Bush Lets NSA Spy on Callers Without Courts

QueEx · Dec 23, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

Greed said:
thats not the point, the point is why are the dems being so blantantly disingenuous and why didnt the new york times do the obvious research on their own stories from the 90's to give its readers a proper context to take all this in.

or why did the new york times already know the proper context and make a conscience decision to not convey it to their readers.

what public good was the new york times pursuing when they wrote a story implying that the world started jan 20, 2001.

and if this is something that over the last 30 years, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches has all agreed is within the presidents power to detect foreign threats then what purpose was served to allow operational details to be exposed.

i know we're all supposed to hate bush but i'm tired of these national security secrets being exposed for gratuitous and purely political reasons.

Are these disclosures for gratuitous and purely political reasons ??? You might be right and, as you know, the nature of the beast makes it virtually impossible for us to know. However, having a little understanding the beast tells me that something else lies at the bottom of all of this.

I feel certain that a many, if not most, of the targets of the surveillance are derived from other sources of intelligence (other than from the surveillance itself) and that the targets fall within the meaning of foreign agents, whether acting domestically or abroard. All of these people would, or should, expect that they may be the subject of governmenal eavesdropping. So, why was Bush so peeved that these people may now know that their convo's are under surveillance ???

If the names/identities of all of the foreign agents/terrorists in this country are known by the government; and if the telephone numbers of those agents/terrorists in this country are known to the government, we could feel rather assured that the government is all over them and who would give a shit about their telephonics being monitored ???

But, we are led to believe that there are/maybe sleepers and others here and that they have not been identified by other sources of intelligence. In other words, we don't know who or where they are.

How, then, are their conversations monitored or even discovered to exist ??? Constant scanning of all or at least millions of ordinary American telephone conversations a day ??? What constitutional or other authority authorizes that ??? Maybe its not the terrorists or would-be terrorists that the president is peeved about, maybe he's ticked off that ordinary Americans now know that their privacy is being stepped on, in violation of law ???

QueEx

QueEx · Dec 23, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

<center>On Leaks, Relying on A Faulty Case Study
Untrue Bin Laden Satellite Phone Story Still Has Currency With Media's Critics</center>

By Glenn Kessler
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 23, 2005; Page A03

The allegation that news organizations leaked information about Osama bin Laden's satellite phone, thus shutting down a valuable source of intelligence that might have prevented the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, has long been a prime case study cited by government officials seeking to impose greater restrictions on the news media.

President Bush drew attention to the case Monday when he twice cited it as a dangerous example of the news media "revealing sources, methods and what we use the information for." Bush was basing his remarks on a conclusion by the Sept. 11 commission, which had labeled it a "leak" that prompted the al Qaeda leader to turn off his phone.

Upon closer examination, the story turned out to be wrong. Bin Laden's use of a satellite phone had already been widely reported by August 1998, and he stopped using it within days of a cruise missile attack on his training camps in Afghanistan.

Yet in recent years, advocates of new laws that would restrict the ability of the news media to report on intelligence matters have repeatedly cited the case of bin Laden's satellite phone as an especially dangerous example of media malfeasance.

In July, Rep, Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), chairman of the House intelligence committee, gave a speech titled "Secrets and Leaks: the Costs and Consequences for National Security," in which he highlighted the bin Laden case. "Were it not for a leak, there is a chance we could have brought Osama bin Laden to justice by now and have a better understanding of the al Qaeda operation," said Hoekstra, who is considering legislation to make it easier to prosecute leakers.

A spokesman for Hoekstra did not return a call seeking comment.

Hoekstra has distributed to lawmakers a classified report on leaks compiled by James B. Bruce, vice chairman of the CIA's Foreign Denial and Deception Committee, and a leading advocate of enacting very tough laws on leaks. In 2002, Bruce was quoted as saying that "we've got to do whatever it takes -- if it takes sending SWAT teams into journalists' homes -- to stop these leaks."

Bruce has also repeatedly cited the bin Laden example as he made the case for new laws to stem leaks, such as making journalists and news organizations liable for prosecution if they report classified information or obtain classified documents.

"Important intelligence collection capabilities against Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda were lost in the several year period leading to 9/11," Bruce told the American Bar Association on Nov. 22, 2002, saying the bin Laden case was "just the tip of the iceberg" of how disclosures hurt the campaign against terrorism. He did not cite other examples.

Former deputy defense secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz mentioned bin Laden's phone in September 2002, saying it was an example of how "our intelligence sources and methods have also been devaluated by a pattern of leaks from the executive and legislative branches of government and through a number of well-known espionage cases."

Bruce, who did not respond to an e-mail requesting comment, was a staff member of the 2005 Robb-Silberman Commission on Intelligence Capabilities, which included a classified annex that detailed leaks "that have collectively cost the American people millions of dollars." A source said one of those cases is that of bin Laden's phone.

Several commissioners declined to comment, except to say there were several incidents that showed significant damage to U.S. intelligence.

Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, said the bin Laden case shows that the news media may play less of a role in intelligence failures than is often assumed. "Cruise missiles concentrate the mind a lot more than news clips do," he said. "It is the underlying reality, not the leaks, that does most of the damage."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...5122201800.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

Greed · Dec 24, 2005

EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants

EXCLUSIVE: Nuclear Monitoring of Muslims Done Without Search Warrants
Posted 12/22/05
By David E. Kaplan

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.

Federal officials familiar with the program maintain that warrants are unneeded for the kind of radiation sampling the operation entails, but some legal scholars disagree. News of the program comes in the wake of revelations last week that, after 9/11, the Bush White House approved electronic surveillance of U.S. targets by the National Security Agency without court orders. These and other developments suggest that the federal government's domestic spying programs since 9/11 have been far broader than previously thought.

The nuclear surveillance program began in early 2002 and has been run by the FBI and the Department of Energy's Nuclear Emergency Support Team (NEST). Two individuals, who declined to be named because the program is highly classified, spoke to U.S. News because of their concerns about the legality of the program. At its peak, they say, the effort involved three vehicles in Washington, D.C., monitoring 120 sites per day, nearly all of them Muslim targets drawn up by the FBI. For some ten months, officials conducted daily monitoring, and they have resumed daily checks during periods of high threat. The program has also operated in at least five other cities when threat levels there have risen: Chicago, Detroit, Las Vegas, New York, and Seattle.

FBI officials expressed concern that discussion of the program would expose sensitive methods used in counterterrorism. Although NEST staffers have demonstrated their techniques on national television as recently as October, U.S. News has omitted details of how the monitoring is conducted. Officials from four different agencies declined to respond on the record about the classified program: the FBI, Energy Department, Justice Department, and National Security Council. "We don't ever comment on deployments," said Bryan Wilkes, a spokesman for DOE's National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages NEST.

In Washington, the sites monitored have included prominent mosques and office buildings in suburban Maryland and Virginia. One source close to the program said that participants "were tasked on a daily and nightly basis," and that FBI and Energy Department officials held regular meetings to update the monitoring list. "The targets were almost all U.S. citizens," says the source. "A lot of us thought it was questionable, but people who complained nearly lost their jobs. We were told it was perfectly legal."

The question of search warrants is controversial, however. To ensure accurate readings, in up to 15 percent of the cases the monitoring needed to take place on private property, sources say, such as on mosque parking lots and private driveways. Government officials familiar with the program insist it is legal; warrants are unneeded for monitoring from public property, they say, as well as from publicly accessible driveways and parking lots. "If a delivery man can access it, so can we," says one.

Georgetown University Professor David Cole, a constitutional law expert, disagrees. Surveillance of public spaces such as mosques or public businesses might well be allowable without a court order, he argues, but not private offices or homes: "They don't need a warrant to drive onto the property -- the issue isn't where they are, but whether they're using a tactic to intrude on privacy. It seems to me that they are, and that they would need a warrant or probable cause."

Cole points to a 2001 Supreme Court decision, U.S. vs. Kyllo, which looked at police use -- without a search warrant -- of thermal imaging technology to search for marijuana-growing lamps in a home. The court, in a ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia, ruled that authorities did in fact need a warrant -- that the heat sensors violated the Fourth Amendment's clause against unreasonable search and seizure. But officials familiar with the FBI/NEST program say the radiation sensors are different and are only sampling the surrounding air. "This kind of program only detects particles in the air, it's non directional," says one knowledgeable official. "It's not a whole lot different from smelling marijuana."

Officials also reject any notion that the program specifically has targeted Muslims. "We categorically do not target places of worship or entities solely based on ethnicity or religious affiliation," says one. "Our investigations are intelligence driven and based on a criminal predicate."

