main arteries, creating what the New York Times termed "a large data-mining operation."
I guess it all depends on what your definition of "limited" is. And of "reviewed." And of "briefed." And of "lying through your teeth."
That is the only way to read NBC's just-issued statement on why they deleted key portions of Andrea Mitchell's interview after we reported on it here earlier today.
[Background: We reported earlier today that NBC's Andrea Mitchell, while interviewing New York Times' reporter James Risen (the man who broke the domestic spying scandal) asked Risen if there was any evidence to suggest Bush was spying on US journalists. When Risen said none that he knew of, Mitchell then pressed the issue again and asked if there was any evidence that Bush was spying on CNN's Christiane Amanpour. We reported on the fact that Mitchell seemed to know something, and shortly thereafter NBC deleted the section of the transcript dealing with Amanpour.]
Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on 'NBC Nightly News' nor on any other NBC News program. We removed that section of the transcript so that we may further continue our inquiry.
This is quite big. Note exactly what NBC said.
- NBC did not say it pulled the references to Bush spying on Amanpour because it was inappropriate conjecture about something which Andrea Mitchell had no evidence.
- No, NBC said it pulled the references because it was still investigating the accusation and didn't want to scoop itself before it was finished investigating. And make no mistake, NBC is "continuing their inquiry."
- UPDATE: One more point. NBC did NOT delete the part of the interview preceding the Amanpour question - where Mitchell asks if any reporters are being spied on. They only deleted the follow-up question about whether Amanpour was being spied on. Thus, their premature release of info regarding an "ongoing inquiry" wasn't about reporters generally - or they'd have deleted that part of the interview as well - they only deleted the Amanpour follow-up, suggesting that it's the question of whether Bush spied on Amanpour that they have been, and are still, investigating.
New York Times reporter James Risen first broke the story two weeks ago that the National Security Agency began spying on domestic communications soon after 9/11. In a new book out Tuesday, "State of War," he says it was a lot bigger than that. Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell sat down with Risen to talk about the NSA, and the run-up to the war in Iraq....
Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net?
Risen: No, I don't. It's not clear to me. That's one of the questions we'll have to look into the future. Were there abuses of this program or not? I don't know the answer to that
Mitchell: You don't have any information, for instance, that a very prominent journalist, Christiane Amanpour, might have been eavesdropped upon?
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE
Published: January 4, 2006
WASHINGTON, Jan. 3 - The National Security Agency acted on its own authority, without a formal directive from President Bush, to expand its domestic surveillance operations in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to declassified documents released Tuesday.
The N.S.A. operation prompted questions from a leading Democrat, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who said in an Oct. 11, 2001, letter to a top intelligence official that she was concerned about the agency's legal authority to expand its domestic operations, the documents showed.
Ms. Pelosi's letter, which was declassified at her request, showed much earlier concerns among lawmakers about the agency's domestic surveillance operations than had been previously known. Similar objections were expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, in a secret letter to Vice President Dick Cheney nearly two years later.
The letter from Ms. Pelosi, the House minority leader, also suggested that the security agency, whose mission is to eavesdrop on foreign communications, moved immediately after the Sept. 11 attacks to identify terror suspects at home by loosening restrictions on domestic eavesdropping.
The congresswoman wrote to Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then head of the N.S.A., to express her concerns after she and other members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees received a classified briefing from General Hayden on Oct. 1, 2001, about the agency's operations.
Ms. Pelosi, then the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said, "I am concerned whether, and to what extent, the National Security Agency has received specific presidential authorization for the operations you are conducting."
The answer, General Hayden suggested in his response to Ms. Pelosi a week later, was that it had not. "In my briefing," he wrote, "I was attempting to emphasize that I used my authorities to adjust N.S.A.'s collection and reporting."
WASHINGTON, Dec. 31 - A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.
The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.
The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.
With Mr. Comey unwilling to sign off on the program, the White House went to Mr. Ashcroft - who had been in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital with pancreatitis and was housed under unusually tight security - because "they needed him for certification," according to an official briefed on the episode. The official, like others who discussed the issue, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.
Mr. Comey declined to comment, and Mr. Gonzales could not be reached.
Accounts differed as to exactly what was said at the hospital meeting between Mr. Ashcroft and the White House advisers. But some officials said that Mr. Ashcroft, like his deputy, appeared reluctant to give Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales his authorization to continue with aspects of the program in light of concerns among some senior government officials about whether the proper oversight was in place at the security agency and whether the president had the legal and constitutional authority to conduct such an operation.
It is unclear whether the White House ultimately persuaded Mr. Ashcroft to give his approval to the program after the meeting or moved ahead without it.
The White House and Mr. Ashcroft, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment Saturday on the hospital meeting. A White House spokeswoman, Jeannie Mamo, said she could not discuss any aspect of the meeting or the internal debate surrounding it, but said: "As the president has stated, the intelligence activities that have been under way to prevent future terrorist attacks have been approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department."
The domestic eavesdropping program was publicly disclosed in mid-December by The New York Times. President Bush, in acknowledging the existence of the program in a televised appearance two weeks ago, said that tight controls had been imposed over the surveillance operation and that the program was reviewed every 45 days by top government officials, including at the Justice Department.
"The review includes approval by our nation's top legal officials, including the attorney general and the counsel to the president," Mr. Bush said, adding that he had personally reauthorized the program's use more than 30 times since it began. He gave no indication of any internal dissent over the reauthorization.
Questions about the surveillance operation are likely to be central to a Congressional hearing planned by Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the Judiciary Committee. Mr. Specter, like some other Republicans and many Democrats in Congress, has voiced deep concerns about the program and Mr. Bush's legal authority to bypass the courts to order domestic wiretaps without warrants.
What is known is that in early 2004, about the time of the hospital visit, the White House suspended parts of the program for several months and moved ahead with more stringent requirements on the security agency on how the program was used, in part to guard against abuses.
The concerns within the Justice Department appear to have led, at least in part, to the decision to suspend and revamp the program, officials said. The Justice Department then oversaw a secret audit of the surveillance program.
The audit examined a selection of cases to see how the security agency was running the program. Among other things, it looked at how agency officials went about determining that they had probable cause to believe that people in the United States, including American citizens, had sufficient ties to Al Qaeda to justify eavesdropping on their phone calls and e-mail messages without a court warrant. That review is not known to have found any instances of abuses.
The warrantless domestic eavesdropping program was first authorized by President Bush in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, officials said. Initially, it was focused on communications into and out of Afghanistan, including calls between Afghanistan and the United States, people familiar with the operation said. But the program quickly expanded.
Several senior government officials have said that when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with it, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, officials have said.
At its outset in 2002, the surveillance operation was so highly classified that even Larry Thompson, the deputy attorney general to Mr. Ashcroft, who was active in most of the government's most classified counterterrorism operations, was not given access to the program.
That led to uncertainties about the chain of command in overseeing law enforcement activities connected to the program, officials said, and it appears to have spurred concerns within the Justice Department over its use. Mr. Thompson's successor, Mr. Comey, was eventually authorized to take part in the program and to review intelligence material that grew out of it, and officials said he played a part in overseeing the reforms that were put in place in 2004.
BREAKING NEWS
NBC, MSNBC and news services
Updated: 10:50 a.m. ET Dec. 30, 2005
WASHINGTON - The U.S. Justice Department has launched an investigation to see who disclosed details about a secret domestic eavesdropping operation, department officials said Friday.
“We are opening an investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of classified materials related to the NSA,” one official said, referring to the National Security Agency.
President Bush earlier this month said that he presumed such an investigation was under way. The program, which authorized telecommunications surveillance without a court order, was disclosed by The New York Times, which attributed its information to sources.
in her first BRAD BLOG Guest Blog, the 'Gag Ordered' FBI Translator Cites 'Patriotic Duty' of America's Intelligence Officials to Make Themselves Available for Congressional Testimony, Oversight .
ED. NOTE: FBI whistleblower, Sibel Edmonds' story has been partially told over the last several years in several different media outlets, including a lead story on CBS' 60 Minutes and more recently, a detailed feature in Vanity Fair. The information she has been able to reveal publicly about her experience during her time translating for the FBI has so far been limited given the arcane "States Secrets" privilege that the Dept. of Justice and the Bush Administration has invoked to effectively place a "gag order" on the information she has shared with internal FBI investigators as well as the Dept. of Justice's Inspector General who found her allegations "credible" and "serious" and "warrant[ing] a thorough and careful review by the FBI." Edmonds was fired by the FBI after voicing allegations including those about possible espionage inside the bureau. She has also testified to the 9/11 Commission, U.S. Senators Grassley (R-IA) and Leahy (D-VT) and many other officials on both the Senate Judiciary and Intelligence Committees. Her case recently made its way to the Supreme Court who refused to hear it on November 28, 2005, thus ending her legal options to have her case heard publicly. More info on her and her co-writer William Weaver follows her editorial below.
Without whistleblowers the public would never know of the many abuses of constitutional rights by the government. Whistleblowers, Truth Tellers, are responsible for the disclosure that President George W. Bush ordered unconstitutional surveillance of American citizens. These constitutional lifeguards take their patriotic oaths to heart and soul: Rather than complying with classification and secrecy orders designed to protect officials engaging in criminal conduct, whistleblowers chose to risk their livelihoods and the wrath of their agencies to get the truth out. But will they be listened to by those who are charged with accountability?
By Jon Van
Chicago Tribune staff reporter
Published December 29, 2005
In the days following revelations that the Bush administration ordered the National Security Agency to spy on domestic telephone and Internet communications without a court order, one involved party has remained silent. The nation's telephone giants--which control the data pipelines--have neither commented on nor denied their reported participation, nor have they reacted to the charge that they may have been complicit in violating privacy rights.
But historically the telecom companies have cooperated with the government on wholesale wiretapping, and the Bush administration's anti-terrorism programs appear to be no exception. Without commenting directly on a classified topic, industry officials--when asked--suggested that they would not stand in the way of a request for help. "Our members have worked for years with law enforcement with an objective to preserve lawfully authorized surveillance," said Tom Amontree, a spokesman for the US Telecom Association, the industry group representing most phone companies. "We have no comment on national security matters."
An hour after the New York Times described Bush’s illegal surveillance program, I wrote on the Huffington Post that Bush had committed a crime, a “High Crime,” and should be impeached.
Was there then enough evidence to justify the beginning of an attempt to impeach the President?
No.
Did the President have a good defense that he relied on Gonzalez, Ashcroft and the best lawyers in the country (in the Solicitor General’s and Department of Justice’s offices)?
Yes.
Would any significant number of Americans of Congressmen then support such a process?
No.
Given all that, would the turmoil and consequential turmoil have justified the start of that brutal process?
No.
But that has all changed.
Because we shall soon see the consequences of those warrantless searches, the consequences of the government’s five years of secrecy, and even the citizens of the “Red States” will be outraged. Firstly, the warrantless taps will infect hundreds of “terrorist” and criminal cases throughout the country. Not only future cases, but past and present cases, even if there were convictions or plea bargains after the survellance started.
The defendants in “terrorist” and other infected criminal cases, the Court must find, must get access to everything, or very close to everything to make sure they were never improperly surveilled.
The Bush Administration, in these cases will refuse, as did the Nixon administration, to divulge information on national security grounds. Many alleged critical cases must then be dismissed. It will include Organized Crime and drug cases.
The entire criminal process will be brought to a standstill. Cases that should take six months to a year, will take three times as long, as motions go up and down the appellate ladder – as federal judges trial disagree with each other. Appellate Courts will disagree on issues so novel and so important that the Supreme Court will look at them.
Secondly, there will be an endless amounts of civil suits, that we can see will result in substantial damage awards. Commentators claimed there cannot be suits because no one has standing to challenge the surveillance. They are wrong. They do not remember the history of the Palmer Raids in the 1920’s, the surveillance in the Sixties and Seventies. The future will show both the enormous information the new technology has gathered but also the dishonest minimization of the extent of the surveillance.
That minimization is standard operating procedure for governments, whether they be run by Democrats or Republicans. Thirdly, and most importantly, it is safe to preduct there will be coverups. This administration is not known for its candor.
The coverup starts by trying to get away with the vauge and meaningless defenses. Both Nixon and Clinton tried that. When that doesn’t work, the coverup will be based on a foundation of small lies. Both Nixon and Clinton tried that.
We do not yet know what the FISA judges already fear – that they have been not just ignored by the executive but misused. The public shall also learn about the FISA judges’ misuse of the FISA courts and their warrants. The courts were created to permit eavesdropping and electronic surveillance, not physical break-ins.
But the facts will show that the Bush administration, with the knowledge, and at times, the consent of, the FISA judges, conducted illegal physical break-ins - break-ins that to this day, the involved person, is unaware of. Were the results of these “terrorist” break-ins then given to criminal authorities to start unrelated prosecutions? Of course.
The American public will also learn what this Administration has thus far successfully hidden. When Bush came into office, he signed an Exeutive Order making all of his, and his father’s, papers privileged. The order, extending 12 years out, also says if the President is incapacitated, then a third person can execute the privilege. This means anybody – a wife, a family lawyer, a child. The order also says the Vice President’s papers are privileged. It is an extraordinary Executive Order – this has never been anything like this. No one ever suggested a Vice President has executive privilege. If we do not find out what they are hiding, we will see witholding on a scale never before seen. He will no longer be able to use 9/11 and the war on terror as an excuse. It will confirm the fact that illegality and secrecy existed long before 9/11, that it started as soon as Bush-Cheney-Rumsfield got into office. It will show deliberate attempts to avoid any judicial or legislative oversight of the illegal use of executive privilege.
Impeachment procedures will come not because of wrongdoing but because of the discovery of lies.
Both Nixon and Cliton faced impeachments because they lied. It was inconceivable before the Nixon and Clinton impeachment procedures began that there could be, or would be a country or Senate that would be responsive to it. In the Nixon case, it spiraled from a petty break-in – in Clinton’s case from a petty sexual act.
But what Bush has done, and will do, to protect himself is not petty. It goes to the heart of the government. He already has a history of misleading the public on the searches conducted thus far. As he and his colleagues seek to minimize the vast amount of data collection, the lies will necessarily expand to cover the wrongdoing. Bush can be brought down.
WASHINGTON (AFP) - Lawyers for an American 'war on terror' detainee said they had petitioned the Supreme Court to examine the US president's powers, citing "the danger of an unchecked Executive Branch". In a filing on Tuesday, lawyers for terror suspect Jose Padilla cited evasive government moves to avoid a high court examination of his case as reason for requesting a "certiorari" review of a lower court decision challenging the president's wartime powers.