Among those said to be briefed on the monitoring program were Vice President Richard Cheney; Michael Brown, then-director of the Federal Emergency Management Administration; and Richard Clarke, then a top counterterrorism official at the National Security Council. After 9/11, top officials grew increasingly concerned over the prospect of nuclear terrorism. Just weeks after the World Trade Center attacks, a dubious informant named Dragonfire warned that al Qaeda had smuggled a nuclear device into New York City; NEST teams swept the city and found nothing. But as evidence seized from Afghan camps confirmed al Qaeda's interest in nuclear technology, radiation detectors were temporarily installed along Washington, D.C., highways and the Muslim monitoring program began.

Most staff for the monitoring came from NEST, which draws from nearly 1,000 nuclear scientists and technicians based largely at the country's national laboratories. For 30 years, NEST undercover teams have combed suspected sites looking for radioactive material, using high-tech detection gear fitted onto various aircraft, vehicles, and even backpacks and attaché cases. No dirty bombs or nuclear devices have ever been found - and that includes the post-9/11 program. "There were a lot of false positives, and one or two were alarming," says one source. "But in the end we found nothing."

http://www.usnews.com/usnews/news/articles/nest/051222nest.htm

Greed · Dec 24, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

QueEx said:
...QueEx

i dont know of the administration explaining their position in the context of the questions you posed, but i can tell you why i would be angry that,

" All of these people would, or should, expect that they may be the subject of governmenal eavesdropping. So, why was Bush so peeved that these people may now know that their convo's are under surveillance ???"

i'd rather stalk an enemy that may be a little complacent, doesnt know whether his security methods are working or not, than a guy that just heard a noise and now his ears are perked up.

as far as the more unknown elements that may be lurking here in america, if the government find a laptop or a phone on a terrorist and it has a whole bunch of numbers on it, then what do they do?

i wasnt aware(i'm no lawyer) guilt by association was enough to get a warrant.

assuming i had the right impression, then does the government just sit on those numbers? i dont advocate that.

of course, the real point of concern is the legality of the collecting of bulk info and sifting through it. i'm not really worried about it personally, because like i said this isnt new as far as i understand it. for almost as long as i've been born the three branches have been haggling over their inherent authorities regardng the fisa law.

now, judging by the dynamics of dem legislatures with dem presidents, dem legislatures with repub presidents, repub legislatures with dem presidents, and repub legislatures with repub presidents over the last 25 yrs with the judicial mixed in there, and they all acquiesced to the present status quo.

i'm sure there is more nuance to it but thats how i see it.

i would love to think this could be debated, but as far as i'm corcerned this is one of the many functions of government.

now, government sifting through large volumes of electronic data looking for something illegal annoys me less than the static cameras with their flashing blue lights in my neighborhoods looking for something illegal.

ultimately, i can take this attitude because after a couple of decades the shit hasnt been challenged and likely wont ever get challenged.

muckraker10021 · Dec 24, 2005

Peeps , there is NO DEBATE in the “Reality-Based Community” about whether the Cheney-Bush Junta COMMITTED A CRIME when they bypassed the FISA court and spied on anyone they wanted to. Cheny-bush BROKE THE LAW.
There is no wiggle-room! Cheney-bush COMMITTED A CRIME !!!
Bush committed an impeachable offense AGAIN.

Even <s>FOX</s> FAKE NEWS commentator
<img src="http://www.foxnews.com/images/2324/11_21_350x450_napolitano_andrew.jpg" width="200" height="256">
RepubliKlan Former Judge Andrew P. Napolitano says


"The president has violated the law in the name of national security, not wanting to violate the law, believing he’s doing the right thing, but he violated it nonetheless. He can’t pick and choose which laws to obey and not to obey any more than the rest of us can"

<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="14"></hr>

[wm]http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TSR-Dersh-Spy-Crime.wmv[/wm]

<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="14"></hr>

Here’s this weeks (December 26th 2005) editorial from that Communist, Marxist-Leninist , Socialist publication that I’ve subscribed to since 1982. BARRONS.

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.


<img src="http://online.barrons.com/barrons-media/BOL_logo_top_page.gif">

<img src="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/thenewswire/archive/ap/0070-17.jpg">

MONDAY, DECEMBER 26, 2005

Unwarranted Executive Power
The pursuit of terrorism does not authorize the president to make up new laws

<a target="_blank" href="http://users2.barrons.com/lmda/do/checkLogin?a=t&d=barrons&sd=users2&url=http://online.barrons.com/article/SB113538491760731012.html">Read the original editorial here</a>


By THOMAS G. DONLAN

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.

It was not a shock to learn that shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to conduct intercepts of international phone calls to and from the United States. The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits the government to gather the foreign communications of people in the U.S. -- without a warrant if quick action is important. But the law requires that, within 72 hours, investigators must go to a special secret court for a retroactive warrant.

The USA Patriot Act permits some exceptions to its general rules about warrants for wiretaps and searches, including a 15-day exception for searches in time of war. And there may be a controlling legal authority in the Sept. 14, 2001, congressional resolution that authorized the president to go after terrorists and use all necessary and appropriate force. It was not a declaration of war in a constitutional sense, but it may have been close enough for government work.

Certainly, there was an emergency need after the Sept. 11 attacks to sweep up as much information as possible about the chances of another terrorist attack. But a 72-hour emergency or a 15-day emergency doesn't last four years.

In that time, Congress has extensively debated the rules on wiretaps and other forms of domestic surveillance. Administration officials have spent many hours before many committees urging lawmakers to provide them with great latitude. Congress acted, and the president signed.

Now the president and his lawyers are claiming that they have greater latitude. They say that neither the USA Patriot Act nor the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act actually sets the real boundary. The administration is saying the president has unlimited authority to order wiretaps in the pursuit of foreign terrorists, and that the Congress has no power to overrule him.

"We also believe the president has the inherent authority under the Constitution, as commander-in-chief, to engage in this kind of activity," said Attorney General Alberto Gonzales. The Department of Justice made a similar assertion as far back as 2002, saying in a legal brief: "The Constitution vests in the president inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that Constitutional authority." Gonzales last week declined to declassify relevant legal reviews made by the Department of Justice.

Perhaps they were researched in a Star Chamber? Putting the president above the Congress is an invitation to tyranny. The president has no powers except those specified in the Constitution and those enacted by law. President Bush is stretching the power of commander-in-chief of the Army and Navy by indicating that he can order the military and its agencies, such as the National Security Agency, to do whatever furthers the defense of the country from terrorists, regardless of whether actual force is involved.

Surely the "strict constructionists" on the Supreme Court and the federal judiciary eventually will point out what a stretch this is. The most important presidential responsibility under Article II is that he must "take care that the laws be faithfully executed." That includes following the requirements of laws that limit executive power. There's not much fidelity in an executive who debates and lobbies Congress to shape a law to his liking and then goes beyond its writ.

Willful disregard of a law is potentially an impeachable offense. It is at least as impeachable as having a sexual escapade under the Oval Office desk and lying about it later. The members of the House Judiciary Committee who staged the impeachment of President Clinton ought to be as outraged at this situation. They ought to investigate it, consider it carefully and report either a bill that would change the wiretap laws to suit the president or a bill of impeachment.

It is important to be clear that an impeachment case, if it comes to that, would not be about wiretapping, or about a possible Constitutional right not to be wiretapped. It would be about the power of Congress to set wiretapping rules by law, and it is about the obligation of the president to follow the rules in the Acts that he and his predecessors signed into law.

Some ancillary responsibility, however, must be attached to those members of the House and Senate who were informed, inadequately, about the wiretapping and did nothing to regulate it. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, told Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 that he was "unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse these activities." But the senator was so respectful of the administration's injunction of secrecy that he wrote it out in longhand rather than give it to someone to type. Only last week, after the cat was out of the bag, did he do what he should have done in 2003 -- make his misgivings public and demand more information.

Published reports quote sources saying that 14 members of Congress were notified of the wiretapping. If some had misgivings, apparently they were scared of being called names, as the president did last week when he said: "It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy."

Wrong. If we don't discuss the program and the lack of authority for it, we are meeting the enemy -- in the mirror.



<hr noshade color="#0000FF" size="14"></hr>


Even <s>FOX</s> FAKE NEWS Cheif Prevaricating Buffoon
O’Really understands the Cheney-bush COMMITTED A CRIME because they DID NOT GO to the FISA Court.

[WM]http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TOF-Turley-Spying.wmv[/WM]

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"></hr>

<img src="http://proquest.umi.com/i/pub/7818.gif">

Mr. Cheney's Imperial Presidency


EDITORIAL Published: December 23, 2005

George W. Bush has quipped several times during his political career that it would be so much easier to govern in a dictatorship. Apparently he never told his vice president that this was a joke.

Virtually from the time he chose himself to be Mr. Bush's running mate in 2000, Dick Cheney has spearheaded an extraordinary expansion of the powers of the presidency - from writing energy policy behind closed doors with oil executives to abrogating longstanding treaties and using the 9/11 attacks as a pretext to invade Iraq, scrap the Geneva Conventions and spy on American citizens.

It was a chance Mr. Cheney seems to have been dreaming about for decades. Most Americans looked at wrenching events like the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal and the Iran-contra debacle and worried that the presidency had become too powerful, secretive and dismissive. Mr. Cheney looked at the same events and fretted that the presidency was not powerful enough, and too vulnerable to inspection and calls for accountability.

The president "needs to have his constitutional powers unimpaired, if you will, in terms of the conduct of national security policy," Mr. Cheney said this week as he tried to stifle the outcry over a domestic spying program that Mr. Bush authorized after the 9/11 attacks.

Before 9/11, Mr. Cheney was trying to undermine the institutional and legal structure of multilateral foreign policy: he championed the abrogation of the Antiballistic Missile Treaty with Moscow in order to build an antimissile shield that doesn't work but makes military contractors rich. Early in his tenure, Mr. Cheney, who quit as chief executive of Halliburton to run with Mr. Bush in 2000, gathered his energy industry cronies at secret meetings in Washington to rewrite energy policy to their specifications. Mr. Cheney offered the usual excuses about the need to get candid advice on important matters, and the courts, sadly, bought it. But the task force was not an exercise in diverse views. Mr. Cheney gathered people who agreed with him, and allowed them to write national policy for an industry in which he had recently amassed a fortune.

The effort to expand presidential power accelerated after 9/11, taking advantage of a national consensus that the president should have additional powers to use judiciously against terrorists.

Mr. Cheney started agitating for an attack on Iraq immediately, pushing the intelligence community to come up with evidence about a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda that never existed. His team was central to writing the legal briefs justifying the abuse and torture of prisoners, the idea that the president can designate people to be "unlawful enemy combatants" and detain them indefinitely, and a secret program allowing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on American citizens without warrants. And when Senator John McCain introduced a measure to reinstate the rule of law at American military prisons, Mr. Cheney not only led the effort to stop the amendment, but also tried to revise it to actually legalize torture at C.I.A. prisons.

There are finally signs that the democratic system is trying to rein in the imperial presidency. Republicans in the Senate and House forced Mr. Bush to back the McCain amendment, and Mr. Cheney's plan to legalize torture by intelligence agents was rebuffed. Congress also agreed to extend the Patriot Act for five weeks rather than doing the administration's bidding and rushing to make it permanent.

On Wednesday, a federal appeals court refused to allow the administration to transfer Jose Padilla, an American citizen who has been held by the military for more than three years on suspicion of plotting terrorist attacks, from military to civilian custody. After winning the same court's approval in September to hold Mr. Padilla as an unlawful combatant, the administration abruptly reversed course in November and charged him with civil crimes unrelated to his arrest. That decision was an obvious attempt to avoid having the Supreme Court review the legality of the detention powers that Mr. Bush gave himself, and the appeals judges refused to go along.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have insisted that the secret eavesdropping program is legal, but The Washington Post reported yesterday that the court created to supervise this sort of activity is not so sure. It said that the presiding judge was arranging a classified briefing for her fellow judges and that several judges on the court wanted to know why the administration believed eavesdropping on American citizens without warrants was legal when the law specifically required such warrants.

Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney are tenacious. They still control both houses of Congress and are determined to pack the judiciary with like-minded ideologues. Still, the recent developments are encouraging, especially since the court ruling on Mr. Padilla was written by a staunch conservative considered by President Bush for the Supreme Court.



<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"></hr>

QueEx · Dec 25, 2005

<center>Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report</center>

The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
Published: December 24, 2005

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.

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter.

"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."

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

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.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.'s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program's operational details, as well as its legality.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

This so-called "pattern analysis" on calls within the United States would, in many circumstances, require a court warrant if the government wanted to trace who calls whom.

The use of similar data-mining operations by the Bush administration in other contexts has raised strong objections, most notably in connection with the Total Information Awareness system, developed by the Pentagon for tracking terror suspects, and the Department of Homeland Security's Capps program for screening airline passengers. Both programs were ultimately scrapped after public outcries over possible threats to privacy and civil liberties.

But the Bush administration regards the N.S.A.'s ability to trace and analyze large volumes of data as critical to its expanded mission to detect terrorist plots before they can be carried out, officials familiar with the program say. Administration officials maintain that the system set up by Congress in 1978 under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not give them the speed and flexibility to respond fully to terrorist threats at home.

A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

"All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there's been much more active involvement in that area," said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.

"If they get content, that's useful to them too, but the real plum is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis," he said. "Massive amounts of traffic analysis information - who is calling whom, who is in Osama Bin Laden's circle of family and friends - is used to identify lines of communication that are then given closer scrutiny."

Several officials said that after President Bush's order authorizing the N.S.A. program, senior government officials arranged with officials of some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies to gain access to switches that act as gateways at the borders between the United States' communications networks and international networks. The identities of the corporations involved could not be determined.

The switches are some of the main arteries for moving voice and some Internet traffic into and out of the United States, and, with the globalization of the telecommunications industry in recent years, many international-to-international calls are also routed through such American switches.

One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the N.S.A. said that to exploit its technological capabilities, the American government had in the last few years been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.

The growth of that transit traffic had become a major issue for the intelligence community, officials say, because it had not been fully addressed by 1970's-era laws and regulations governing the N.S.A. Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches on American soil, some judges and law enforcement officials regarded eavesdropping on those calls as a possible violation of those decades-old restrictions, including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires court-approved warrants for domestic surveillance.

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.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html?pagewanted=1

QueEx · Dec 25, 2005

<center>Officials Want to Expand Review of Domestic Spying </center>

The New York Times
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: December 25, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 24 - Congressional officials said Saturday that they wanted to investigate the disclosure that the National Security Agency had gained access to some of the country's main telephone arteries to glean data on possible terrorists.

"As far as Congressional investigations are concerned," said Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, "these new revelations can only multiply and intensify the growing list of questions and concerns about the warrantless surveillance of Americans."

Members of the Judiciary Committee have already indicated that they intend to conduct oversight hearings into the president's legal authority to order domestic eavesdropping on terrorist suspects without a warrant.

But Congressional officials said Saturday that they would probably seek to expand the review to include the disclosure that the security agency, using its access to giant phone "switches," had also traced and analyzed phone and Internet traffic in much larger volumes than what the Bush administration had acknowledged.

"We want to look at the entire program, an in-depth review, and this new data-mining issue is certainly a part of the whole picture," said a Republican Congressional aide, who asked not to be identified because no decisions had been made on how hearings might be structured.

Current and former government officials say that the security agency, as part of its domestic surveillance program, has gained the cooperation of some of the country's biggest telecommunications companies to obtain access to large volumes of international phone and Internet traffic flowing in and out of the United States.

The agency has traced and analyzed the traffic flow - looking at who is calling whom, where calls originate and end, and other patterns - to gather clues on possible terrorist activities. In cases where security agency supervisors believe they can show a link to Al Qaeda, President Bush has authorized eavesdropping on calls without a warrant within the United States, so long as one end of the phone or e-mail conversation takes place outside the country.

The White House declined to comment Saturday on the security agency program or the use of data-mining, saying it would not discuss intelligence operations.

"The administration will aggressively fight the war on terror in an effort to protect the American people while at the same time upholding the civil liberties of the American people," said Allen Abney, a White House spokesman. "The president is doing both of these things and will continue to do both of these things."

Defenders of the program within the federal government say that the security agency's broad analytical searches and data-mining, combined with actual eavesdropping, are an essential part of detecting and preventing terror attacks.

And they say the president is well within his legal authority to order such programs, because of his inherent constitutional power and because of Congressional authorization in the days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks that permitted him to use "all necessary and appropriate force" to fight terrorism.

But civil rights and privacy advocates voiced concerns Saturday about the expanded role of the security agency, which historically has focused almost exclusively on foreign powers in mining for data on American phone lines.

"To the extent that the N.S.A. is collecting information on people who are suspected of no wrongdoing whatsoever, it presents some very critical privacy concerns," said Marcia Hofmann, who leads the government oversight section at the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a group that lobbies for greater privacy rights. "And it shows the need for Congress to put in place real safeguards to prevent the government from abusing this information."

Lisa Graves, senior counsel with the American Civil Liberties Union, said, "There's no data-mining loophole in the Fourth Amendment." Ms. Graves added, "We're seeing an administration that's engaging in a lot of legal hair-splitting to justify behavior that's not authorized by the law."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/25/politics/25wiretap.html

QueEx · Dec 25, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

i dont know of the administration explaining their position in the context of the questions you posed, but i can tell you why i would be angry that,

" All of these people would, or should, expect that they may be the subject of governmenal eavesdropping. So, why was Bush so peeved that these people may now know that their convo's are under surveillance ???"