"The government's actions highlight the need for this court to grant certiorari to preserve the vital checks and balances" implicit in the US Constitution, the petition said. Referring to a series of "strategic maneuvers" to keep Padilla's case from being heard in court, the petition said the government's actions "highlight the danger of an unchecked Executive Branch."
Padilla's detention "raises questions of profound constitutional importance about the government's military power over citizens in the homeland," the petition said. The petition comes as there are growing questions about President George W. Bush's use of executive war powers to authorize certain treatments of detainees -- allegedly including torture -- and surveillance of US citizens without court orders.
Padilla, a US citizen who converted to Islam, was arrested in May 2002 after returning from Pakistan and has been detained without trial ever since in a military prison as an "enemy combatant".
NEW YORK (AP) — The National Security Agency's Internet site has been placing files on visitors' computers that can track their Web surfing activity despite strict federal rules banning most of them.
These files, known as "cookies," disappeared after a privacy activist complained and The Associated Press made inquiries this week, and agency officials acknowledged Wednesday they had made a mistake.
Nonetheless, the issue raises questions about privacy at a spy agency already on the defensive amid reports of a secretive eavesdropping program in the United States.
"Considering the surveillance power the NSA has, cookies are not exactly a major concern," said Ari Schwartz, associate director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a privacy advocacy group in Washington, D.C. "But it does show a general lack of understanding about privacy rules when they are not even following the government's very basic rules for Web privacy."
Until Tuesday, the NSA site created two cookie files that do not expire until 2035 — likely beyond the life of any computer in use today.
By Toni Locy
Associated Press Writer
Originally published December 28, 2005, 4:10 PM EST
WASHINGTON // Lawyers for an Islamic scholar and a Fort Lauderdale computer programmer want federal judges to determine whether evidence used against their clients was gathered by a secret domestic spying program.
Jonathan Turley, a George Washington University law professor, said today there "seems to be a great likelihood" that Ali al-Timimi, a northern Virginia Islamic cleric convicted for exhorting followers after the Sept. 11 attacks to wage war against U.S. troops overseas, was "subject to this operation."
Attorney Kenneth Swartz of Miami said he wants to know whether any evidence was gathered by the National Security Agency without a warrant and used to convince a secret court to authorize six years of wiretaps of his client, Adham Amin Hassoun.
Last month, Hassoun and Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen held for nearly four years as an "enemy combatant," were charged with raising money to support violent Islamic fighters outside the United States.
President Bush has acknowledged that within days of the Sept. 11 attacks he authorized the NSA to conduct warrantless intercepts of conversations between people in the United States and others abroad who had suspected ties to al-Qaida or its affiliates.
President Bush secretly ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on the international communications of U.S. citizens in violation of the warrant requirement of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in the aftermath of the September 11, 2001, abominations.
The eavesdropping continued for four years, long after fears of imminent September 11 repetitions had lapsed, before the disclosure by the New York Times this month.
Mr. Bush has continued the NSA spying without congressional authorization or ratification of the earlier interceptions. (In sharp contrast, Abraham Lincoln obtained congressional ratification for the emergency measures taken in the wake of Fort Sumter, including suspending the writ of habeas corpus).
Mr. Bush has adamantly refused to acknowledge any constitutional limitations on his power to wage war indefinitely against international terrorism, other than an unelaborated assertion he is not a dictator. Claims to inherent authority to break and enter homes, to intercept purely domestic communications, or to herd citizens into concentration camps reminiscent of World War II, for example, have not been ruled out if the commander in chief believes the measures would help defeat al Qaeda or sister terrorist threats.
Volumes of war powers nonsense have been assembled to defend Mr. Bush's defiance of the legislative branch and claim of wartime omnipotence so long as terrorism persists, i.e., in perpetuity. Congress should undertake a national inquest into his conduct and claims to determine whether impeachable usurpations are at hand. As Alexander Hamilton explained in Federalist 65, impeachment lies for "abuse or violation of some public trust," misbehaviors that "relate chiefly to injuries done immediately to the society itself."
In Crawford, Texas, where Bush is spending the holidays, his spokesman, Trent Duffy, defended what he called a "limited program."
"This is not about monitoring phone calls designed to arrange Little League practice or what to bring to a potluck dinner," he told reporters. "These are designed to monitor calls from very bad people to very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings, and churches."
Wow, very bad people who have a history of blowing up commuter trains, weddings and churches, yet Bush never sought a court order to conduct the snooping because he thought a court wouldn't let him?! Huh? Let me repeat, the people they spied on "have a history of blowing up trains, weddings and churches." If that's true, then any court in the land would haven given Bush a search warrant.
But there's a larger question. If Bush is now telling the truth about who these people are, then pray tell, what the hell was Bush doing letting hundreds if not thousands of people "who have a history of blowing up trains, wedding and churches" run around free inside the US for the past 4 years?
Two of the most powerful moments of political déjà vu I have ever experienced took place recently in the context of the Bush administration's defense of presidentially ordered electronic spying on American citizens.
First, in the best tradition of former President Bill Clinton's classic, "it-all-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-is-is" defense, President Bush responded to a question at a White House news conference about what now appears to be a clear violation of federal electronic monitoring laws by trying to argue that he had not ordered the National Security Agency to "monitor" phone and e-mail communications of American citizens without court order; he had merely ordered them to "detect" improper communications.
This example of presidential phrase parsing was followed quickly by the president's press secretary, Scott McLellan, dead-panning to reporters that when Bush said a couple of years ago that he would never allow the NSA to monitor Americans without a court order, what he really meant was something different than what he actually said. If McLellan's last name had been McCurry, and the topic an illicit relationship with a White House intern rather than illegal spying on American citizens, I could have easily been listening to a White House news conference at the height of the Clinton impeachment scandal.
On foreign policy, domestic issues, relationships with Congress, and even their selection of White House Christmas cards and china patterns, presidents are as different as night and day. But when caught with a hand in the cookie jar and their survival called into question, administrations circle the wagons, fall back on time-worn but often effective defense mechanisms, and seamlessly morph into one another.
First, we get a president bobbing and weaving like Muhammad Ali. He knows he can't really tell the truth and he knows he can't rely only on lies. The resulting dilemma leads him to veer from unintelligible muttering to attempts to distract, and then to chest-beating bravado and attacks on his accusers.
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
and JAMES RISEN
Published: December 28, 2005
WASHINGTON, Dec. 27 - Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.
The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out.
The expected legal challenges, in cases from Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, add another dimension to the growing controversy over the agency's domestic surveillance program and could jeopardize some of the Bush administration's most important courtroom victories in terror cases, legal analysts say.
The question of whether the N.S.A. program was used in criminal prosecutions and whether it improperly influenced them raises "fascinating and difficult questions," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has studied terrorism prosecutions.
"It seems to me that it would be relevant to a person's case," Professor Tobias said. "I would expect the government to say that it is highly sensitive material, but we have legal mechanisms to balance the national security needs with the rights of defendants. I think judges are very conscientious about trying to sort out these issues and balance civil liberties and national security."
While some civil rights advocates, legal experts and members of Congress have said that President Bush did not have the authority to order warrantless eavesdropping by the security agency, the White House and the Justice Department continued on Tuesday to defend the legality and propriety of the program.
Trent Duffy, a spokesman for the White House, declined to comment in Crawford, Tex., when asked about a report in The New York Times that the security agency had tapped into some of the country's main telephone arteries to conduct broader data-mining operations in the search for terrorists.
December 28, 2005 -- BREAKING NEWS. NSA spied on its own employees, other U.S. intelligence personnel, and their journalist and congressional contacts. WMR has learned that the National Security Agency (NSA), on the orders of the Bush administration, eavesdropped on the private conversations and e-mail of its own employees, employees of other U.S. intelligence agencies -- including the CIA and DIA -- and their contacts in the media, Congress, and oversight agencies and offices.
The journalist surveillance program, code named "Firstfruits," was part of a Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) program that was maintained at least until October 2004 and was authorized by then-DCI Porter Goss. Firstfruits was authorized as part of a DCI "Countering Denial and Deception" program responsible to an entity known as the Foreign Denial and Deception Committee (FDDC). Since the intelligence community's reorganization, the DCI has been replaced by the Director of National Intelligence headed by John Negroponte and his deputy, former NSA director Gen. Michael Hayden.
Firstfruits was a database that contained both the articles and the transcripts of telephone and other communications of particular Washington journalists known to report on sensitive U.S. intelligence activities, particularly those involving NSA. According to NSA sources, the targeted journalists included author James Bamford, the New York Times' James Risen, the Washington Post's Vernon Loeb, the New Yorker's Seymour Hersh, the Washington Times' Bill Gertz, UPI's John C. K. Daly, and this editor [Wayne Madsen], who has written about NSA for The Village Voice, CAQ, Intelligence Online, and the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC).
In addition, beginning in 2001 but before the 9-11 attacks, NSA began to target anyone in the U.S. intelligence community who was deemed a "disgruntled employee." According to NSA sources, this surveillance was a violation of United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18 and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The surveillance of U.S. intelligence personnel by other intelligence personnel in the United States and abroad was conducted without any warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The targeted U.S. intelligence agency personnel included those who made contact with members of the media, including the journalists targeted by Firstfruits, as well as members of Congress, Inspectors General, and other oversight agencies. Those discovered to have spoken to journalists and oversight personnel were subjected to sudden clearance revocation and termination as "security risks."
From the Bush Administration perspective, apparently FISA was not working. But what does that mean exactly? And what did the Bush Adminisitration need to do to make it work? John Ashcroft's June 8, 2004 testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee provides some of the most revealing insights into the Bush Administration ethics of mendacity, secretiveness and incompetence. In particular, the questioning by Senator Michael DeWine (R-OH) of Ashcroft demonstrates that the "failings" of FISA are solely the responsibility of the Justice Department -- Justice, and thus the Bush Administration simply did not do its job on FISA, and the War on Terror, contrary to Justice's current claim that "FISA could not have provided the speed and agility required":
[SEN.] DEWINE: The FISA statute is one of the most important weapons we have in the fight against terrorism. In fact, really, I'm not sure there's anything that the Justice Department does that's more important than administering the FISA statute. Unfortunately, it appears that we're still having problems with the FISA process.
On the plus side, it seems as though the Justice Department has been more aggressive in filing FISA applications, with the result that last year we saw record number of applications: over 1,700 according to your testimony. Unfortunately, however, many applications are still sitting and waiting to be processed. The staff of the independent 9/11 commission tells us, and I quote, "The application process, nonetheless, continue to be long and slow."
And that process is still subject to, and again I quote, "bottlenecks."bSimilarly, Mr. Attorney General, on May 20th, at the last FBI oversight hearing held by this committee, I asked FBI Director Mueller how well he thought the FISA statute was being utilized. Frankly, he seemed a little uncomfortable with the question. And he didn't want to go into much detail because some of the information, understandably, might be classified. But what he said was this -- and I must tell you, Mr. Attorney General, I was very concerned by what he did say, and let me quote -- and this is a direct quote -- "We still have concerns. There is still frustration out there in the field in certain areas where, because we've had to prioritize, we cannot get to certain requests for FISA as fast as perhaps we might have in the past," end of quote.
So you've got the independent 9/11 commission saying that. You've got the FBI director with his very candid comments to our committee. Other information that I receive indicates there's a bottleneck. You know, I understand that you're doing a better job. You've put more resources into this. But governance is priorities. And I don't know anything that is more important that you all are doing than getting these FISA applications through.
And if I was somebody out in the field and I had worked up a FISA application and I thought it was the most important thing in the world and I'd worked it up and I had everything lined up. And it was sitting there, sitting in Washington, and I couldn't get it through, I would be very discouraged. I think it has a -- I think it has to have a demoralizing affect on the people out in the field.
And there's still a problem there. I mean, there is still a problem. And I guess my question is what can you do to put more resources on this? I just think, Mr. Attorney General, you've got a ways to go on this. And I just don't think there's anything more important that you're doing. And I just think you need to put more resources on it and prioritize this.
ASHCROFT: Let me thank you for raising this issue. It's a matter of great concern to me. The first or second thing that happened to me after I got into office was a call from the FISA court saying that we needed to renovate the FISA operation. We did. And that was early in the year 2001.
And then when September 11th hit, the demand for FISA coverage skyrocketed. It's increased by -- well, the numbers really aren't very helpful. We can say by the number of petitions up by 85 percent, but some of these are very substantial multiple surveillance petitions so that it doesn't really reflect the true numbers total.
I think there a couple of things that we wanted to do. We want to restructure the operations so that we don't have a duplicate effort, one on the FBI side, and then have it done all over again when it comes to Justice and redone. And we want to be able to work promptly by avoiding those kind of bottlenecks.
In April of this year, I combined -- in response to these issues, and part of them I think you had written about or conferred with me about, as I recall... we created a special group of attorneys to look at this out of the Office of Intelligence Policy and Review to cut down on the costs of moving across the street back and forth to the FBI and moving from the field to Washington.
And we are making progress. The problem is remediating. We have fewer pipeline FISAs now than before but we're not home yet. And so we will continue to work in that respect. I have asked, in each of the past three weeks, the chairman of this task force for reports and the reports are encouraging.
I would just say this: that we are prioritizing among FISA applications... so that at least the most promising of those applications are the ones that would be first attended to. But, frankly, it's not easy always to know where you're going to get the most, the best intelligence. And it is not a situation where I'm confident in saying, "Well, oh well, we don't have to worry about that one. That might not be as productive..."
[DEWINE]: And, Mr. Attorney General, my time is up. But I think that's just the point. I think you are prioritizing and you have to, but I think it's dangerous when you have to prioritize. I think you're doing a better job, but all the information I can get indicates that we've still got a ways to go. I think you all can do a better job. And I just think that you need to put more resources on this. And I would just encourage you to put more resources on this.
I don't know that there's anything more important that you're doing in the war on terrorism. And I don't know how to say it any stronger: You've got to put more resources on this; you've got to do a better job.
Translation --- Justice, and thus the Bush Administration, was screwing up the FISA applications. The FISA Court was not the problem. Justice, and thus the Bush Administration, was the problem.
Back when former President Clinton was being impeached, many of our current Congressmen and Senators were involved in the process. Men like Tom DeLay, Bill Frist, and Henry Hyde, among others, came out strongly in support of the impeachment of Clinton based upon the highest standard of "rule of law."
Today, as impeachment makes its way back into the American vernacular, this time related to George W. Bush, the following quotes become quite illuminating.
While reading them, perhaps ask yourself, "What happened to the "rule of law?"