Greed said:
i'd rather stalk an enemy that may be a little complacent, doesnt know whether his security methods are working or not, than a guy that just heard a noise and now his ears are perked up.

Even with the present revelations, the enemy STILL doesn't know whether his security methods are working or not. Revelations that the government is watching - without getting into the intricacies of the sources and methods involved doesn't give the enemy jack. Its hard for me not to believe that who ever the enemy is, he is aware that the government is trying to listen to his convo's and watch his movements. He knows that and thats the reason he uses tactics to evade that eavesdropping. Frankly, I think Bush's hands have been caught in the proverbial cookie jar -- and some of his responses to that are nothing more than using the fear factor (essentially, the enemy can now get us because he knows we're spying on him) so the press/congress/the people need to back off on this one.

as far as the more unknown elements that may be lurking here in america, if the government find a laptop or a phone on a terrorist and it has a whole bunch of numbers on it, then what do they do?

i wasnt aware(i'm no lawyer) guilt by association was enough to get a warrant.

assuming i had the right impression, then does the government just sit on those numbers? i dont advocate that.

If the government finds a laptop or phone on a terrorist, those associated with the numbers are exactly guilty by association. But, thats not the problem with what were learning about now. The issue here is whether the government is simply spying on Americans without any reason to believe that they are connected to terrorism or a terrorists laptop/phone. I don't believe any law gives the president the power to do that.

of course, the real point of concern is the legality of the collecting of bulk info and sifting through it. i'm not really worried about it personally, because like i said this isnt new as far as i understand it.

The preservation of civil liberty is a big concern to me. An erosion in one area leads to erosions in other ways. Ultimately, its a erosion of the Constitution itself.

QueEx

Greed · Dec 25, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

que, if one branch hasnt changed the law to close this inherent power argument loophole in 30 years, and the other branch hasnt declared it illegal/unconstitutional then what makes it against the constitution. it takes more than just people being uncomfortable with it.

i view the point of the constitution is to draw up the separation of power guidelines with the needed checks and balances. thats it.

with that standard i see the constitution working.

one elected official in one branch told other elected officials from different parties in another branch and they came to an agreement that was consistent with agreements between the two from other eras. thats what we send them all to washington to do. make judgements in the public interest even though the public may get pissed.

and no, i'm not some blind lemming looking for the government to take care of me and i always trust government to do the right thing, but more often than not they are using past decades as their guide.

my amateur political assessment of this is its going to go nowhere, because people like muckraker go too far too fast.

as soon as they hear the story its impeach bush.

well, every since the fisa laws were introduced there have been public news stories about the executive branch pushing the boundaries of it in the name of national security and inherent powers. but no one called for impeachment when carter, reagan, bush41, or clinton found ways to bypass it.

didnt clinton use warrantless searches to catch aldrich ames, i think thats the name of the fbi traitor's name. does impeachment cries depend on results? if bush43 pulls a counter-terrorism victory out his ass does that mean he's ok to do this?

as far as i know about this program dating back to the 90's, which is unofficial, echelon has ALWAYS grabs everything in its path and looked for codewords, voices, or whatever it was programmed to look for then spit it back out. unless you want to say it never picked up an voice originating from american soil.

why the cries of civil liberty now? i dont hear an argument like the government is keeping the data too long liek the las vegas incident last year. i hear outrage over the existence of this method? why now?

QueEx · Dec 25, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

Interesting comments. Sometime after the family gathering, I'll comment.

QueEx

Greed · Dec 25, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

to make my point simpler and shorter, everything i read before this year about the NSA and domestic spying and how evil it is was written by conservatives. in the 90's. why? because they hated clinton doing it.

predictable right?

now, everything coming out about the NSA and domestic spying(like its new), is written by liberals. in 2005. why? because they hate bush43 for doing it.

just like iraq, privatizing social security, and no child left behind, liberals made great arguments for domesic spying in the 90's. because clinton was president.

just like iraq, privatizing social security, and no child left behind, conservatives have made great arguments for domestic spying since 2005. because bush43 is president.

i dont forget that i had no problem with all those things in the 90's. and 10 years later i still didnt have a problem with those things just because a certain person was in charge.

Greed · Dec 25, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

QueEx said:
If the government finds a laptop or phone on a terrorist, those associated with the numbers are exactly guilty by association. But, thats not the problem with what were learning about now. The issue here is whether the government is simply spying on Americans without any reason to believe that they are connected to terrorism or a terrorists laptop/phone. I don't believe any law gives the president the power to do that.

i was going to make a post pointing out that some people do care that bush43 is targeting people with the "guilt by association" moniker, but decided against it because i hadnt given it much thought even though i noticed that reality.

now i see this SF chronicles story.
the article says it matter of factly that the people the administration are going after has ties to al qaeda.

To win a court-approved wiretap, the government must show "probable cause" that the target of the surveillance is a member of a foreign terrorist organization or foreign power and is engaged in activities that "may" involve a violation of criminal law.

Faced with that standard, Bamford said the Bush administration had difficulty obtaining FISA court-approved wiretaps on dozens of people within the United States who were communicating with targeted al Qaeda suspects inside the United States.

"The court wouldn't find enough 'probable cause' to give the Bush administration wiretap warrants on everybody that talks to or e-mails the terror suspect that they were trying to target," Bamford said.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/12/25/MNGCEGD95C1.DTL

i'm sure we all understand, but not all sympathizes, with the increased sense of urgency and lack of patience the administration is showing with regards on who should be targeted. it apparently doesnt make fisa court sense to monitor those people. if it doesnt meet fisa court standard then thats just life and judges do have their priorites as they should.

but the executive also has its priorities. if it comes out that the executive spied on someone that the court said he couldnt spy on then i'm against that. if it comes out that bush43 spied on people for gratuitous and purely political reasons and not national security reasons, then i'm against that. the last reason is what i thought the intent of the fisa courts in the 1st place.

Greed · Dec 25, 2005

Powell: 'Nothing Wrong' With Eavesdropping

Powell: 'Nothing Wrong' With Eavesdropping
49 minutes ago
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."

The New York Times reported on its Internet site Friday that the NSA has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States. The program bypassed the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Powell said Congress will need to judge whether Bush is correct in his assertion that he could approve eavesdropping without first obtaining court orders.

"And that's going to be a great debate," Powell said.

Powell, who also is a former chairman of the military Joint Chiefs of Staff, had no reservations when asked whether eavesdropping should continue.

"Of course it should continue," he said. "And nobody is suggesting that the president shouldn't do this."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051225...KpI2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

Makkonnen · Dec 26, 2005

Re: Powell: 'Nothing Wrong' With Eavesdropping

U.S. surveillance may be broader than acknowledged

By JOSH MEYER and JOSEPH MENN
Los Angeles Times
Published on: 12/26/05

Washington — President Bush has acknowledged that several hundred targeted Americans were wiretapped without warrants under the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, but some U.S. officials and outside experts say they suspect the government is engaged in a far broader U.S. surveillance operation.

Although these experts have no specific evidence, they say the National Security Agency 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.

The NSA already conducts that same kind of "wholesale" surveillance operation on a continuous basis most 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 telecommunications companies to suck up millions of phone calls, e-mails and other forms of communications.

Powerful supercomputers at the NSA then search through this "sigint" — short for signals intelligence — for particular words like "bomb" that might suggest terrorist plots.

The information is then passed along to intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, former head of the NSA and now the No. 2 U.S. intelligence official, has insisted 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.

It was disclosed this month that the administration has circumvented the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and conducted surveillance on hundreds of Americans since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. President Bush and his inner circle said the practice is limited to occasions when an individual in the United States is communicating with someone overseas who has a known link to al-Qaida or other terrorist groups or their supporters.

Some current and former intelligence officials and outside technology 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 Bruce Schneier, a cryptography expert and author of several books on related subjects.

Schneier and others suspect that the NSA may be turning its massive satellites inward on the United States, and intentionally gathering vast streams of raw data from many more people than disclosed to date — 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, including tapping directly into the telecommunications industry infrastructure.

The NSA and other agencies have enjoyed the cooperation of phone companies and others for years.

In the early 1990s, AT&T agreed to use an NSA-designed chip to ensure law enforcement access to phone calls.

After such massive volumes of information are collected, they are searched for suspicious language.

The administration could thus argue that only hundreds of people were monitored because those conversations were the ones flagged because they contained suspicious words, Schneier said.

"If a computer looks at all e-mail and says 'bing' once, is that monitoring one person or millions?" Schneier asked. "The Bush numbers are depending on that subterfuge."

Former NSA signals intelligence analyst Russell Tice said the agency has long had the technology and know-how for "data mining."

"I'm not allowed to say one way or another what the NSA is or is not doing. But the technology exists," said Tice, who left the NSA earlier this year.

"Say Aunt Molly in Oklahoma calls her niece at an Army base in Germany and says, 'Isn't it horrible about those terrorists and September 11th,'" the former analyst said. That conversation would not only be captured by NSA satellites listening in on Germany — which is legal — but flagged and listened to by NSA analysts and possibly transcribed for further investigation.

"All you would have to do is move the vacuum cleaner a little to the left and begin sucking up the other end of that conversation," said the former analyst. "You move it a little more and you could be picking up everything people are saying from California to New York."

Current and former intelligence officials said with the advances in communications technology, it would probably be next to impossible for the NSA to filter out all U.S.-based electronic communications even if it wanted to when casting a wide net for terrorists.

But some administration critics in Congress have begun speculating that the administration is intentionally directing the NSA to conduct such surveillance in the U.S..

"Based on how much their story keeps changing, I think there's more to the story," said Susan McCue, chief of staff to Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). "A lot of people on Capitol Hill think that."

For some, the program recalls retired Adm. John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness program, which he was developing for the Pentagon to use public records and other data to hunt for clues about terrorist activity.

TIA was officially killed by Congress over privacy concerns. But parts were quietly moved elsewhere and continue to get classified funding, according to Poindexter.

In the business world, data mining is not particularly controversial, because it uses customer info and other records to look for patterns and trends in people's buying habits.

In the hands of a powerful government, however, critics say the practice raises serious questions about privacy and civil liberties, and the Bush administration has used it aggressively.

QueEx · Dec 26, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

Greed said:
to make my point simpler and shorter, everything i read before this year about the NSA and domestic spying and how evil it is was written by conservatives. in the 90's. why? because they hated clinton doing it.

predictable right?

now, everything coming out about the NSA and domestic spying(like its new), is written by liberals. in 2005. why? because they hate bush43 for doing it.

just like iraq, privatizing social security, and no child left behind, liberals made great arguments for domesic spying in the 90's. because clinton was president.

just like iraq, privatizing social security, and no child left behind, conservatives have made great arguments for domestic spying since 2005. because bush43 is president.

i dont forget that i had no problem with all those things in the 90's. and 10 years later i still didnt have a problem with those things just because a certain person was in charge.

Whats the issue: who complains; or is it legal or illegal? Everybody knows that the greatest complainants are usually always those out-of-power. Moreover, everyone should know by now that those least likely to complain are those holding power. So who is complaining has virtually nothing to do with legal and illegal -- just who is more likely to raise an issue and who is more likely to say its a non-issue.

QueEx

Greed · Dec 26, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

i dont think its a non issue, because who's complaining has to be coincided with who has the power to declare it illegal.

i already said i thought the whole thing was overall legal, but thats based on my view of what the constitution is, which of course varies from person to person, and also i want to figure out will it be declared illegal despite my opinion of it.

and it wont. this is the part of our government we dont like, and wont ever like. 10 years we'll be hearing how the executive pushed the limits of the law again.

QueEx · Dec 26, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

Greed said:
que, if one branch hasnt changed the law to close this inherent power argument loophole in 30 years, and the other branch hasnt declared it illegal/unconstitutional then what makes it against the constitution. it takes more than just people being uncomfortable with it.

i view the point of the constitution is to draw up the separation of power guidelines with the needed checks and balances. thats it.

with that standard i see the constitution working.

one elected official in one branch told other elected officials from different parties in another branch and they came to an agreement that was consistent with agreements between the two from other eras. thats what we send them all to washington to do. make judgements in the public interest even though the public may get pissed.

If its a constitutional question, is not left to the congress, the president or the supreme court to change the law. Congress and the president are without the power to simply change a constitutional issue; and the Sp. Ct. has only the power to interpret or say what is meant by the law - which, depending on its judgment, may work a change from prior understanding of the law. The fact that members of either party may agree on an interpretation, as you know, doesn't make it the law either - though that might have some affect on how the Sp. Ct. interprets a particular provision.

and no, i'm not some blind lemming looking for the government to take care of me and i always trust government to do the right thing, but more often than not they are using past decades as their guide.

my amateur political assessment of this is its going to go nowhere, because people like muckraker go too far too fast.

as soon as they hear the story its impeach bush.

well, every since the fisa laws were introduced there have been public news stories about the executive branch pushing the boundaries of it in the name of national security and inherent powers. but no one called for impeachment when carter, reagan, bush41, or clinton found ways to bypass it.

didnt clinton use warrantless searches to catch aldrich ames, i think thats the name of the fbi traitor's name. does impeachment cries depend on results? if bush43 pulls a counter-terrorism victory out his ass does that mean he's ok to do this?

as far as i know about this program dating back to the 90's, which is unofficial, echelon has ALWAYS grabs everything in its path and looked for codewords, voices, or whatever it was programmed to look for then spit it back out. unless you want to say it never picked up an voice originating from american soil.

why the cries of civil liberty now? i dont hear an argument like the government is keeping the data too long liek the las vegas incident last year. i hear outrage over the existence of this method? why now?

The way I see it, it doesn't matter whether Reagan, Papa Bush or Clinton violated the law; or whether there has been illegal domestic spying in the past. If its wrong its wrong and G.W. doing it now is not a wrong that now makes it right.

Why is being raised now??? You tend to see it as merely the out-of-power group taking political advantage. I tend to see it as - its happening now in what may be a greater, wider and deeper proportion than before, hence, its a newsworthy departure from the past and it appears (as we learn more about it) that it may be a substantial invasion of privacy and significant violation of law. I'm not concerned so much with who raises the issue because we KNOW that criminals rarely confess to crime without pressure from some external source -- which means the in-party is not about to admit (in numbers) that its leader is violating the law. So, that the external pressure may be coming from "liberal" sources is really of no moment.

The issue for me is this: is it legal or illegal; and does there exist sufficient tools to do what Bush wants to do in a legal manner; if not, how should the law be narrowly tailored so that it can be done legally with the greatest protection for that which we claim to be fighting for (freedom).

If the tools Bush now has to work with are sufficient - then why resort to an abandonment of the 4th amendment ??? If they are not suffifcient, why the hell has he not asked for the tools to get the job done ??? I don't buy it that the president has the inherent power to superecede the 4th amendment except perhaps in certain narrow circumstances -- but certainly not the power to wholesale order an abandonment of the 4th - which is what happens, in my opinion, if the president can order eavesdropping on ordinary Americans without having probably cause to believe they have committed or are committing a crime.

QueEx

QueEx · Dec 26, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

Greed said:
i dont think its a non issue, because who's complaining has to be coincided with who has the power to declare it illegal.

I might be wrong Greed (and I have not research this issue for my self, yet) but off the top of my head I believe the ultimate authority on the inherent power of the president is the Supreme Court. Members of congress or the body as a whole might say whether the president has exceeded his power, but I belive the final arbiter to be the Sp. Ct. Hence, it doesn't matter who complains - liberal congressmen or the liberal press.

i already said i thought the whole thing was overall legal,

You're saying that you believe it is legal, in the face of the 4th Amendment, to spy on Americans without probable cause to believe they have or are committing a crime ???? I don't think thats what you're saying - but help me out here (I may have misread your point).

but thats based on my view of what the constitution is, which of course varies from person to person, and also i want to figure out will it be declared illegal despite my opinion of it.

and it wont. this is the part of our government we dont like, and wont ever like. 10 years we'll be hearing how the executive pushed the limits of the law again.

There are grey areas of the law that are better left alone -- and this issue over the inherent power of the president may be one of them. As lawyers are apt to say, bad facts (in this case spying on ordinary Americans without cause) can make bad law (the Court, if presented with the right case on these facts, could actually interpret the president's inherent power much narrower than is wise and thereby limit that power significantly -- or, in the alternative, interpret that power much broader than is wise and, thereby, give the president carte blanche over individual freedoms). In other words, sometimes you have to be careful what you ask for.

QueEx

Greed · Dec 26, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

sorry que, but when i think of politicians i think of politics and not right or wrong.

i think of who will get away with what and i think about what will be gotten away with at who's expense.

and i'm sure you know the supreme court isnt above politics. by the end of his term bush43 may appoint 3 supreme court judges, which may include a liberal spot. anything political resulting from that?

i have this theory and my theory is nothing is going to happen because like usual things have resorted to partisan extremism.

the left looking for impeachment, the right declaring people terrorist sypathizers, and the end result is the status quo.

this shit wont see a day in court.

a bush victory isnt congress passing a law saying he can do this or the supreme court declaring it constitutional. a bush victory is the maintaining of the status quo. and what has always been there to guarantee that? partisan bickering.

where people like muckraker say impeach the day the story breaks, it comes out that clinton did the same thing and the right decides its facing unfair opposition then everyone digs in for the battle that results in nothing.

where would we be if that would have happened with nixon?

most of the bureaucracy is still in place from the last president that did this shit and those people know how not to be challenged in court on this.

you dont bring up charges with evidence you obtained through these warrantless searches, so who's going to havee the grounds to challenge the legality?

so who has declared it illegal like you've already stated that it is?

who do you expect to declare it illegal like you've already stated that it is?

you're right there is a lot of grey area and i think about how long that shit been around, then it becomes obvious to me that no one is going to declare illegal.