"This nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law. Sometimes hard, sometimes unpleasant, this path relies on truth, justice and the rigorous application of the principle that no man is above the law. Now, the other road is the path of least resistance. This is where we start making exceptions to our laws based on poll numbers and spin control. This is when we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us, when we ignore the facts in order to cover up the truth.
No man is above the law, and no man is below the law. That's the principle that we all hold very dear in this country."
"I suggest impeachment is like beauty: apparently in the eye of the beholder. But I hold a different view. And it's not a vengeful one, it's not vindictive, and it's not craven. It's just a concern for the Constitution and a high respect for the rule of law. ... as a lawyer and a legislator for most of my very long life, I have a particular reverence for our legal system. It protects the innocent, it punishes the guilty, it defends the powerless, it guards freedom, it summons the noblest instincts of the human spirit.
The rule of law protects you and it protects me from the midnight fire on our roof or the 3 a.m. knock on our door."
"What is on trial here is the truth and the rule of law. Our failure to bring President Clinton to account for his lying under oath and preventing the courts from administering equal justice under law, will cause a cancer to be present in our society for generations. I want those parents who ask me the questions, to be able to tell their children that even if you are president of the United States, if you lie when sworn "to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth," you will face the consequences of that action, even when you don't accept the responsibility for them."
"There can be no shading of right and wrong. The complicated currents that have coursed through this impeachment process are many. But after stripping away the underbrush of legal technicalities and nuance, I find that the President abused his sacred power by lying and obstructing justice. How can parents instill values and morality in their children? How can educators teach our children? How can the rule of law for every American be applied equally if we have two standards of justice in America--one for the powerful and the other for the rest of us?"
"I will have no part in the creation of a constitutional double-standard to benefit the President. He is not above the law. If an ordinary citizen committed these crimes, he would go to jail."
"When someone is elected president, they receive the greatest gift possible from the American people, their trust. To violate that trust is to raise questions about fitness for office. My constituents often remind me that if anyone else in a position of authority -- for example, a business executive, a military officer of a professional educator -- had acted as the evidence indicates the president did, their career would be over. The rules under which President Nixon would have been tried for impeachment had he not resigned contain this statement: "The office of the president is such that it calls for a higher level of conduct than the average citizen in the United States."
President Bush and other top officials in his administration used the National Security Agency to secretly wiretap the home and office telephones and monitor private email accounts of members of the United Nations Security Council in early 2003 to determine how foreign delegates would vote on a U.N. resolution that paved the way for the U.S.-led war in Iraq, NSA documents show.
Two former NSA officials familiar with the agency's campaign to spy on U.N. members say then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice authorized the plan at the request of President Bush, who wanted to know how delegates were going to vote. Rice did not immediately return a call for comment.
The former officials said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also participated in discussions about the plan, which involved "stepping up" efforts to eavesdrop on diplomats.
Raw Story is out with a report that could further complicate life for the Bush administration, and one that also does not reflect well on the United States mainstream media. The story harkens back to early 2003 when the Bush administration was desperately trying to coax the United Nations into legitimizing its plans to go to war with Iraq (at the urging of Tony Blair, which we now know, thanks to the Downing Street memos and minutes). In order to determine how the delegates were leaning on a UN resolution that would have given the U.S. a green light, the Bush administration decided, according to Raw Story, to "step up" efforts by the NSA to eavesdrop, via wiretaps and e-mail intercepts, on members of the UN Security Council. But the story, as Raw Story acknowledges, is not new. It caused a firestorm at the time in the corridors of the United Nations and was front-page news in the European press. But here in the United States, where a cowered media seemed resigned, even eager, to going to war, the story was almost entirely ignored.
It seems only natural, in the wake of daily revelations about warrantless NSA wiretaps authorized by the Bush administration (President Bush brands the revelations, not the spying, "shameful"), that the media would revisit this largely ignored at the time 2003 story involving possibly illegal NSA wiretaps . Having ignored the implications in 2003, it seems hardly surprising that we are now reminded of them by Raw Story rather than by The Washington Post or The New York Times.
President Bush and other top officials in his administration used the National Security Agency to secretly wiretap the home and office telephones and monitored private email accounts of members of the United Nations Security Council in early 2003 to determine how foreign delegates would vote on a U.N. resolution that paved the war for the U.S.-led war in Iraq, NSA documents show.
Two former NSA officials familiar with the agency's campaign to spy on U.N. members say then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice authorized the plan at the request of President Bush, who wanted to know how delegates were going to vote. Rice did not immediately return a call for comment.
The former officials said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld also participated in discussions about the plan, which involved "stepping up" efforts to eavesdrop on diplomats.
A spokeswoman at the White House who refused to give her name also would not comment, and pointed to a March 3, 2003 press briefing by former White House press secretary Ari Fleischer when questions about U.N. spying were first raised.
"As a matter of long-standing policy, the administration never comments on anything involving any people involved in intelligence," Fleischer said. "So I'm not saying yes and I'm not saying no."
Disclosure of the wiretaps and the monitoring of U.N. members' email came on the eve of the Iraq war in the British-based Observer. The leak -- which the paper acquired in the form of an email via a British translator -- came amid a U.S. push urging U.N. members to vote in favor of a resolution that said Iraq was in violation of U.N. resolution 1441, asserting that it had failed to rid the country of weapons of mass destruction.
...One intelligence source who spoke to RAW STORY said top White House officials and some Republican members of Congress had debated in December 2002 whether to step up the surveillance of U.N. officials to include eavesdropping on home telephone and personal email accounts. Some feared that in the event it was discovered, it would further erode relations between the U.S. and the U.N.
The source added that U.S. spying on the U.N. isn't new.
"It's part of the job," the intelligence source said. "Everyone knows it's being done."
Eavesdropping on U.N. diplomats is authorized under the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Services Act. However, it's still considered a violation of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, which says that "The receiving state shall permit and protect free communication on the part of the mission for all official purposes... The official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable."
According to one former official, "The administration pushed the envelope by tapping their home phones."
...
The implications of this story are enormous. If it was indeed authorized by then National Security Advisor Condoleeza Rice this implicates the top reaches of the administration in illegal activity. The involvement of the NSA further makes a mockery of the claims by the Bush administration and its apologists that the warrrantless NSA intercepts were a necessary weapon in the "war on terror." This was politics, pure and simple, authorized by top administration officials, and carried out, in violation of the law, by The National Security Agency. And the mainstream media, by ignoring the story, failed the American people, as it has time and time again in recent years.
As I said in the introduction, this is not a new story. Virtually all of it was known, and reported upon by the media before we went to war.
According to Raw Story, a memo written by Frank Koza of the NSA on January 31, 2003 "was leaked to a handful of media outlets in the U.S. {emphasis added} and U.K. by Katharine Tersea Gun, a former translator for British intelligence." This memo was hardly an effort to stem terrorists (Read the memo here).
So the U.S. media had the story, but it was the British Observer that broke it on March 2, 2003: "Revealed: US dirty tricks to win vote on Iraq war -- Secret document details American plan to bug phones and emails of key Security Council members"
The United States is conducting a secret 'dirty tricks' campaign against UN Security Council delegations in New York as part of its battle to win votes in favour of war against Iraq.
Details of the aggressive surveillance operation, which involves interception of the home and office telephones and the emails of UN delegates in New York, are revealed in a document leaked to The Observer.
The disclosures were made in a memorandum written by a top official at the National Security Agency... and circulated to both senior agents in his organisation and to a friendly foreign intelligence agency asking for its input.
The memo describes orders to staff at the agency, whose work is clouded in secrecy, to step up its surveillance operations 'particularly directed at... UN Security Council Members... to provide up-to-the-minute intelligence for Bush officials on the voting intentions of UN members regarding the issue of Iraq.
The leaked memorandum makes clear that the target of the heightened surveillance efforts are the delegations from Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Mexico, Guinea and Pakistan at the UN headquarters in New York - the so-called 'Middle Six' delegations whose votes are being fought over by the pro-war party, led by the US and Britain, and the party arguing for more time for UN inspections, led by France, China and Russia.
The memo is directed at senior NSA officials and advises them that the agency is 'mounting a surge' aimed at gleaning information not only on how delegations on the Security Council will vote on any second resolution on Iraq, but also 'policies', 'negotiating positions', 'alliances' and 'dependencies' - the 'whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favourable to US goals or to head off surprises'.
Dated 31 January 2003, the memo was circulated four days after the UN's chief weapons inspector Hans Blix produced his interim report on Iraqi compliance with UN resolution 1441.
It was sent by Frank Koza, chief of staff in the 'Regional Targets' section of the NSA, which spies on countries that are viewed as strategically important for United States interests.
Koza specifies that the information will be used for the US's 'QRC' - Quick Response Capability - 'against' the key delegations.
Suggesting the levels of surveillance of both the office and home phones of UN delegation members, Koza also asks regional managers to make sure that their staff also 'pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms [office and home telephones] for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations'...
Disclosure of the US operation comes in the week that Blix will make what many expect to be his final report to the Security Council.
It also comes amid increasingly threatening noises from the US towards undecided countries on the Security Council who have been warned of the unpleasant economic consequences of standing up to the US.
Sources in Washington familiar with the operation said last week that there had been a division among Bush administration officials over whether to pursue such a high-intensity surveillance campaign with some warning of the serious consequences of discovery.
The existence of the surveillance operation, understood to have been requested by President Bush's National Security Adviser, Condoleezza Rice, is deeply embarrassing to the Americans in the middle of their efforts to win over the undecided delegations.
The language and content of the memo were judged to be authentic by three former intelligence operatives shown it by The Observer. We were also able to establish that Frank Koza does work for the NSA and could confirm his senior post in the Regional Targets section of the organisation.
The operation appears to have been spotted by rival organisations in Europe. 'The Americans are being very purposeful about this,' said a source at a European intelligence agency when asked about the US surveillance efforts.
The involvement of Donald Rumsfeld adds a new wrinkle, but other than that The Observer had virtually the entire story, right down to Condoleeza Rice having authorized the surveillance (and they even reported a week later that "American intelligence experts told The Observer that a decision of this kind would also have involved Donald Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet and NSA chief General Michael Hayden. President Bush himself would have been informed at one of the daily intelligence briefings held every morning at the White House").
As Fairness and Accuracy in Media (FAIR) noted at the time, the reaction of the U.S. media to this shocking story was underwhelming, to say the least. The New York Times ignored the story completely. NBC, CNN and FOX News all scheduled and then cancelled interviews with one of the authors, ignoring the story instead. The Washington Post ridiculed the revelations in a page 17 story "Spying Report No Shock To U.N. that inaccurately suggested that "Security Council diplomats today shrugged off a British newspaper report that the super-secretive National Security Agency had ordered an eavesdropping 'surge' on their telephones to determine their voting positions on a resolution that would pave the way for a U.S.-led war against Iraq." The article went on to downplay the Observer revelations, indicating that this kind of eaves-dropping goes on all the time and is not news, quoting one diplomat: "You'd have to be very naive to be surprised." The Washington Times and The Drudge Report meanwhile tried to brand the leaked memo a fake.
Not every one took the story so lightly. Media Commentator Norman Solomon interviewed Daniel Ellsberg -- of Pentagon Papers fame -- about it at the time. Ellsberg responded that "This leak is more timely and potentially more important than the Pentagon Papers." Describing the media coverage, Solomon wrote:
...The London Times article called it an "embarrassing disclosure." And the embarrassment was nearly worldwide. From Russia to France to Chile to Japan to Australia, the story was big mainstream news. But not in the United States.
Several days after the "embarrassing disclosure," not a word about it had appeared in America's supposed paper of record. The New York Times - the single most influential media outlet in the United States - still had not printed anything about the story. How could that be?
"Well, it's not that we haven't been interested," New York Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale said Wednesday night, nearly 96 hours after the Observer broke the story. "We could get no confirmation or comment" on the memo from U.S. officials.
The Times opted not to relay the Observer's account, Smale told me. "We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting." She added: "We are still definitely looking into it. It's not that we're not."
Belated coverage would be better than none at all. But readers should be suspicious of the failure of the New York Times to cover this story during the crucial first days after it broke. At some moments in history, when war and peace hang in the balance, journalism delayed is journalism denied...
Contrary to the Washington Post's inference that this was a tempest in a teapot, it caused a furor at the UN and around the world, as the Observer reported on March 9, 2003 (while the U.S. media continued to avoid the story like the plague):
UN launches inquiry into American spying
The United Nations has begun a top-level investigation into the bugging of its delegations by the United States, first revealed in The Observer last week.
Sources in the office of UN Secretary General Kofi Annan confirmed last night that the spying operation had already been discussed at the UN's counter-terrorism committee and will be further investigated.
The news comes as British police confirmed the arrest of a 28-year-old woman working at the top secret Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) on suspicion of contravening the Official Secrets Act.
The revelations of the spying operation have caused deep embarrassment to the Bush administration at a key point in the sensitive diplomatic negotiations to gain support for a second UN resolution authorising intervention in Iraq. White House spokesman Ari Fleischer and Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld were both challenged about the operation last week, but said they could not comment on security matters.
The operation is thought to have been authorised by US National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, but American intelligence experts told The Observer that a decision of this kind would also have involved Donald Rumsfeld, CIA director George Tenet and NSA chief General Michael Hayden.
President Bush himself would have been informed at one of the daily intelligence briefings held every morning at the White House. Attention has now turned to the foreign intelligence agency responsible for the leak. It is now believed the memo was sent out via Echelon, an international surveillance network set up by the NSA with the cooperation of GCHQ in Britain and similar organisations in Australia, New Zealand and Canada.
...The Observer story caused a political furore in Chile, where President Ricardo Lagos demanded an immediate explanation of the spying operation. The Chilean public is extremely sensitive to reports of US 'dirty tricks' after decades of American secret service involvement in the country's internal affairs. In 1973 the CIA supported a coup that toppled the democratically-elected socialist government of Salvador Allende and installed the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. President Lagos spoke on the telephone with Prime Minister Tony Blair about the memo last Sunday, immediately after the publication of the story, and twice again on Wednesday. Chile's Foreign Minister Soledad Alvear also raised the matter with Foreign Secretary Jack Straw.
Chile's ambassador to Britain Mariano Fernández told The Observer: 'We cannot understand why the United States was spying on Chile. We were very surprised. Relations have been good with America since the time of George Bush Snr.' He said that the position of the Chilean mission to the UN was published in regular diplomatic bulletins, which were public documents openly available. While the bugging of foreign diplomats at the UN is permissible under the US Foreign Intelligence Services Act, it is a breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, according to one of America's leading experts on international law, Professor John Quigley of Ohio University.