Greed · Dec 26, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

BTW, your idea of probable cause is probably different than my idea of probable cause just like the administrations definition is different than the fisa courts definition.

it aint nothing but a word. yes, i said nothing but a word. its not right or wrong. its about what can be argued.

i posted that SF chronicles story where people conversing with terrorist isnt enough probable cause in some instances, but if i read your other post corectly you wondered yourself why would a big deal be made over that. guilt by association right.

the executive has different priorities than the courts and it hasnt been made explicit that they clash with the laws, so the predictable thing is happening where a political branch is taking advantage of the ambiguity.

muckraker10021 · Dec 26, 2005

<table id="table4" bgcolor="#bf001f" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" width="44%"> <tr><td width="181"><img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10028/Republiklan.jpg"><img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10028/Republiklan.jpg"></td> <td bgcolor="#bf001f"> <table id="table5" bordercolorlight="#BF001F" bordercolordark="#BF001F" bgcolor="#bf001f" border="5" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" height="335" width="200"> <tr> <td> <img src="http://www.nypress.com/17/31/news&columns/BUSH-FEATURE-300.jpg" border="0" height="335" width="200"></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> </table>



If you want to remain willfully unintelligent and not recognize Fascism when it grabs you by the short-hairs of your balls, then that is your prerogative.
America has been down this road before.
Read and review the 1975 Church Committee papers

http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/contents.htm 

The Nixon junta in the 1970's was engaged in the same fascist illegal activities that Cheney-bush is utilizing now. The FISA courts were set up after the revelations of the Church Committee reports. There are two individuals from the Nixon junta that are now the prime powers in the baby bush junta, who approved of—"Imperial Power"—Fascism then— and are arrogantly unapologetic about —"Imperial Power"—Fascism now.
Cheney and Rumsfeld.

The attempt by some die-hard RepubliKlans to say that Clinton acted - "In The Same Manner" - as bush is an unmitigated LIE.
<table border="4" width="650" bordercolorlight="#0000CC" bordercolordark="#0000FF" bgcolor="#F2FFFF">
<tr>
<td>
<a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/26/no-holiday/" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Misinformation On Spying Doesn’t Take A Holiday">Misinformation On Spying Doesn’t Take A Holiday</a>
</h2>
National Review’s Mark Levin “informs” his readers <a href="http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_12_25_corner-archive.asp#085453">today</a>:
<blockquote>Clinton bypassed FISA by extending warrantless searches to include physical searches.</blockquote>

Levin is referring to Clinton’s <a href="http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-12949.htm">2/9/95 executive order</a> and his claim is totally false. First, <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2001/10/06/MN183971.DTL">FISA didn’t cover physical searches at the time</a>, so the executive order did not, and could not, “bypass FISA.” Second, unlike the secret Bush administration program, <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/20/drudge-fact-check/">Clinton’s public executive order did not apply to U.S. persons</a>. If Bush’s program didn’t apply to U.S. persons there would be no controversy at all.
But Levin doesn’t have to read Think Progress to figure this out. He can read his own right-wing magazine. Here’s the National Review’s Byron York <a href="http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200512211147.asp">five days ago</a>:
<blockquote>In the argument that has emerged over warrantless surveillance, there have been a number of overstatements. Some people, for example, have said that Bill Clinton signed an executive order authorizing such surveillance; he did not.</blockquote>

One clarification: when someone says something that’s not true, it’s not an overstatement, it’s a lie.
</td>
</tr>
</table>

The December 25th 2005 James Bamford article, further exposes the Bush-junta Big Lie that Presidential spying on Americans, without a court order is productive in the so-called "War On Terror"

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/122505Y.shtml">
NSA, the Agency That Could Be Big Brother</a>

Here is the key sentence from the original New York Times article that starts this thread that most peeps are overlooking.

"Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president."

This is the article that the bush-junta was so fearful of that they called the owner and chief editor into the oval office to try to block its publication
READ-

<a target="_blank" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10536559/site/newsweek/?nav=slatefrom/RSS/">NEWSWEEK The president was so desperate to kill The New York Times' eavesdropping story, he summoned the paper's editor and publisher to the Oval Office. But it wasn't just out of concern about national security.</a></a><a target="_blank" href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10536559/site/newsweek/?nav=slatefrom/RSS/">
</a>

There is Strong Conjecture and Buzz in Washington that Cheney-bush was using the NSA to wiretap Democratic Party candidates and Democratic Party operatives during the fall of 2004. Yes this includes bugging of John Kerry's campaign phones, email, cell-phones, Faxes etc.

This is not some far-fetched Orwellian flight of the imagination.

This is why when Senator Arlen Specter holds hearings about the Cheney-bush illegal bypassing of the FISA court, HE MUST demand that the NSA hand over the complete list of everyone the bush has bugged without a court order.

If you still believe that these activities are not Fascism then welcome to the twilight zone.

Greed · Dec 26, 2005

muckraker10021 said:
There is Strong Conjecture and Buzz in Washington that Cheney-bush was using the NSA to wiretap Democratic Party candidates and Democratic Party operatives during the fall of 2004. Yes this includes bugging of John Kerry's campaign phones, email, cell-phones, Faxes etc.

once again this is why this shit will go no where.

African Herbsman · Dec 28, 2005

NSA Web Site Puts 'Cookies' on Computers

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer 1 hour, 39 minutes ago

NEW YORK - 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.

Don Weber, an NSA spokesman, said in a statement Wednesday that the cookie use resulted from a recent software upgrade. Normally, the site uses temporary, permissible cookies that are automatically deleted when users close their Web browsers, he said, but the software in use shipped with persistent cookies already on.

"After being tipped to the issue, we immediately disabled the cookies," he said.

Cookies are widely used at commercial Web sites and can make Internet browsing more convenient by letting sites remember user preferences. For instance, visitors would not have to repeatedly enter passwords at sites that require them.

But privacy advocates complain that cookies can also track Web surfing, even if no personal information is actually collected.

In a 2003 memo, the White House's Office of Management and Budget prohibits federal agencies from using persistent cookies — those that aren't automatically deleted right away — unless there is a "compelling need."

A senior official must sign off on any such use, and an agency that uses them must disclose and detail their use in its privacy policy.

Peter Swire, a Clinton administration official who had drafted an earlier version of the cookie guidelines, said clear notice is a must, and `vague assertions of national security, such as exist in the NSA policy, are not sufficient."

Daniel Brandt, a privacy activist who discovered the NSA cookies, said mistakes happen, "but in any case, it's illegal. The (guideline) doesn't say anything about doing it accidentally."

The Bush administration has come under fire recently over reports it authorized NSA to secretly spy on e-mail and phone calls without court orders.

Since The New York Times disclosed the domestic spying program earlier this month,
President Bush has stressed that his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al-Qaida.

But on its Web site Friday, the Times reported that the NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained broader access to streams of domestic and international communications.

The NSA's cookie use is unrelated, and Weber said it was strictly to improve the surfing experience "and not to collect personal user data."

Richard M. Smith, a security consultant in Cambridge, Mass., questions whether persistent cookies would even be of much use to the NSA. They are great for news and other sites with repeat visitors, he said, but the NSA's site does not appear to have enough fresh content to warrant more than occasional visits.

The government first issued strict rules on cookies in 2000 after disclosures that the White House drug policy office had used the technology to track computer users viewing its online anti-drug advertising. Even a year later, a congressional study found 300 cookies still on the Web sites of 23 agencies.

In 2002, the
CIA removed cookies it had inadvertently placed at one of its sites after Brandt called it to the agency's attention

QueEx · Dec 29, 2005

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

Greed said:
sorry que, but when i think of politicians i think of politics and not right or wrong.

i think of who will get away with what and i think about what will be gotten away with at who's expense.

and i'm sure you know the supreme court isnt above politics. by the end of his term bush43 may appoint 3 supreme court judges, which may include a liberal spot. anything political resulting from that?

You know what is likely to result from it -- more conservative interpretations of the law. Some of those conservative interpretations will undoubtedly be based in the political conservativeness ideas of those responsible for the appointment.

i have this theory and my theory is nothing is going to happen because like usual things have resorted to partisan extremism.

the left looking for impeachment, the right declaring people terrorist sypathizers, and the end result is the status quo.

this shit wont see a day in court.

a bush victory isnt congress passing a law saying he can do this or the supreme court declaring it constitutional. a bush victory is the maintaining of the status quo. and what has always been there to guarantee that? partisan bickering.

Of course, I don't know whether this spying case will end up before the courts or, if it does, will it be in time to prevent abuse. But I do believe from partisan disagreement often springs the challenge -- and often that comes from persons and groups not aligned with either party or the government. The much maligned ACLU, comes to mind - but there are many others interested in and dedicated to the protection of those fundamental rights set forth in the Constitution. If it turns out that NSA has stepped outside of intel collection involving foreign elements, I would expect that conduct to be challenged, if for no other reason than the chilling effect it has on individual speech and/or the gross violation of the 4th Amendment.

You will note that the president and those defending the NSA's eavesdropping have all based their defense in or around the "Foreign Element" component of either FISA or the so-called inherent power of the president to defend in the time of war. None of those defenses, I urge, will stand up if it turns out that the surveillance is of ordinary citizens not somehow connected to a Foreign Element. That is, if the NSA is simply monitoring the communications of ordinary citizens without some basis to believe they are connected with a Foreign Element, this matter will reach the courts which will have either to enjoin the activity or carve out an exception to the 4th so broad that will all but repeal it.

where people like muckraker say impeach the day the story breaks, it comes out that clinton did the same thing and the right decides its facing unfair opposition then everyone digs in for the battle that results in nothing.

where would we be if that would have happened with nixon?

Nixon didn't just roll over. He had his supporters and strong ones at that. During Nixon, there were forces on both sides, just as there are now, arguing both sides of the issue. The thing with Nixon is the evidence just started to mount - and his own tapes did his ass in.

you dont bring up charges with evidence you obtained through these warrantless searches, so who's going to havee the grounds to challenge the legality?

so who has declared it illegal like you've already stated that it is?

who do you expect to declare it illegal like you've already stated that it is?

Maybe you've never heard of constitutional challenge because of overbreadth ???

you're right there is a lot of grey area and i think about how long that shit been around, then it becomes obvious to me that no one is going to declare illegal.

I don't think its that no one will declare it illegal; I think the issue is having the "right facts" or the "right scenario" upon which to bring such a challenge. Believe me, there are lawyers on both sides of this matter working overtime honing the issues -- and both sides are concerned about how the issue is presented. Both sides know that the wrong facts or wrong scenario migiht yield a result none of them will want.

I can't think of a case off hand to demonstrate what I am talking about, but the NAACP's 1960's challenges do come to mind. The cases it brought were carefully selected based on the particular facts and the character of the plaintiff. There were many egregious violations that would have shocked the conscious, however, the facts of those cases or the would be plaintiff in those cases mitigated against bringing those cases before a court, i.e., Rosa Parks was selected as a plaintiff because of her character although she was hardly the first to refuse to yield.

QueEx

Mr. Equator · Dec 29, 2005

African Herbsman said:
NSA Web Site Puts 'Cookies' on Computers

By ANICK JESDANUN, AP Internet Writer 1 hour, 39 minutes ago

NEW YORK - 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.

Don Weber, an NSA spokesman, said in a statement Wednesday that the cookie use resulted from a recent software upgrade. Normally, the site uses temporary, permissible cookies that are automatically deleted when users close their Web browsers, he said, but the software in use shipped with persistent cookies already on.

"After being tipped to the issue, we immediately disabled the cookies," he said.

Cookies are widely used at commercial Web sites and can make Internet browsing more convenient by letting sites remember user preferences. For instance, visitors would not have to repeatedly enter passwords at sites that require them.

But privacy advocates complain that cookies can also track Web surfing, even if no personal information is actually collected.

In a 2003 memo, the White House's Office of Management and Budget prohibits federal agencies from using persistent cookies — those that aren't automatically deleted right away — unless there is a "compelling need."

A senior official must sign off on any such use, and an agency that uses them must disclose and detail their use in its privacy policy.

Peter Swire, a Clinton administration official who had drafted an earlier version of the cookie guidelines, said clear notice is a must, and `vague assertions of national security, such as exist in the NSA policy, are not sufficient."

Daniel Brandt, a privacy activist who discovered the NSA cookies, said mistakes happen, "but in any case, it's illegal. The (guideline) doesn't say anything about doing it accidentally."

The Bush administration has come under fire recently over reports it authorized NSA to secretly spy on e-mail and phone calls without court orders.

Since The New York Times disclosed the domestic spying program earlier this month,
President Bush has stressed that his executive order allowing the eavesdropping was limited to people with known links to al-Qaida.

But on its Web site Friday, the Times reported that the NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained broader access to streams of domestic and international communications.

The NSA's cookie use is unrelated, and Weber said it was strictly to improve the surfing experience "and not to collect personal user data."

Richard M. Smith, a security consultant in Cambridge, Mass., questions whether persistent cookies would even be of much use to the NSA. They are great for news and other sites with repeat visitors, he said, but the NSA's site does not appear to have enough fresh content to warrant more than occasional visits.

The government first issued strict rules on cookies in 2000 after disclosures that the White House drug policy office had used the technology to track computer users viewing its online anti-drug advertising. Even a year later, a congressional study found 300 cookies still on the Web sites of 23 agencies.

In 2002, the
CIA removed cookies it had inadvertently placed at one of its sites after Brandt called it to the agency's attention

Yep and soon as the news broke about the Spying some genius posted a Iframe to the NSA site in this thread!!! Pure -d- Unadulterated Genius wouldn't you say, whats even worse I think these weak ass mods allowed it......I posted a Comment on it!!

And as corrupt as this Administration is you all ways got one Genius with false analogys and talking points to try to make sense of Absolute Corruption....

muckraker10021 · Dec 29, 2005

More Illegal use of the NSA
How many of you peeps still can’t see the obvious FASCISM.
There is MUCH MORE to come on this story.


<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"></hr>
<body>
<div>
The List of the Bush-Junta's NSA Bugging Targets is Breathtaking

"Bush and Dick wouldn't go to FISA because they were illegally spying on
Americans for political gain, not for national security purposes, and FISA
would not grant a warrant for such clearly unconstitutional actions."


<h4>Tue Dec 27, 2005 at 12:42:27 AM PDT www.dailykos.com </h4>
 Colin Powell made statements this weekend that reached the <a href="http://www.seacoastonline.com/news/12262005/world/79889.htm">apex of irony</a>: 

<div>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." 
</div>
Wonder if he feels the same after learning that bush had the NSA spy on him when he was Secretary of State?  Does he think the FISA Court would issue a warrant to spy in the Secretary of State?
<ul>
<li><a href="http://lapin.dailykos.com/">lapin's diary</a> :: :: </li>
</ul>
</div>
 From Wayne Madsen, all the way back in <a href="http://www.onlinejournal.org/Special_Reports/042505Madsen/042505madsen.html">April, 2005</a>.  John Bolton is in the thick of this domestic spying travesty, and his goal is to further the neocon's designs:
 
<div>April 25, 2005--According to National Security Agency insiders, outgoing NSA Director General Michael Hayden approved special communications intercepts of phone conversations made by past and present U.S. government officials. The intercepts are at the height of the current controversy surrounding the nomination of Undersecretary of State John R. Bolton as ambassador to the United Nations.
 It was revealed by Senator Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) during Bolton's Senate Foreign Relations Committee nomination hearing that Bolton requested transcripts of 10 NSA intercepts of conversations between named U.S. government officials and foreign persons. However, NSA insiders report that Hayden approved special intercept operations on behalf of Bolton and had them masked as "training missions" in order to get around internal NSA regulations that normally prohibit such eavesdropping on U.S. citizens.
---
United States Signals Intelligence Directive (USSID) 18, the NSA's "Bible" for the conducting of surveillance against U.S. persons, allows "U.S. material," i.e., listening to U.S. persons, to be used for training missions. However, USSID 18 also requires that all intercepts conducted for such training missions are to be completely destroyed after completion of the training operation.
 In the case of Bolton and other Bush administration hardliners, the material in question was not deleted and was transmitted in raw intercept form to external agencies for clearly political purposes--a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and USSID 18, which only allows such raw training mission intercepts to be transmitted when evidence of criminal activity is uncovered during the training mission.
</div>
 The beneficiary of Bolton's felonious acts are none other than Dick Cheney and Irving Libby!
 