He says the convention stipulates that: 'The receiving state shall permit and protect free communication on the part of the mission for all official purposes... The official correspondence of the mission shall be inviolable.'
One of the supreme ironies of this story is that the Washington Post, while clearly showing abominable judgment by blacking out this story, was pretty close to the mark when it suggested that surveillance of United Nations officials is commonplace. In 2004 it was revealed by former Tony Blair cabinet minister Clare Short that the UK had spied on UN Secretary General Kofi Annan during the run up to the Iraq war. Blair, in a reaction similar to the one George W. Bush would later articulate when the New York Times revealed the current NSA wiretap scandal, branded Short's disclosures as "deeply irresponsible" and said that Short was "undermining British security." (Short denied putting the UK or its security services at risk, and accused Blair of using "pompous" distraction tactics). The Short disclosures received little play from the U.S. mainstream media.
A few days later the Australian Broadcasting Company (ABC) revealed that British or U.S. intelligence had also "monitored former United Nations chief weapons inspector Hans Blix's mobile phone whenever he was in Iraq," according to sources in Australia's Office of National Assessments who had read the transcripts. That too got little play in the U.S. mainstream media.
It is to be hoped that both the mainstream media and the Congress will now revisit the NSA surveillance of United Nations officials -- for clearly political ends -- during the run-up to war. It appears to have been in violation of not only U.S. law, but also a breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. The president has justified authorizing NSA surveillance without warrants as being necessary to protect U.S. citizens from the terrorist threat. Does Mr. Bush consider the UN Security Council to be a haven for terrorists?
AUSTIN, Texas -- The first time as tragedy, the second time as farce. Thirty-five years ago, Richard Milhous Nixon, who was crazy as a bullbat, and J. Edgar Hoover, who wore women's underwear, decided some Americans had unacceptable political opinions. So they set our government to spying on its own citizens, basically those who were deemed insufficiently like Crazy Richard Milhous.
For those of you who have forgotten just what a stonewall paranoid Nixon was, the poor man used to stalk around the White House demanding that his political enemies be killed. Many still believe there was a certain Richard III grandeur to Nixon's collapse because he was also a man of notable talents. There is neither grandeur nor tragedy in watching this president, the Testy Kid, violate his oath to uphold the laws and Constitution of our country.
The Testy Kid wants to do what he wants to do when he wants to do it because he is the president, and he considers that sufficient justification for whatever he wants. He even finds lawyers like John Yoo, who tell him that whatever he wants to do is legal.
The creepy part is the overlap. Damned if they aren't still here, after all these years, the old Nixon hands -- Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, the whole gang whose yearning for authoritarian government rose like a stink over the Nixon years. Imperial executive. Bring back those special White House guard uniforms. Cheney, like some malignancy that cannot be killed off, back at the same old stand, pushing the same old crap.
Of course, they tell us we have to be spied on for our own safety, so they can catch the terrorists who threaten us all. Thirty-five years ago, they nabbed a film star named Jean Seberg and a bunch of people running a free breakfast program for poor kids in Chicago. This time, they're onto the Quakers. We are not safer.
We would be safer, as the 9-11 commission has so recently reminded us, if some obvious and necessary precautions were taken at both nuclear and chemical plants -- but that is not happening because those industries contribute to Republican candidates. Republicans do not ask their contributors to spend a lot of money on obvious and necessary steps to protect public safety. They wiretap, instead.
"Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so"
- George W. Bush April 20, 2004.
At the very time of that statement, George W. Bush was personally overseeing wiretaps without any court orders.
For all of you who still claim this president doesn't lie, this must come as a shock. For the rest of us it just comes as another "we told you so." He admitted as much the other day when he vowed to continue the practice of spying on American citizens whom he suspects may have ties to Al Qaeda.
The problem is, who is deciding just what amounts to "ties to Al Qaeda?" Not the courts. George W. Bush is above the law. He and he alone will decide. Okay, he may consult with a crony or two. As Richard Nixon once said, "if the president does it, it can't be illegal." Right, George?
How times have changed. With a few exceptions, the most outspoken Republicans who were screaming for the head of Bill Clinton for lying about an extra-marital encounter, claiming no one was above the law, are singing a different tune now that it's their guy who seems to believe he is above the law.
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The Nation
12/27/2005 The I-Word is Gaining Ground Katrina vanden Heuvel
In 1998, House Majority Whip Tom DeLay, currently under indictment on corruption charges, proclaimed: "This nation sits at a crossroads. One direction points to the higher road of the rule of law...The other road is the path of least resistance" in which "we pitch the law completely overboard when the mood fits us...[and] close our eyes to the potential lawbreaking...and tear an unfixable hole in our legal system." That arbiter of moral politics was incensed about the possibility of Bill Clinton escaping unpunished for his "crimes."
Fast forward to December 2005. Not one official in the entire Bush Administration has been fired or indicted, not to mention impeached, for the shedding of American blood in Iraq or for the shredding of our Constitution at home. As Newsweek columnist Jonathan Alter put it--hours after the New York Times reported that Bush had authorized NSA wiretapping of US citizens without judicial warrants--this President has committed a real transgression that "goes beyond sex, corruption and political intrigue to big issues like security versus liberty and the reasonable bounds of presidential power."
In the last months, several organizations, including AfterDowningStreet, Impeach Central and ImpeachPAC.org, have formed to urge Bush's impeachment. But until very recently, their views were virtually absent in the so-called "liberal" MSM, and could only be found on the Internet and in street protests.
WASHINGTON -- When President Bush sought to reassure the country that his authorization of spying on Americans without warrants was a reasonable exercise of his power, he emphasized that his orders were always reviewed by the attorney general and the White House counsel.
''Each review is based on a fresh intelligence assessment of terrorist threats to continuity of our government and the threat of catastrophic damage to our homeland," Bush said in his Dec. 17 radio address. ''The review includes approval by our nation's top legal officials, including the attorney general and the counsel to the president."
The current occupants of those jobs are Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and White House counsel Harriet E. Miers. Prior to 2005, Gonzales was White House counsel and John Ashcroft was attorney general.
The current dispute over whether the president had the authority to order domestic spying without warrants, despite a law against it, has put new focus on the legal officials who have guided Bush. And the qualifications of Ashcroft, Gonzales, and Miers could become a focus of the upcoming Senate hearings on the spying decision.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 26 (UPI) -- U.S. President George Bush decided to skip seeking warrants for international wiretaps because the court was challenging him at an unprecedented rate.
A review of Justice Department reports to Congress by Heart newspapers shows the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.
The 11-judge court that authorizes FISA wiretaps modified only two search warrant orders out of the 13,102 applications approved over the first 22 years of the court's operation.
But since 2001, the judges have modified 179 of the 5,645 requests for surveillance by the Bush administration, the report said. A total of 173 of those court-ordered "substantive modifications" took place in 2003 and 2004. And, the judges also rejected or deferred at least six requests for warrants during those two years -- the first outright rejection of a wiretap request in the court's history.
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Washington Post
Dec. 26, 2005 Yoo Stands by Post-9/11 Writings On Torture, Domestic Eavesdropping
...Yoo wrote a memo that said the White House was not bound by a federal law prohibiting warrantless eavesdropping on communications that originated or ended in the United States. When news of the program broke, members of both parties called for hearings.
Yoo believes he was correct, even if critics say the U.S. response to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks "threatens the very idea of America," as one editorial said. "It would be inappropriate for a lawyer to say, 'The law means A, but I'm going to say B because to interpret it as A would violate American values,'" Yoo said. "A lawyer's job is if the law says A, the law says A."
How Yoo, who has never met President Bush or Vice President Cheney, came to be a principal interpreter of laws and the Constitution for the Bush team is a story rooted in his conservative convictions and a network of like-minded thinkers who helped him thrive.
"He has succeeded and won people over and advanced his ideas," said Manus Cooney, who hired Yoo on to the Judiciary Committee staff of Sen. Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) in 1995. "As far as conservative academics, I don't think there's anyone in the law whose contacts run deeper in the three branches, or higher."
Well, they say it on their own Web site, so I guess that issue is settled. It's a violation of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution for the NSA to spy on Americans. End of discussion.
Power That Bush Can't Just Take
By Eugene Robinson
Tuesday, December 27, 2005; Page A25
Since the holiday season is a time of generosity and goodwill toward all -- even those who torture the Constitution and hoodwink the nation into ill-advised wars -- let's do a little thought experiment. Let's assume that George W. Bush's claim of virtually unfettered presidential power is not just an exercise in reclaiming executive perks that Dick Cheney believes were wrongly surrendered after Watergate. Let's assume that Bush genuinely believes he needs the right to blanket the nation with electronic surveillance, detain indefinitely anyone he considers a terrorist suspect, make those detainees disappear into secret, CIA-run prisons, and subject them to "waterboarding" and other degradations. Let's assume for the moment that the president's only desperate motivation is to prevent another day like Sept. 11, 2001.
Let's go even further and assume he decided to invade Iraq for the same reason. Even in a thought experiment, we can't forgive the way he snowed the country into believing there was some connection between Iraq and the Sept. 11 attacks; nor can we forget the way he hyped the flawed intelligence about weapons of mass destruction -- we're being generous here, not stupid. But let's assume that however calculated and cynical the machinations, and however wrongheaded the decision to go to war, the underlying motive was purely to avoid another catastrophic terrorist attack.
All right: Given these overly kind assumptions, can this administration's usurpation of power somehow be justified? Every time I work it through, the answer I come up with is no. The president has no right to ignore the rule of law as if it were a mere nuisance.
The problem is that if the president really were determined to do anything it takes to prevent another terrorist strike, why not suspend habeas corpus, as Lincoln did during the Civil War? That way you could arrest everyone who could possibly be a terrorist, or who once lived next door to a suspected terrorist's uncle, and you could hold those people as long as you wanted. Why stop at surveillance of international telephone calls and e-mails? Why not listen in on, say, all interstate calls as well? Or just go for it and scarf up all the domestic communications the National Security Agency's copious computers can hold. Why stop at waterboarding? Why not go all the way and pull out some fingernails, if that would give Americans another tiny increment of security? Wouldn't electric shocks make us safer still? Just order the White House lawyers to draw up yet another thumb-on-the-scale legal opinion explaining how torture isn't really torture, and have at it.
If potential terrorists may be walking among us, why not have police officers stand on street corners all day and subject anyone who looks "suspicious" to questioning and a search? That's what Fidel Castro does in Cuba, and believe me, Cuba is an extremely safe country. In Vietnam we destroyed villages in order to save them. In this war on terrorism, why not go ahead and destroy our freedoms in order to save them? The reason we don't do these absurd things, of course, is that we see a line between the acceptable and the unacceptable. That bright line is the law, drawn by Congress and regularly surveyed by the judiciary. It can be shifted, but the president has no right to shift it on his own authority. His constitutional war powers give him wide latitude, but those powers are not unlimited.
One wonders if Osama bin Laden didn't win after all. He ruined the America that existed on 9/11. But he had help.
If, back in 2001, anyone had told me that four years after bin Laden's attack our president would admit that he broke U.S. law against domestic spying and ignored the Constitution -- and then expect the American people to congratulate him for it -- I would have presumed the girders of our very Republic had crumbled.
Had anyone said our president would invade a country and kill 30,000 of its people claiming a threat that never, in fact, existed, then admit he would have invaded even if he had known there was no threat -- and expect America to be pleased by this -- I would have thought our nation's sensibilities and honor had been eviscerated.
If I had been informed that our nation's leaders would embrace torture as a legitimate tool of warfare, hold prisoners for years without charges and operate secret prisons overseas -- and call such procedures necessary for the nation's security -- I would have laughed at the folly of protecting human rights by destroying them.
If someone had predicted the president's staff would out a CIA agent as revenge against a critic, defy a law against domestic propaganda by bankrolling supposedly independent journalists and commentators, and ridicule a 37-year Marie Corps veteran for questioning U.S. military policy -- and that the populace would be more interested in whether Angelina is about to make Brad a daddy -- I would have called the prediction an absurd fantasy.
That's no America I know, I would have argued. We're too strong, and we've been through too much, to be led down such a twisted path.
By the authority vested in me as President by the Constitution and the laws of the United States of America, and to ensure appropriate agency disclosure of information, and consistent with the goals of section 552 of title 5, United States Code, it is hereby ordered as follows:
(A) use of information technology in responding to FOIA requests, including without limitation the tracking of FOIA requests and communication with requesters;
The order requires each agency to designate a Chief FOIA officer, who will have agency-wide responsibility for compliance with FOIA. One of the Chief FOIA officer's duties will be to "facilitate public understanding of the FOIA's statutory exemptions." Each agency also has to set up a FOIA Requester Service Center, which appears to be a physical location. Information about the center does have to be posted to the Internet. Each agency has to report in six months from the date of the order about the implementation of the order.
SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2005, Issue No. 114
December 15, 2005
Congress is poised to carve out a new exemption from the Freedom of Information Act for so-called "operational files" of the Defense Intelligence Agency. That would be a mistake, argued Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA), in a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. DIA has demonstrated over the years that valuable intelligence records can be released under the FOIA without compromise of secret intelligence sources, Rep. Waxman observed. "New [FOIA] exemptions should not be created lightly, especially in the absence of a hearing record that demonstrates the need for an exemption," he wrote.
Meanwhile, the National Security Archive petitioned a federal court for leave to file an amicus brief in the FOIA lawsuit Aftergood v. National Reconnaissance Office, in which the NRO has refused to disclose unclassified budget files, claiming that they are exempted "operational files." The court's decision in this case "will have implications for a broad swathe of the public," argued Meredith Fuchs, general counsel of the National Security Archive, and "this is a case of first impression." See:
Washington -- Government records show that the Bush administration was encountering unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's approval.
A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration than the four previous presidential administrations combined.
The court's repeated intervention in Bush administration wiretap requests may explain why the president decided to bypass the court nearly four years ago to begin secret National Security Agency spying on hundreds and possibly thousands of Americans and foreigners inside the United States, according to James Bamford, an authority on the security agency that intercepts telephone calls, e-mails, faxes and Internet communications.
"They wanted to expand the number of people they were eavesdropping on, and they didn't think they could get the warrants they needed from the court to monitor those people," said Bamford, author of "Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency" and "The Puzzle Palace: Inside America's Most Secret Intelligence Organization." "The FISA court has shown its displeasure by tinkering with these applications by the Bush administration."
BUFFALO, N.Y. The White House denies that President Bush's domestic spying actions contradict a speech he made in Buffalo last year. In April 2004, Bush had told an upstate audience that -- quote -- "When you think 'Patriot Act' constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."
White House spokesman David Almacy tells the Buffalo News that the president was referring to new powers and responsibilities under the post-9-11 Patriot Act. Domestic eavesdropping under the Patriot Act requires a court order. Almacy says those taps are different from the intercepts the president authorized the National Security Agency to make without court permission of conversations between American citizens and suspected terrorists overseas.
After reporting on America's spying operations for 25 years, James Bamford is speaking out against Bush's FISA runaround. He says the wiretapping is illegal.
By Michael Scherer
James Bamford is not just any reporter when it comes to the NSA. He is the journalist who introduced the agency to the world with his explosive 1982 NSA history, "The Puzzle Palace." With obscure but public information, he bargained his way into the secret core of the U.S. intelligence establishment and revealed the scope of its reach, from its listening posts in the Turkish highlands to its omniscient relay satellites.
By 2001, when he published the second book on the agency, "Body of Secrets," the NSA brass appeared to have accepted him as a sort of unofficial ambassador to the general public. "The irony is that they tried putting me in jail after 'Puzzle Palace,' and they had a book-signing for me after 'Body of Secrets' came out," says the author, a balding, soft-spoken 59-year-old who wears his mustache neatly trimmed.
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Editor and Publisher
New York Times' Completes Long Pass -- Then Fumbles Its scoop about the domestic spying program should stay in the spotlight but instead the newspaper itself is becoming the story. Revelations in the past few hours about its decision to hold, then publish, the spy story -- and the paper's lack of transparency -- raise serious leadership questions once again.
By Greg Mitchell
(December 20, 2005) -- The New York Times can't seem to win for losing. It scores its biggest scoop of the year, with its domestic spying revelations, and wins wide praise. At the same time it gets hammered from left, right and even some in the middle for holding the story for a year, and then belatedly timing publication either to the Patriot Act debate and/or an upcoming book -- and being less than transparent about the whole kit and caboodle.
Will Bunch, the Philadelphia Daily News reporter and blogger, said it best today with this simple question: "Is there a word in the English language that means 'stunned' and 'not stunned' at the same time?"
Washington -- Congress' five-week extension of controversial Patriot Act provisions coupled with likely congressional hearings into President Bush's order for warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens looks to produce pointed debate early next year. As the federal government is on alert against terrorism, the debate over civil liberties intensified this week when a federal judge resigned from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court in Washington, apparently in protest over the Bush-ordered eavesdropping by the National Security Agency that skirted his court. The court's chief judge has called for briefings next month to see if the snooping went around the law.
And it could worsen.
There are murmurs among some Democrats about calling for impeachment proceedings against Bush, if they conclude he has committed an impeachable offense. Sen. Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., for instance, has written four law professors and presidential scholars asking for their opinion on whether Bush broke laws by approving such eavesdropping outside of normal channels.
President Bush is a bundle of paradoxes. He thinks the scope of the federal government should be limited but the powers of the president should not. He wants judges to interpret the Constitution as the framers did, but doesn't think he should be constrained by their intentions. He attacked Al Gore for trusting government instead of the people, but he insists anyone who wants to defeat terrorism must put absolute faith in the man at the helm of government. His conservative allies say Bush is acting to uphold the essential prerogatives of his office. Vice President Cheney says the administration's secret eavesdropping program is justified because "I believe in a strong, robust executive authority, and I think that the world we live in demands it."
But the theory boils down to a consistent and self-serving formula: What's good for George W. Bush is good for America, and anything that weakens his power weakens the nation. To call this an imperial presidency is unfair to emperors. Even people who should be on Bush's side are getting queasy. David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union, says in his efforts to enlarge executive authority, Bush "has gone too far." He's not the only one who feels that way. Consider the case of Jose Padilla, a U.S. citizen arrested in 2002 on suspicion of plotting to set off a "dirty bomb." For three years, the administration said he posed such a grave threat that it had the right to detain him without trial as an enemy combatant. In September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 4th Circuit agreed.
But then, rather than risk a review of its policy by the Supreme Court, the administration abandoned its hard-won victory and indicted Padilla on comparatively minor criminal charges. When it asked the 4th Circuit Court for permission to transfer him from military custody to jail, though, the once-cooperative court flatly refused. In a decision last week, the judges expressed amazement that the administration suddenly would decide Padilla could be treated like a common purse snatcher--a reversal that, they said, comes "at substantial cost to the government's credibility." The court's meaning was plain: Either you were lying to us then, or you are lying to us now.
If that's not enough to embarrass the president, the opinion was written by conservative darling J. Michael Luttig--who just a couple of months ago was on Bush's short list for the Supreme Court. For Luttig to question Bush's use of executive power is like Bill O'Reilly announcing that there's too much Christ in Christmas. This is hardly the only example of the president demanding powers he doesn't need. When American-born Saudi Yasser Hamdi was captured in Afghanistan, the administration also detained him as an enemy combatant rather than entrust him to the criminal justice system.
By Josh Meyer and Joseph Menn, Times Staff Writers - December 25, 2005
WASHINGTON — President Bush has acknowledged that several hundred targeted Americans were wiretapped without warrants under the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, and now some U.S. officials and outside experts say they suspect that the government is engaged in a far broader U.S. surveillance operation. Although these experts have no specific evidence, they say that the NSA has a vast array of satellites and other high-tech tools that it could be using to eavesdrop on a much larger cross-section of people in the United States without permission from a court. The suspicion is quietly gaining currency among current and former U.S. intelligence officials and among outside experts familiar with how the NSA operates. The NSA conducts such "wholesale" surveillance continuously almost everywhere else in the world. It does so by using a sprawling network of land-based satellite transponder stations and friendly foreign intelligence agencies and telecommunication companies to collect millions of phone calls, e-mails and other communications. Powerful NSA supercomputers search this "sigint" — short for signals intelligence — for words that might suggest terrorist plots, such as "bomb," then pass the information to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, former head of the NSA and now the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official, has said the NSA does not use the same technologies to purposely spy on Americans. The agency is prohibited from doing so by federal laws enacted after the domestic spying scandals of the 1970s. Rare exceptions must be approved by a special court overseeing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978. The top-secret tribunal considers requests for warrants when the NSA or FBI believes such surveillance is needed to protect national security. This month it was disclosed that the Bush administration has circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to monitor hundreds of Americans since the Sept. 11 attacks without any warrants. Bush and his inner circle said the practice is limited to occasions when an individual in the U.S. is communicating with someone overseas who has a known link to Al Qaeda, other terrorist groups or their supporters.
But some officials and other experts believe the top-secret program may be doing more than that. "It's really obvious to me that it's a look-at-everything type program," said cryptography expert Bruce Schneier, who has written several books about security. Schneier and others suspect that the NSA may be turning its satellites toward the United States and gathering vast streams of raw data from many more people than disclosed — potentially including all e-mails and phone calls from the United States to certain other countries. These experts were chiefly talking about satellite surveillance, but the NSA can use other means to eavesdrop. The New York Times reported Saturday that the NSA has collected large volumes of telephone and Internet communications since the Sept. 11 attacks by "tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries."
Leading telecommunication companies have been saving information on calling patterns and passing it along to the government, the newspaper said. The companies have also given the NSA access to electronic switches that connect U.S. and overseas communications networks, a "significant expansion" of NSA capabilities, it said. Phone companies and others have cooperated with U.S. agencies including the NSA for years. In the early 1990s, AT&T agreed to use an NSA-designed chip to ensure that law enforcement had access to phone calls. And AT&T has a database code-named Daytona that keeps track of phone numbers on both ends of calls as well as the duration of all land-line calls, according to a business executive who has been briefed on the system.
Maimi Herald - Congress may prevail on war power
Despite White House claims that war powers authorize domestic spying and the special detention of terror suspects, Congress may well settle the issue.
BY CAROL ROSENBERG
In defending a decision to let the National Security Agency eavesdrop inside America without a court warrant, the White House is invoking the same legal argument it uses to justify its policies at the prison for terror suspects at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. President Bush says post-Sept. 11, 2001, war powers entitle him to circumvent civilian courts on a range of war-on-terror activities -- from keeping terror suspects captive in cages at the U.S. Navy base in Cuba to letting U.S. agents listen in on phone calls between people in the United States and foreigners, to gather intelligence on al Qaeda. Yet now, it looks like Congress -- not the courts -- will examine the legality of the eavesdropping episode, which some are calling ``Spookgate.''
''The president has been ambitious in defending us, and now the Congress wants to know if he has been overly ambitious -- and if it [that ambition] has offended civil liberties,'' says Pepperdine University law professor Douglas Kmeic, a Reagan administration conservative. ``The real check and balance is this dynamic between Congress and the president.'' Until now, the courts have largely refereed whether the White House is overreaching when it says Congress' authorization for the use of force has allowed everything from the holding of foreign terror suspects as enemy combatants, not POWs; to having U.S. military officers, not civilian judges, rule on war crimes in Military Commissions; to whether the Defense Department can hold U.S. citizens without charge, as enemy combatants.
DEEP in a remote, fog-layered hollow near Sugar Grove, W.Va., hidden by fortress-like mountains, sits the country's largest eavesdropping bug. Located in a "radio quiet" zone, the station's large parabolic dishes secretly and silently sweep in millions of private telephone calls and e-mail messages an hour.
Run by the ultrasecret National Security Agency, the listening post intercepts all international communications entering the eastern United States. Another N.S.A. listening post, in Yakima,Wash., eavesdrops on the western half of the country. A hundred miles or so north of Sugar Grove, in Washington, the N.S.A. has suddenly taken center stage in a political firestorm. The controversy over whether the president broke the law when he secretly ordered the N.S.A. to bypass a special court and conduct warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens has even provoked some Democrats to call for his impeachment.
According to John E. McLaughlin, who as the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency in the fall of 2001 was among the first briefed on the program, this eavesdropping was the most secret operation in the entire intelligence network, complete with its own code word - which itself is secret. Jokingly referred to as "No Such Agency," the N.S.A. was created in absolute secrecy in 1952 by President Harry S. Truman. Today, it is the largest intelligence agency. It is also the most important, providing far more insight on foreign countries than the C.I.A. and other spy organizations.
But the agency is still struggling to adjust to the war on terror, in which its job is not to monitor states, but individuals or small cells hidden all over the world. To accomplish this, the N.S.A. has developed ever more sophisticated technology that mines vast amounts of data. But this technology may be of limited use abroad. And at home, it increases pressure on the agency to bypass civil liberties and skirt formal legal channels of criminal investigation. Originally created to spy on foreign adversaries, the N.S.A. was never supposed to be turned inward. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated the agency and came away stunned. "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't matter. There would be no place to hide."
He added that if a dictator ever took over, the N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
"AS THE YEAR WAS DRAWING TO A CLOSE, we picked up our New York Times and learned that the Bush administration has been fighting terrorism by intercepting communications in America without warrants. It was worrisome on its face, but in justifying their actions, officials have made a bad situation much worse: Administration lawyers and the president himself have tortured the Constitution and extracted a suspension of the separation of powers . . .
By James W. Brosan Scripps Howard News Service April 28, 2005
WASHINGTON - Gov. Bill Richardson is concerned that some of his phone calls were monitored by a U.S. spy agency and transcripts of them were given to the president's nominee for ambassador to the United Nations, John Bolton.
Richardson called Sen. Chris Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, to express his concerns after Dodd revealed that Bolton had on 10 occasions asked the National Security Agency for the intercepts of phone conversations involving Americans.
An online journalist then speculated that Richardson's conversations with former Secretary of State Colin Powell and another U.S. official about North Korea might have been among Bolton's requests.
"The governor is upset that his conversations with Secretary Powell would be intercepted since most of them were domestic calls," said Richardson spokesman Billy Sparks. "The governor felt his calls about North Korea were confidential."
Bolton, as undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, was one of the architects of a hard-line approach toward negotiating with North Korea over dismantling its nuclear weapons program.
The United Nations spying row widened yesterday when its former weapons inspector, Hans Blix, told the Guardian he suspected both his UN office and his home in New York were bugged in the run-up to the Iraq war.
In an exclusive interview, Mr Blix said he expected to be bugged by the Iraqis, but to be spied upon by the US was a different matter. He described such behaviour as "disgusting", adding: "It feels like an intrusion into your integrity in a situation when you are actually on the same side." He said he went to extraordinary lengths to protect his office and home, having a UN counter-surveillance team sweep both for bugs.
"If you had something sensitive to talk about you would go out into the restaurant or out into the streets," he said. Mr Blix's darkest fears were reinforced when he was shown a set of photographs by a senior member of the Bush administration which he insists could only have been obtained through underhand means.
WASHINGTON - Former Secretary of State
Colin Powell on Sunday supported government eavesdropping to prevent terrorism but said a major controversy over presidential powers could have been avoided by obtaining court warrants.
Powell said that when he was in the Cabinet, he was not told that
President Bush authorized a warrantless National Security Agency surveillance operation after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.
Appearing on ABC's "This Week" Powell said he sees "absolutely nothing wrong with the president authorizing these kinds of actions" to protect the nation.
But he added, "My own judgment is that it didn't seem to me, anyway, that it would have been that hard to go get the warrants. And even in the case of an emergency, you go and do it."
"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."
....What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.
This is interesting stuff, and it sounds like pretty useful stuff to me, too. This program and this technology might very well be important elements in the fight against al-Qaeda.
But that's not the point. The point is that it appears to be illegal, and if George Bush believed it was genuinely critical to our national security he should have asked Congress to pass legislation authorizing it. The president is simply not allowed to decide for himself to break the law simply because it's inconvenient, and the excuse that he couldn't go to Congress because that would expose valuable secrets to al-Qaeda is laughable. It's tantamount to saying that he never needs to ask Congress for approval of any black program because that might somehow tip off al-Qaeda to its existence. Not only is that untrue (Congress routinely holds closed hearings to discuss sensitive issues), but it's a transparent rationalization for the president to do practically anything he wants with no oversight at all, and that just doesn't fly, wartime or not.
WASHINGTON - The Bush administration formally defended its domestic spying program in a letter to Congress late Thursday saying the nation's security outweighs privacy concerns of individuals who are monitored. In a letter to the chairs of the House and Senate intelligence committees, the Justice Department said President Bush authorized electronic surveillance without first obtaining a warrant in an effort to thwart terrorist acts against the United States.
"There is undeniably an important and legitimate privacy interest at stake with respect to the activities described by the president," wrote Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella. "That must be balanced, however, against the government's compelling interest in the security of the nation."
President Bush has acknowledged he authorized such surveillance and repeatedly has defended it in recent days.
Iyman Faris, the only named American target of the National Security Agency's secret warrantless wiretap program, will consider a lawsuit against the president of the United States, according to his criminal defense attorney, David Smith. "I am sure he would be delighted to sue President Bush," said Smith, of the law firm English & Smith in Alexandria, Va., who is representing Faris in his criminal appeals. "He may be the only person in the country who can."
To accomplish this goal, Smith has issued an all points bulletin for civil liberties attorneys and constitutional scholars interested in taking up his client's case. "If some lawyer would like to sue on behalf of Faris, I would be happy to introduce them," Smith told Salon Thursday evening. "I've got the man here."
The offer comes at a time of concern among civil liberties attorneys, who worry that the courts may never get a chance to adjudicate the legality of President Bush's secret wiretap program. "Courts don't like to hear hypothetical matters," said Barry Steinhardt, director of the ACLU's Technology and Liberty program, who has been preparing for a court battle. "There has to be a real plaintiff with a real injury."
Last week, the New York Times quoted several officials who claimed that Faris was caught with the help of warrantless wiretaps, making him one of only a few routes to challenging the legality of President Bush's program. The president could also face criminal charges from a special prosecutor, an unlikely scenario in the current political climate. Under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, warrants from a secret court are required to wiretap an American citizen in a matter of national security. President Bush has argued that his constitutional powers to defend the country trump the law's requirements.
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said. As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
...Historically, the American intelligence community has had close relationships with many communications and computer firms and related technical industries. But the N.S.A.'s backdoor access to major telecommunications switches on American soil with the cooperation of major corporations represents a significant expansion of the agency's operational capability, according to current and former government officials. Phil Karn, a computer engineer and technology expert at a major West Coast telecommunications company, said access to such switches would be significant. "If the government is gaining access to the switches like this, what you're really talking about is the capability of an enormous vacuum operation to sweep up data," he said.
EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants
In search of a terrorist nuclear bomb, the federal government since 9/11 has run a far-reaching, top secret program to monitor radiation levels at over a hundred Muslim sites in the Washington, D.C., area, including mosques, homes, businesses, and warehouses, plus similar sites in at least five other cities, U.S. News has learned. In numerous cases, the monitoring required investigators to go on to the property under surveillance, although no search warrants or court orders were ever obtained, according to those with knowledge of the program. Some participants were threatened with loss of their jobs when they questioned the legality of the operation, according to these accounts.
A document on the Justice Department Executive Office for Immigration Review's site listed the name and Social Security number of a woman involved in a 2003 immigration review case. Other searches of the site yielded more Social Security numbers and identifying information.
The federal government is responsible for issuing Social Security numbers, but it may not be doing enough to protect these critically personal pieces of information on its own Web sites. Acting on a tip, InformationWeek was able to access Web pages that include the names and Social Security numbers of people involved in Justice Department-related legal actions. It's a discomforting discovery at a time when identity theft and fraud are on the rise.
The president is not above the law; he is not King George. Yet, with sorrow, we are now learning that in this great land we have an administration that has refused to follow well-crafted, longstanding procedures that require the president to get a court order before spying on people within the United States. With outrage, we learn that this administration believes that it does not have to follow the law of the land.
Republican Senator Chuck Hagel and four other members of the Intelligence Committee have called for a joint probe with the Senate Judiciary Committee to determine the extent of the domestic surveillance and whether the president had legal authority to order it without court approval.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Security officials to spy on chat rooms
(2004)
Their proposal, also disclosed under the Freedom of Information Act, received $157,673 from the CIA and NSF. It says: "We propose a system to be deployed in the background of any chat room as a silent listener for eavesdropping...The proposed system could aid the intelligence community to discover hidden communities and communication patterns in chat rooms without human intervention."
Yener and Krishnamoorthy, both associate professors of computer science, wrote that their research would involve writing a program for "silently listening" to an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel and "logging all the messages." One of the oldest and most popular methods for chatting online, IRC attracts hundreds of thousands of users every day. A history written by IRC creator Jarkko Oikarinen said the concept grew out of chat technology for modem-based bulletin boards in the 1980s.
The Yener and Krishnamoorthy proposal says their research will begin Jan. 1, 2005 but does not say which IRC servers will be monitored.
In the paper, Yener and Krishnamoorthy predicted their work "could aid (the) intelligence community to eavesdrop in chat rooms, profile chatters and identify hidden groups of chatters in a cost-effective way" and that their future research will focus on identifying "topic-based information."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Conyers, others introduce resolution demanding surveillance probe John Conyers, Jr., (D - MI) ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and 26 other Congressmen today submitted a resolution of inquiry into warrantless wiretapping of citizens on U.S. soil.
Warrantless Wiretapping: Why It Seriously Imperils the Separation of Powers, And Continues the Executive's Sapping of Power From Congress and the Court
Bush keeps saying, "We don't intercept domestic-to-domestic calls."
You take a domestic call, and re-route it through Canada or Mexico or somewhere else, with neither the callers or recipients knowledge, and BINGO!!, an international call. You can monitor anyone you want to, without a warrant. And this all came out a couple of years ago in the ATT-Worldcom lawsuit. And lets not forget the relationship WorldCom execs have with the Bush Administration. It is a method that has already been used and documented in court, by WorldCom, and brought up by AT&T in WorldCom's bankruptcy filing: Route the domestic calls through a second country. Furthermore, in the AT&T suit against WorldCom, AT&T specifically cites the case of a Democratic Congressman's US-to-US calls being so routed through Canada. A Scrivener's Lament was the first to drop this bombshell on December 21, as far as I can tell. Some of Kerry's calls were apparently routed through Canada during the runup to 2004 it seems.
Total Information Awareness Went Offshore - as per this Washington Post story - Ben H. Bell III, was Poindexter's point man on the eviscerated TIA program
- so he pulled up and moved operations to the Caribbean with the Bahamas-based Global Information Group Ltd whose servers are in the London Docklands area. They're a customer of "core-isp.net".
The U.S. government uses private, offshore, enterprises, run by "former" intelligence officials, to achieve their surveillance objectives. So that leads to the question. What is George Bush pushing this for? Here is a list of privatised 'profiling' companies that could also be tied in to this train of thought.
Have you heard of something called "the presidents management agenda [whitehouse.gov]" that the Bush administration has been touting since it came into office. This president has been seeking to outsource all "non inherently governmental" jobs in the US executive branch for quite some time now. The thinking for this is that private corporations will save the taxpayer's money by finding efficiencies in doing business that government cannot. "Nearly half of all federal employees perform tasks that are readily available in the commercial marketplace - tasks like data collection, administrative support, and payroll services." Another good quote is "Government should be market-based -- we should not be afraid of competition, innovation, and choice. I will open government to the dicipline of competition. GWB". (PDF WARNING)
Poindexter's crew ran their Iran/Contra operation offshore, in both Iran and Central America (Honduras, Nicaragua, El Salvador), as well as around the Caribbean for drug/gun transport, Columbia/Bolivia/Peru for getting the drugs, and in America only to get money and weapons for their modern triangular trade. This kind of stuff is most likely business as usual for them, with the Internet replacing CIA-covered small planes for their brand of global "trade".
One US law professor worries that "it might meet business interests, but not necessarily the public interest." Another states that "he is making a highly controversial program more controversial... doing it offshore and making money off of it."
When the New York Times revealed that George W. Bush had ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap the foreign calls of American citizens without seeking court permission, as is indisputably required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), passed by Congress in 1978, he faced a decision. Would he deny the practice, or would he admit it? He admitted it. But instead of expressing regret, he took full ownership of the deed, stating that his order had been entirely justified, that he had in fact renewed it thirty times, that he would continue to renew it and--going even more boldly on the offensive--that those who had made his law-breaking known had committed a "shameful act." As justification, he offered two arguments, one derisory, the other deeply alarming. The derisory one was that Congress, by authorizing him to use force after September 11, had authorized him to suspend FISA, although that law is unmentioned in the resolution. Thus has Bush informed the members of a supposedly co-equal branch of government of what, unbeknownst to themselves, they were thinking when they cast their vote. The alarming argument is that as Commander in Chief he possesses "inherent" authority to suspend laws in wartime. But if he can suspend FISA at his whim and in secret, then what law can he not suspend? What need is there, for example, to pass or not pass the Patriot Act if any or all of its provisions can be secretly exceeded by the President?
Bush's choice marks a watershed in the evolution of his Administration. Previously when it was caught engaging in disgraceful, illegal or merely mistaken or incompetent behavior, he would simply deny it. "We have found the weapons of mass destruction!" "We do not torture!" However, further developments in the torture matter revealed a shift. Even as he denied the existence of torture, he and his officials began to defend his right to order it. His Attorney General, Alberto Gonzales, refused at his confirmation hearings to state that the torture called waterboarding, in which someone is brought to the edge of drowning, was prohibited. Then when Senator John McCain sponsored a bill prohibiting cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment of prisoners, Bush threatened to veto the legislation to which it was attached. It was only in the face of majority votes in both houses against such treatment that he retreated from his claim.
Another day, yet another new and wholly different explanation from the Bush administration about its illegal domestic spying operation.
In just the last 5 days, we've seen 3 separate explanations rolled out from the White House. First they claimed it was legal all along, then when that didn't fly, they said they had to do it because of a need for speed.
And the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), undermining congressional Democrats who are courageously raising questions, actually says Bush' law-breaking is entirely justified, even though we haven't been given one justification that holds water.
Sen. Rockefeller (D-WV) just released a letter he sent the vice president on July 17th, 2003 after he received his first briefing about the NSA intercepts program. We'll be posting the letter momentarily. The long and the short of it, though, is that Rockefeller, as Ranking Member of the senate intelligence committee, was given a brief descrption of what was happening, but wasn't allowed to discuss it either with his staff or with his colleagues, even other senators on the intel committee.
Dear Mr. Vice President,
I am writing to reiterate my concern regarding the secretive intelligence issues we discussed today with the DCI, DIRNSA, Chairman Roberts and our House Intelligence Committee counterparts.
Clearly, the activities we discussed raise profound oversight issues. As you know, I am neither a technician nor an attorney. Given the security restrictions associated with this information, and my inability to consult staff or counsel on my own, I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities.
As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance.
Without more information and the ability to draw on any independent legal or technical expertise, I simply cannot satisfy lingering concerns raised by the briefing we received.
I am retaining a copy of this letter in a sealed envelope in the secure spaces of the Senate Intelligence Committee to ensure that I have a record of this communication.
Because of what Alexander Hamilton praised as "energy in the executive," which often drives the growth of government, for years many conservatives were advocates of congressional supremacy. There were, they said, reasons why the Founders, having waged a revolutionary war against overbearing executive power, gave the legislative branch pride of place in Article I of the Constitution.
One reason was that Congress's cumbersomeness, which is a function of its fractiousness, is a virtue because it makes the government slow and difficult to move. But conservatives' wholesome wariness of presidential power has been a casualty of conservative presidents winning seven of the past 10 elections.
On the assumption that Congress or a court would have been cooperative in September 2001, and that the cooperation could have kept necessary actions clearly lawful without conferring any benefit on the nation's enemies, the president's decision to authorize the NSA's surveillance without the complicity of a court or Congress was a mistake. Perhaps one caused by this administration's almost metabolic urge to keep Congress unnecessarily distant and hence disgruntled.
David Keene, Executive Director of the American Conservative Union, on today's Diane Rehm Show:
Keene: [...] Having said that as a description of their justification of it, the claim that in trying to protect Americans and pursuing his powers as commander in chief that a President has power that inherently trumps the rest of the Constitution is a sort of exaggerated claim of power on behalf of this President or any other President for that matter [...]
Rehm: How do you see this action in using a branch of government such as
the NSA to spy on American citizens?
Keene: I think its Presidential overreaching and I think most Americans would certainly oppose it. Just as we have been at the forefront of the call for reform of the Patriot Act, the reauthorization.
Bruce Fein, former Associate Deputy Attorney General under Reagan, on today's Diane Rehm Show:
Fein: It's more power than King George III had at the time of the revolution in asserting the theory that anything the President thinks is helpful to fighting the war against terrorism he can do. That was why he claimed he can ignore the torture convention [...]
Rehm: Bruce Fein, why couldn't the National Security Agency do exactly what the President wanted if they had simply gone to this special secret court?
Fein: It could have, the secret court is inclined to ratify virtually every warrant that has ever been asked by the executive branch.
Rehm: So why didn't the President go to the court?
Fein: Because I think the President believes that he is the only unit of government capable of running a war.
You can hear that Diane Rehm show here (Real Audio).
A few current and former signals intelligence guys have been checking in since this NSA domestic spying story broke. Their reactions range between midly creeped out and completely pissed off.
All of the sigint specialists emphasized repeatedly that keeping tabs on Americans is way beyond the bounds of what they ordinarily do -- no matter what the conspiracy crowd may think.
'It's drilled into you from minute one that you should not ever, ever, ever, under any fucking circumstances turn this massive apparatus on an American citizen,' one source says. 'You do a lot of weird shit. But at least you don't fuck with your own people.'
Another, who's generally very pro-Administration, emphasized that the operation at least started with people that had Al-Qaeda connections -- with some mass-spying master list. As the Times, in its original story, noted:
The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said....In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said....Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses.
But this call chain could very well have grown out of control, the source admits. Suddenly, people ten and twelve degrees of separation away from Osama may have been targeted.
Deputy Director for National Intelligence Michael Hayden hinted at what might be going on in a press conference yesterday:
And here the key is not so much persistence as it is agility. It's a quicker trigger. It's a subtly softer trigger. And the intrusion into privacy -- the intrusion into privacy is significantly less. It's only international calls. The period of time in which we do this is, in most cases, far less than that which would be gained by getting a court order.
As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveillance.
TIA, of course, would be 'Total Information Awareness,' Darpa's effort to find potential enemies of the state in the data trails of ordinary folks. The program was cancelled a few years back. But a whole bunch of similar efforts continue throughout the government.
A former sigint type -- who also talked to Ryan, apparently -- suggests a different technological approach: the NSA 'may have compromised a hardware manufacturer -- say Motorola or a satellite phone manufacturer, a telecom carrier or a satellite(s).'
There's a ton of surveillance-related news that has come out in the last day, including:
So what's the nature of the secret NSA bugging program? Why did the Bush administration feel like they couldn't continue to seek warrants via the usual FISA procedures? Take a look at the following quotes and you can see a single thread that starts to emerge:
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, telling reporters why Bush didn't simply ask Congress to pass a law making the program clearly legal: We've had discussions with members of Congress, certain members of Congress, about whether or not we could get an amendment to FISA, and we were advised that that was not likely to be — that was not something we could likely get, certainly not without jeopardizing the existence of the program, and therefore, killing the program.
President Bush, answering questions at Monday's press conference: We use FISA still....But FISA is for long-term monitoring....There is a difference between detecting so we can prevent, and monitoring. And it's important to know the distinction between the two....We used the process to monitor. But also....we've got to be able to detect and prevent.
Senator Jay Rockefeller, in a letter to Dick Cheney after being briefed on the program in 2003: As I reflected on the meeting today, and the future we face, John Poindexter's TIA project sprung to mind, exacerbating my concern regarding the direction the Administration is moving with regard to security, technology, and surveiliance.
New York Times editor Bill Keller, explaining why the Times finally published its story last week after holding it back for over a year: In the course of subsequent reporting we satisfied ourselves that we could write about this program — withholding a number of technical details — in a way that would not expose any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record.
None of these quotes makes sense if the NSA program involved nothing more than an expansion of ordinary taps of specific individuals. After all, the FISA court would have approved taps of domestic-to-international calls as quickly and easily as they do with normal domestic wiretaps. What's more, Congress wouldn't have had any objection to supporting a routine program expansion; George Bush wouldn't have explained it with gobbledegook about the difference between monitoring and detecting; Jay Rockefeller wouldn't have been reminded of TIA; and the Times wouldn't have had any issues over divulging sensitive technology.
It seems clear that there's something involved here that goes far beyond ordinary wiretaps, regardless of the technology used. Perhaps some kind of massive data mining, which makes it impossible to get individual warrants? Stay tuned.
Lots of people have suggested that the NSA program has something to do with Echelon, a massive project that vacuums up communications of all kinds from all over the globe. The problem is that Echelon has been around for a long time and no one has ever complained about it before — so whatever this new program is, it's something more than vanilla Echelon. What's more, it's something disturbing enough that a few weeks after 9/11 the administration apparently felt that even Republicans in Congress wouldn't approve of it. What kind of program is so intrusive that even Republicans, even with 9/11 still freshly in mind, wouldn't have supported it?
Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years...
Members of Congress were eventually briefed on this fact and kept quiet -- violating theiroaths of office as a result.
After the special program started, Congressional leaders from both political parties were brought to Vice President Dick Cheney's office in the White House. The leaders, who included the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, learned of the N.S.A. operation from Mr. Cheney, Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, who was then the agency's director and is now the principal deputy director of national intelligence, and George J. Tenet, then the director of the C.I.A., officials said.
It is not clear how much the members of Congress were told about the presidential order and the eavesdropping program. Some of them declined to comment about the matter, while others did not return phone calls.
Later briefings were held for members of Congress as they assumed leadership roles on the intelligence committees...
The New York Times eventually got wind of the White House's actions in 2004, confronted the White House, and was then persuaded to sit on the story on the pretense that publishing the truth might jeopardize ongoing investigations. Never mind that by 2004 it was well-established that the Bush Administration couldn't be trusted to tell you the time of day, let alone the truth about national security matters or its foreign policy decisions.
The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.
Subsequently, the NYT -- by sitting on what should have been a major issue of the 2004 Presidential election -- failed in its duty to ensure that voters were able to make a fully-informed decision when casting their ballots.
So, Bush uses the Constitution as a piece of toilet paper, Congress turns a blind eye, and the NYT helps tilt the 2004 election in Bush's favor by failing -- again -- to honestly report the White House's actions. All in all, just another day in what's left of a democratic republic that is a pale shadow of its former self.
The Bush administration recently received a harsh legal blow in the war against terrorism. It came from an unlikely place: a clandestine federal court responsible for reviewing government requests to spy on terrorism suspects.
This court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Court, refused to approve of certain procedures proposed by Attorney General Ashcroft. In an unprecedented move, it also publicly released its ruling this August. The dispute, however, had been going on since May, when the Court announced its dissatisfaction with the procedures and its belief that they were contrary to existing federal law.
The procedures would have allowed criminal prosecutors routine access to information obtained through counterintelligence searches and wiretaps - without a probable cause showing that a crime had been or was about to be committed.
Brief for the United States, redacted, to the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, dated: August 21, 2002:
56 page decision of the United States Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, argued on September 09, 2002 and decided on November 18, 2002:
WASHINGTON - Ruling for the first time in its history, the ultra-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review today gave the green light to a Justice Department bid to broadly expand its powers to spy on U.S. citizens.
"We are deeply disappointed with the decision, which suggests that this special court exists only to rubberstamp government applications for intrusive surveillance warrants," said Ann Beeson, litigation director of the Technology and Liberty Program of the American Civil Liberties Union.
"As of today," she said, "the Attorney General can suspend the ordinary requirements of the Fourth Amendment in order to listen in on phone calls, read e-mails, and conduct secret searches of Americans' homes and offices."
This last week, we learned President Bush secretly ordered the National Security Agency to conduct a domestic spy program that entails no judicial oversight. In defense of this controversial program, a number of Republicans rely upon the case of Zacarias Moussaoui as justification for Bush's attack on our privacy and civil liberties.
Moussaoui is the only individual to be charged in connection with the 9-11 attacks and has pled guilty but is fighting the death penalty. He contends that he was not directly involved with the attacks on 9-11 but was instead to participate in a second-wave attack. He awaits a "death penalty phase" hearing. Although detained on immigration charges since August 16, 2001, the FBI failed to sufficiently investigate Moussaoui pre 9-11. If searches of his personal effects and laptop had been authorized, Moussaoui's connections to the 9-11 hijackings may have emerged and it is possible that 9-11 could have been prevented.
Republican commentators such as William Kristol and Rush Limbaugh claim FISA procedures, and the legal impediments they impose, prevented FBI agents from acting. Consequently, they maintain President Bush is justified in abrogating FISA law to order the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans.
As legal counsel to the Minneapolis FBI Division and witness to the entire Moussaoui case, I can tell you that these assertions are not just factually wrong, they miss the real problems that existed within our intelligence gathering superstructure. I wrote a 13 page memo and testified before Congress on these very failures, yet some individuals continue to misapply and misrepresent what I said.
Myth #1: The Justice Department decided there was not sufficient evidence to get a FISA warrant to allow the inspection of Moussaoui's computer files.
No evidence whatsoever was presented at any time to the Justice Department of Moussaoui's suspicious flight training and ties with terrorism. The Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, which handles FISA matters, was never contacted. Furthermore, no contact was made either with criminal attorneys in the Department of Justice or with the U.S. Attorney's Office. Therefore, no decision was ever made by Department of Justice personnel regarding the given evidence and its application to FISA or criminal standards.
In fact, the subsequent intelligence committees' inquiry, Inspector General investigation, and 9-11 Commission all decided that a sufficient connection between Moussaoui and a foreign power (or international terrorist group) did exist to have satisfied the FISA standard. Likewise, criminal prosecutors advised (after the fact) that they would have proceeded forward to seek a search warrant of Moussaoui's belongings based on the information known in August 2001.
As it turned out, faulty interpretations and widely-varying perceptions of FISA procedures, especially what the "FISA wall" entailed, played a big role in the FBI's determination not to contact DOJ, and not to move forward until after the 9/11 attacks occurred. There was also the little problem that the FBI's national security law unit lawyer had not actually read for himself the facts that Minneapolis agents had provided but, instead, had relied upon a short, verbal briefing by the first-line supervisor. When 9-11 happened, however, and it was painfully clear in hindsight that the FBI had botched it, this same lawyer's (the lawyer who had not read it) pronouncement of insufficient probable cause served as a convenient blanket defense to protect all of the underlying governmental incompetence. My 2002 memo punched a hole in that blanket defense and led to some truth being unraveled.) The bottom line is that the FISA law itself was not the reason the FBI failed to inspect Moussaoui's personal effects and computer files. Rather, the faulty interpretations and failure to share and analyze
intelligence sufficiently is what enabled Moussaoui to escape further investigation.
Myth #2: Rowley depicted the legal mechanism for security warrants under FISA, as burdensome and restrictive, a virtual roadblock to effective law enforcement.
It's true that the "FISA wall" problem did play a role in preventing the effective sharing and analysis of information pre 9-11. But to the extent that the "FISA wall" issue was problematic, (and in fact, there is no denying it was a problem, even if it all turned out to be more a problem of misperception and faulty interpretations), it was remedied when the Patriot Act brought down the "wall" shortly after 9-11 that prevented effective sharing of national security intelligence with criminal investigators and/or criminal attorneys.
My original memo to FBI Director Mueller contained a description of "probable cause" as meaning more probable than not, or if quantified, a 51% likelihood. I believed that the information gathered in August 2001 about Moussaoui satisfied the probable cause standard because a federal district judge did, in fact, find ample probable cause to grant a criminal search warrant on September 11th, the day of the attacks. The only material additions were the 9-11 attacks. When I testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee in June, 2002, Senator (and former U.S. Attorney) Arlen Specter made sure I was aware that probable cause, as viewed in the Gates "totality of the circumstances" test, could be seen as even less than a 51% likelihood. The more expansive view of probable cause was subsequently incorporated into FBI General Counsel legal opinions, which means that the minimum threshold of probable cause is even lower than I, and other legal commentators, would have previously thought.
Myth #3: The FISA process is not quick or flexible enough to detect and thwart terrorists.
The FISA process has always been a secret process which contains effective emergency provisions. These emergency provisions allow the attorney general enormous power to authorize secret "emergency" electronic surveillance and searches before any court order is granted, or an application is made, for up to 72 hours. No application is even necessary if the surveillance is terminated before the 72 hour "emergency" period ends. In fact, Minneapolis agents were so convinced of the urgency of the situation involving Moussaoui that they requested use of this emergency provision, not the regular FISA process.
Unfortunately, this would have required Attorney General Ashcroft, who had just ranked terrorism as his lowest priority in early August 2001, to appreciate the danger and sign off on the "emergency." And it would have required then FBI Acting Director Pickard to take the emergency request to Ashcroft after he (Ashcroft) had rebuked him (Pickard) earlier that summer, as Pickard testified to the 9-11 Commission, saying "he (Ashcroft) didn't want to hear any more about terrorism." Given these circumstances, FBI Headquarters quickly gave up on Minneapolis' request to seek AG approval for use of this emergency provision.
But myths aside, Moussaoui did not escape inspection because the FISA law was not permissive enough. And with the further changes wrought by the Patriot Act, bringing down the FISA wall and making the FISA process even more permissive, it is certainly not a good argument for Bush to skirt the law now.
IT took 21 years longer than expected, but the future has finally arrived. And we don't like it. Not one bit. We are fighting a war with no end to create a peace with no defined victory. We occupy a foreign land that doesn't want us, while at home our civil liberties are discounted. We are told that it's better not to know what our government is doing in our name, for security purposes. Meanwhile, our government is becoming omnipresent, spying on us whenever it deems it necessary.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.
George Orwell was right after all.
In 1949, Orwell penned "1984," a dark, futuristic satire in which the totalitarian government used indoctrination, propaganda and fear to enforce order and conformity. His "Big Brother" — the face of this all-knowing regime — was never wrong, and to make sure of it, history was constantly being rewritten. Orwell wrote his book as a cautionary tale to underscore the insidious danger of slowly eroded individual liberties. His Thought Police may not yet be on the march, but it's not hyperbole to point out the eerie parallels with today's America. In America today, Big Brother is watching. He's watching because President Bush told him to. Shortly after 9/11, Bush secretly authorized warrantless wiretaps on U.S. citizens making or receiving international calls and e-mails. When it comes to fighting terror, Bush is totalitarian — remember, you're either with us or against us. Trust me to get it right, he says. Debate on the law is not only not needed, it's evil.
"An open debate about the law would say to the enemy, 'Here's what we're going to do.'" Bush said recently. "The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy." Then there's the Patriot Act, also created in the days immediately after Sept. 11, 2001. The Senate and House of Representatives voted Thursday to extend the law by a month. President Bush and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales insist it's an indispensable tool in the war on terror and want it extended permanently. "I'm as concerned about the privacy of American citizens as anyone, but we cannot allow libraries and use of libraries to become safe havens for terrorists," Gonzales said in July, defending one of the act's most controversial provisions.
Remember, too, that we invaded Iraq primarily because we were told Saddam Hussein was an immediate threatwith his weapons of mass destruction. Now the Bush administration acknowledges that wasn't so, but insists there were (are?) other reasons to invade. History is malleable. Orwell wrote of war without end; we're told the war on terror will last decades at least. Orwell wrote of a dumbed-down "Newspeak," and who could argue that our national discourse hasn't slumped? Orwell's "Ministry of Love" tortured dissidents real or imagined; our government decries Iraq's secret torture prisons while arguing over whether to ban torture. Meanwhile, we maintain our own secret CIA prisons. Bush is unapologetic. The president believes he has the legal authority to spy on American citizens without a warrant, and he plans to continue to reauthorize the program "for so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill American citizens." But when the enemy is poorly defined, who determines when the threat is over? In this case, the same government that secretly taps our phones.
Turns out the truth is no stranger than fiction.
We think it's time for Congress to heed the warning of George Orwell.
To that end, we're asking for your help: Mail us or drop off your tattered copies of "1984." When we get 537 of them, we'll send them to every member of the House of Representatives and Senate and to President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney.
Feel free to inscribe the book with a note, reminding these fine people that we Americans take the threat to our liberties seriously. Remind Congress that it makes no sense to fight a war for democracy in a foreign land while allowing our democratic principles to erode at home.
Remind President Bush that ours is a country of checks and balances, not unbridled power. Perhaps our nation's leaders can find some truth in this fiction and more carefully ponder the road we're traveling. Bring or mail your books to the Oakland Tribune, 401 13th St., Oakland CA 94612. Doors are open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m.
Analysis of Sensenbrenner-Conyers Bill: Prepared By Piper Marbury Rudnick & Wolfe, contact: Ron Plesser, Jim Halpert, or Milo Cividanes, (202) 861-3900, Piper Marbury Rudnick & Wolfe, October 2, 2001
Testimony of Morton Halperin at the Senate Judiciary Committee on October 3, 2001, contact: Mort Halperin, (202) 518-3406, Council On Foreign Relations
The U.S. PATRIOT Act was passed with overwhelming bipartisan support in the weeks following the tragic events of 9/11. This piece of legislation expanded federal officials' existing surveillance and investigative powers for law enforcement and foreign intelligence investigations. Of over 150 provisions, 16 are set to sunset, or expire, on December 31, 2005 unless reauthorized by Congress.
On June 30, 2005, the Internet Caucus Advisory Committee assembled a fair and balanced panel of experts in electronic surveillance to discuss issues surrounding PATRIOT Act reauthorization. The panel featured:
Moderator: Peter Swire, Professor, Moritz College of Law of the Ohio State University Bio
James X. Dempsey, Executive Director, Center for Democracy & Technology Bio
William Moschella, Assistant Attorney General, Department of Justice Bio
Emily Sheketoff, Associate Executive Director, American Library Association Bio
The panel debated the issues that Congress must decide before adjournment this fall including, but not limited to:
Section 213. "Sneak and Peak" or "Delayed Notification Warrants"
Section 215. "Business Records" or "Library Records" Provision
Administrative Subpoena Powers Under Patriot Reauthorization Act (PAREA) Recently Reported Out of the Senate Intelligence Committee
Sharing of Information Between Foreign Intelligence Agencies and Domestic Agencies (i.e. "The Wall")
Section 206. "Roving Wiretap Surveillance Authority Under FISA
This event is hosted jointly by the Internet Caucus and its Co-Chairs - Senators Burns and Leahy and Congressmen Goodlatte and Boucher.
*The Echelon System (NSA)
Summary:
Echelon is the term popularly used for an automated, global, quasi-total surveillance system operated by the intelligence agencies in five nations: the United States (NSA), the United Kingdom (GCHQ), Canada (CSE), Australia (DSD) and New Zealand (GCSB). Echelon intercepts huge amounts of ordinary phone calls, e-mail messages, Internet downloads, satellite transmissions, etc., gathering all of these transmissions indiscriminately and distilling the information that is most heavily desired through artificial intelligence programs. Some sources have claimed that Echelon sifts through an estimated 90 percent of all traffic that flows through the Internet. The United States government has gone to extreme lengths to keep Echelon a secret, even after the governments of Australia and New Zealand admitted to its existence. Echelon is a highly classified operation, which is conducted with little or no oversight by national parliaments or courts, so there is no way to know how the information is used, and whether that use is lawful or not. Significant privacy concerns have been raised by Congress and many other governments and institutions. [Source for this information]
Details:
Data is collected in multiple ways. Massive ground based radio antennae intercept satellite transmissions and tap surface traffic. Satellites are used to catch "spillover" data from transmissions between cities and beam this information down to processing centers on the ground. Echelon also intercepts Internet transmissions through numerous "sniffer" devices which collect information from data packets as they traverse the Internet via several key junctions. It also uses search software to scan for web sites that may be of interest. Echelon has even used special underwater devices which tap into cables that carry phone calls across the seas. The nations that are involved with Echelon also train special agents to install a variety of special data collection devices, such as an information processing kit that is the size of a suitcase or a sophisticated radio receiver that is as small as a credit card. All of the information collected is sifted through a system of computers, known as Dictionaries, to pick out relevant information. [ACLU]
The U.S. government refuses to admit that Echelon even exists. It is known to exist because both the governments of Australia and New Zealand have admitted to this fact (even after this, the U.S. refuses to comment). In addition, the Scientific and Technical Options Assessment program office of the European Parliament commissioned two reports which confirm the existence of Echelon and describe its activities. These reports unearthed a startling amount of evidence which suggests that Echelon's powers may have been underestimated and that "Echelon is designed for primarily non-military targets: governments, organizations and businesses in virtually every country." [ACLU]
When the House Select Committee on Intelligence started asking questions about the legality of Echelon activities (since US law severely limits the ability of the intelligence agencies to engage in domestic surveillance), the NSA invoked the attorney-client privilege and refused to disclose the legal standards by which Echelon might have conducted its activities. [ACLU]
The NSA and its compatriot organizations may have circumvented countless laws in numerous countries which are in place to prevent such invasions of privacy (including U.S. laws against wiretapping and spying on citizens without due process). There are suspicions that Echelon has engaged in subterfuge to avoid these legal restrictions. For example, it is rumored that nations do not use their own agents to spy on their own citizens, but assign the task to agents from other countries. [ACLU]
The original purpose of Echelon was to protect national security, but national security is not Echelon's only concern. Reports have indicated that industrial espionage has become a part of Echelon's activities, and there are concerns that Echelon's information may be used to stifle political dissent. There is also evidence that Echelon has been engaged in significant invasions of privacy, including secret surveillance of political organizations, such as Amnesty International. There are no known safeguards to prevent such abuses of power. [ACLU]
An office was created within the Department of Commerce, the Office of Intelligence Liaison, to forward certain intercepted information to major U.S. corporations. In many cases, the beneficiaries of this commercial espionage effort are the very companies that helped the NSA develop the systems that power the Echelon network (Lockheed, Boeing, Loral, TRW and Raytheon). This relationship is so strong that sometimes this intelligence information is used to push other American manufacturers out of deals in favor of these mammoth U.S. defense and intelligence contractors, who frequently are the source of major cash contributions to both political parties. [POOLE]
As one example of industrial espionage, in 1990 the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel revealed that the NSA intercepted messages about a pending $200-million telecommunications deal between Indonesia and a Japanese satellite manufacturer. George Bush intervened on the basis of the intelligence intercept and convinced the Indonesians to split the contract between the Japanese and U.S.-owned AT&T. [NP]
Several former GCHQ officials confidentially told the London Observer in June 1992 that Echelon targeted seemingly non-controversial organizations including Amnesty International, Greenpeace and Christian Aid. [POOLE]
A former Maryland Congressman, Michael Barnes, claimed in a 1995 Baltimore Sun article that under the Reagan Administration his phone calls were regularly intercepted, which he discovered only after reporters had been passed transcripts of his conversations by the White House. [POOLE]
In 1988, a former Lockheed software manager who was responsible for a dozen VAX computers that powered the Echelon computers at Menwith Hill, Margaret Newsham, came forth with the stunning revelation that she had actually heard the NSA's real time interception of phone conversations involving Senator Strom Thurmond. [POOLE] "The surveillance was incredibly target-oriented. We were capable of singling out an individual or organization and monitoring all electronic communication - real time - and all the time. The person was monitored without ever having a chance to discover it, and most of the information was sent with lightening speed to another station using the enormous digital capacity at our command. Everything took place without a search warrant." [EB]
The NSA has a history of domestic political spying. Nixon presidential aide John Ehrlichman revealed in his published memoirs that Henry Kissinger used the NSA to intercept the messages of then-Secretary of State William P. Rogers, which Kissinger used to convince President Nixon of Rogers' incompetence. Kissinger also found himself on the receiving end of the NSA's global net. Word of Kissinger's secret diplomatic dealings with foreign governments would reach the ears of other Nixon administration officials, incensing Kissinger. [POOLE] In the 1970's, Congressional committees found that government agencies, including the NSA, had eavesdropped on actress Jane Fonda, Dr. Benjamin Spock and other anti-Vietnam War activists. [CNN]
As of February, 2000 the NSA had a global staff of 38,000 and a budget estimated at more than $3.6-billion - more than the FBI and the CIA combined. [NP] In July, 2002 the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Terrorism and Homeland Security found that the NSA was unable to identify how it spends the money it gets from Congress each year "to any level of detail." [TIME]
In 2001, the CIA's Office of Advanced Information Technology began developing a number of data-mining enhancements to make eavesdropping on electronic communications easier. One program, called Oasis, automatically converts audio signals into conveniently readable, and searchable, text (distinguishing the speakers). [WAPOST] This will very likely be used by the NSA to improve Echelon's ability to monitor and log masses of intercepted phone conversations. [REG]
In March, 2003 the United Nations began a top-level investigation into the bugging of its delegations by the United States using Echelon. The Observer published details of a memo sent by the NSA ordering a "dirty tricks" intelligence surge against Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea with "extra focus on Pakistan UN matters." The operation was designed to win votes in favor of intervention in Iraq. While the bugging of foreign diplomats at the UN is permissible under the U.S. Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, it is a breach of the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. [OBS]
As of June, 2003, Congress is going to allow the NSA to exempt itself from all Freedom of Information Act requests dealing with files that document the means by which foreign intelligence or counterintelligence is collected through technical systems. (In other words, the details of Echelon would become off-limits from FOIA requests). Apparently, similar exemptions allowed in the past for the operational files of other agencies, such as the National Reconnaissance Office, led to those agencies categorizing all of their directives as "operational". It is possible the NSA will continue this trend and over-apply the exemption. [NSARCH]
The National Security Archive, a research institute based at George Washington University, has uncovered apparently definitive proof of the existence of Echelon from the government itself, in the form of two declassified documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act which refer directly to Echelon and known Echelon sites (including Yakima in Washington state and Sugar Grove in West Virginia). Those documents can be found online here and here.
Further Info: ACLU - Large resource of news and links on Echelon Duncan Campbell - Article "Inside Echelon" Duncan Campbell Article on Echelon and corporate espionage National Security Archive - Archive of declassified U.S. documents obtained through FOIA ZDNet UK - Tech editor's speculation on the nuts and bolts of Echelon NSA - Official Homepage of the National Security Administration GCHQ - Official Homepage of the British Government Communications Headquarters
If you're under FBI surveillance, there's a good chance your phone calls and Internet traffic are traveling over the equipment of Verint Systems -- a company that's doing very well these days, writes SecurityFocus' Kevin Poulsen.
New York-based technology firm Verint Systems recently launched a product called "IntelliFind" that claims impressive capabilities. The system is designed to be attached to the phone lines at a company's call center, where it silently monitors every telephone call, and -- using advanced voice recognition technology -- picks out conversations in which certain keywords are spoken, dumping a digital recording into a searchable database. "You can decide you want to see all the calls where product 'xyz' was mentioned, and then you can pick one and listen to that entire call," says Alan Roden, Verint's VP of corporate development.
If IntelliFind sounds like something that would normally be found on a supercomputer humming in an NSA basement, there's a reason. Behind business intelligence offerings like IntelliFind, and a line of networkable video cameras, Verint is a leading maker of electronic surveillance equipment and software for the United States and other governments. And it turns out that while other technology firms are struggling in a down economy, the business of helping governments with their spying may be a growth industry. In quarterly results announced Wednesday, Verint, a subsidiary of Comverse Technology, posted record sales of $42 million for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2002 -- the company's third straight quarter of growth since going public in May 2002.
"During the year we believe that a greater interest in gathering intelligence to prevent criminal activity by government and law enforcement agencies resulted in greater demand for our communication interception solutions," said company president Dan Bodner in a conference call for analysts. "Over the past year we enhanced our competitive position by entering new markets, expanding our customer base, and introducing new capabilities for the analysis of content and culled data collected from wireline, wireless and data networks."
Among those new markets was an unnamed country "in the Latin America region" whose government recently placed a multi-million dollar order for communications interception systems, said Bodner.
Bodner didn't say what the Latin American government bought with that money, but the mainstay of Verint's electronic surveillance business is its "STAR-GATE" and "RELIANT" products, which operate on the supply and consumption sides of domestic spying respectively. The RELIANT system acts as a government agency's big ear, collecting and managing intercepted voice, e-mail, fax, SMS, data, chat, and Web browsing -- all on a single platform. On the delivery side, STAR-GATE does the actual wiretapping, and is primarily marketed to telephone companies trying to comply with the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA), which requires telecommunications carriers to keep their networks wiretap friendly for the FBI. An ISP version of STAR-GATE lets Internet providers conduct lawful surveillance of their customers and send the intercepted data to law enforcement over private networks.
PATRIOT Profits
With recent legislation and court decisions granting U.S. law enforcement agencies greater spying powers than they've had since the Nixon administration, government surveillance solutions look like a good bet, and other technology companies are getting in on the game. Last Fall, VeriSign launched its "NetDiscovery" service -- a turnkey CALEA solution for telephone companies that sends intercepted communications to law enforcement over a national IP-based network, using Verint STAR-GATEs for the taps. And last August, computer security company Network Associates got into the Carnivore business with its acquisition of Utah-based Traxess, makers of the "DragNet" Internet spy tool.
And for every company that makes the news with a surveillance system, there may be countless more that nobody's ever heard of. When the non-profit Electronic Privacy Information Center recently obtained a list of companies vying for a piece of the Defense Department's "Total Information Awareness" computerized spying project, the list of bidders included nearly as many obscure companies as it did brand name defense contractors. "It looks like there's this whole world of these little security technology companies that are probably doing well these days," says EPIC attorney David Sobel.
But Gartner analyst John Pescatore isn't convinced that there's big money in domestic surveillance. Instead, he says, the real opportunities are in helping the U.S. perform surveillance internationally. Indeed, according to its quarterly report, Verint has a subsidiary that provides communications interception solutions to what's described demurely as "various U.S. government agencies." The subsidiary's offices hold a facility security clearance from the Defense Department, and are located in Chantilly, Virginia, a stone's throw from most of America's intelligence agencies.
"Certainly with the USA-PATRIOT Act and all this homeland security stuff, there's been more effort in domestic collection," says Pescatore. "But the domestic type money has been a lot slower to start flowing than the national intelligence stuff... There's been definite growth there."
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: September 21, 2005, 1:49 PM PDT
The National Security Agency has obtained a patent on a method of figuring out an Internet user's geographic location.
Patent 6,947,978, granted Tuesday, describes a way to discover someone's physical location by comparing it to a "map" of Internet addresses with known locations.
The NSA did not respond Wednesday to an interview request, and the patent description talks only generally about the technology's potential uses. It says the geographic location of Internet users could be used to "measure the effectiveness of advertising across geographic regions" or flag a password that "could be noted or disabled if not used from or near the appropriate location."
Other applications of the geo-location patent, invented by Stephen Huffman and Michael Reifer of Maryland, could relate to the NSA's signals intelligence mission--which is, bluntly put, spying on the communications of non-U.S. citizens.
"If someone's engaged in a dialogue or frequenting a 'bad' Web site, the NSA might want to know where they are," said Mike Liebhold, a senior researcher at the Institute for the Future who has studied geo-location technology. "It wouldn't give them precision, but it would give them a clue that they could use to narrow down the location with other intelligence methods."
A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.
Memo questions use of presidential power in wiretapping without approval
President Bush's rationale for eavesdropping on Americans without warrants rests on questionable legal ground, and Congress does not appear to have given him the authority to order the surveillance, said a Congressional analysis released Friday.
All of the sigint specialists emphasized repeatedly that keeping tabs on Americans is way beyond the bounds of what they ordinarily do -- no matter what the conspiracy crowd may think.