<div>Intelligence community insiders claim that a number of State Department and other government officials may have been subject to NSA "training" surveillance and that transcripts between them and foreign officials likely ended up in the possession of Bolton and his neoconservative political allies, including such members of Vice President Dick Cheney's staff as David Wurmser (a former assistant to Bolton at State), John Hannah, and Lewis "Scooter" Libby.</div>
 

The list of NSA targets is breathtaking:
 
<div>Possible affected individuals include: Secretary of State Colin Powell and Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage and their conversations with their counterparts and officials around the world; Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs William Burns and his telephone conversations with International Atomic Energy Agency director general Mohammed el Baradei... (Bolton was frozen out of negotiations between Burns, Britain, and Libya over the stand-down of the Libyan weapons of mass destruction program)... various phone calls made by Chairman of the President's Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board Brent Scowcroft...New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson and his telephone conversations with Secretary of State Powell and North Korea's deputy UN ambassador Han Song Ryol; phone conversations between Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Joseph Biden and his Iranian counterpart, Majlis foreign affairs chair Mohsen Mirdamad, and between Biden, his staff, and William Burns and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Marc Grossman; and President Jimmy Carter's phone conversations with Cuban officials before and during his May 2002 trip to Cuba (Carter said he found no evidence to support Bolton's claims of Cuban biological weapons development).</div>
 Before George admitted to spying, I looked at Madsen's NSA sources as tin foil hat overdrive.  Well hand me an aluminum  cap, because this looks all too feasible now and fits into the Bush administration pattern of behavior of Machiavillian tactics.  

Bush and Dick wouldn't go to FISA because they were illegally spying on Americans for political gain, not for national security purposes, and FISA would not grant a warrant for such clearly unconstitutional actions.  


 More from Madsen <a href="http://www.waynemadsenreport.com/">here</a>
<center>
</center>
Tags: <a href="/tag/George%20W.%20Bush">George W. Bush</a>, <a href="/tag/Colin%20Powell">Colin Powell</a>, <a href="/tag/John%20Bolton">John Bolton</a>, <a href="/tag/Bill%20Richardson">Bill Richardson</a>, <a href="/tag/wiretaps">wiretaps</a>, <a href="/tag/NSA">NSA</a>, <a href="/tag/Domestic%20Spying">Domestic Spying</a>, <a href="/tag/Joe%20Biden">Joe Biden</a>, <a href="/tag/FISA">FISA</a>, <a href="/tag/Recommended">Recommended</a>, <a href="/tag/Dick%20Cheney">Dick Cheney</a> (<a href="/tag">all tags</a>)
</body>

<hr noshade color="#ff0000" size="14"></hr>

<body>
 Rice authorized National Security Agency To Spy On UN Security Council in run-up to Iraq Invasion
  

 by Jason Leopold rawstory.com 
December 27th 2005
 <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/fr/thumb/4/4c/Condi_rice2.jpg/230px-Condi_rice2.jpg" alt="rice" hspace="5" vspace="5" border="1" align="right" />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 without seeking a warrant from any court, including the FISA court, 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 <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2003/03/20030303-3.html">press briefing</a> 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 <a href="http://observer.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,905899,00.html">Observer</a>. The leak -- which the paper acquired in the form of an <a href="http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,905954,00.html">email</a> 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.
 News of the NSA spying on the U.N. received scant coverage in U.S. newspapers at the time. But with the explosive domestic spying report published in the New York Times last week, a closer examination of pre-war spying may shed light on whether the Bush administration has used the NSA for its own political purposes, as opposed to tracking down communications regarding potential terrorist threats against the U.S. 
 The leaked NSA email detailing the agency's spy tactics against the U.N. was written Jan. 31, 2003 by Chief of Staff for Regional Targets Frank Koza. In the email, Koza asked an undisclosed number of NSA and British intelligence officials to "pay attention to existing non-UN Security Council Member UN-related and domestic comms (home and office telephones) for anything useful related to Security Council deliberations."
 One intelligence source who spoke to <a href="http://rawstory.com">RAW STORY</a> 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."
 Koza's email, a copy of which is included at the end of this report, says the "Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/ negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies, etc."
 "The whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to U.S. goals or to head off surprises. In RT, that means a QRC surge effort to revive/ create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters."
 The email was sent out just four days after Blix filed his Iraq weapons report with the U.N. through a top secret surveillance network set up by the NSA, the British Government Communication Headquarters and similar intelligence agencies based in Australia, New Zealand and Canada known as Echelon. 
 It was leaked to a handful of media outlets in the U.S. and U.K. by Katharine Tersea Gun, a former translator for British intelligence. Gun was arrested in November 2003 and charged with violating her country's Official Secrets Act. She said she felt compelled to leak the memo because she believed the U.S. and Britain were about to launch an illegal war.
 "Any disclosures that may have been made were justified on the following grounds: because they exposed serious illegality and wrongdoing on the part of the U.S. Government who attempted to subvert our own security services and, to prevent wide-scale death and casualties among ordinary Iraqi people and UK forces in the course of an illegal war," she said in a statement at the time.
 In his book "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward, deputy managing editor of the Washington Post, said the administration was also spying on Hans Blix, the U.N. weapons inspector sent to Iraq to look for WMDs.
 "One of the things that's gone unnoticed is national intelligence assets spying on Hans Blix," Woodward told the Council on Foreign Relations on June 9, 2004 "And Bush was getting these reports and felt that there was incongruity between what Blix was saying publicly and what he was actually doing. It makes it very clear we were wiretapping Hans Blix."
 In an <a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/solomon02262004.html">article</a> for Counterpunch, media critic Norman Solomon noted that the U.S. media barely covered the U.N. spying.
 "Nearly 96 hours after the Observer had reported it, I called Times deputy foreign editor Alison Smale and asked why not," Solomon writes. "'We would normally expect to do our own intelligence reporting,' Smale replied. She added that 'we could get no confirmation or comment.' In other words, U.S. intelligence officials refused to confirm or discuss the memo -- so the Times did not see fit to report on it."
 The Washington Post printed a 514-word article on a back page with the headline "Spying Report No Shock to U.N," while the Los Angeles Times emphasized from the outset that U.S. spy activities at the United Nations are "long-standing," Solomon wrote. 
 Solomon says his research turned up only one story which took the spying seriously -- a Mar. 4, 2003 piece in the Baltimore Sun.
 The leaked NSA <a href="http://observer.guardian.co.uk/iraq/story/0,12239,905954,00.html">email</a> which revealed the spying follows.
<h2>#</h2>
 To: [Recipients withheld] From: FRANK KOZA, Def Chief of Staff (Regional Targets) CIV/NSA Sent on Jan 31 2003 0:16 Subject: Reflections of Iraq Debate/Votes at UN-RT Actions + Potential for Related Contributions Importance: HIGH Top Secret//COMINT//X1 All, As you've likely heard by now, the Agency is mounting a surge particularly directed at the UN Security Council (UNSC) members (minus US and GBR of course) for insights as to how to membership is reacting to the on-going debate RE: Iraq, plans to vote on any related resolutions, what related policies/ negotiating positions they may be considering, alliances/ dependencies, etc - the whole gamut of information that could give US policymakers an edge in obtaining results favorable to US goals or to head off surprises. In RT, that means a QRC surge effort to revive/ create efforts against UNSC members Angola, Cameroon, Chile, Bulgaria and Guinea, as well as extra focus on Pakistan UN matters. We've also asked ALL RT topi's to emphasize and make sure they pay attention to existing non-UNSC member UN-related and domestic comms for anything useful related to the UNSC deliberations/ debates/ votes. We have a lot of special UN-related diplomatic coverage (various UN delegations) from countries not sitting on the UNSC right now that could contribute related perspectives/ insights/ whatever. We recognize that we can't afford to ignore this possible source. We'd appreciate your support in getting the word to your analysts who might have similar, more in-direct access to valuable information from accesses in your product lines. I suspect that you'll be hearing more along these lines in formal channels - especially as this effort will probably peak (at least for this specific focus) in the middle of next week, following the SecState's presentation to the UNSC. Thanks for your help 
   
</body>

Hung Lo · Dec 30, 2005

Mr. Equator said:
Yep and soon as the news broke about the Spying some genius posted a Iframe to the NSA site in this thread!!! Pure -d- Unadulterated Genius wouldn't you say, whats even worse I think these weak ass mods allowed it......I posted a Comment on it!!

And as corrupt as this Administration is you all ways got one Genius with false analogys and talking points to try to make sense of Absolute Corruption....

SHUT YO WEAK ASS UP! LEARN HOW TO DELETE YOUR COOKIES.
MAKE IT A REGULAR HABIT EVEN.

IF YOU'RE THAT SCARED OF THESE ORGANIZATIONS THEN YOU MAY NEED TO BE KIDNAPPED AND TORTURED YOUR DAMNSELF :lol:

!!!!!!!

Mr. Equator · Dec 30, 2005

Hung Lo said:
SHUT YO WEAK ASS UP! LEARN HOW TO DELETE YOUR COOKIES.
MAKE IT A REGULAR HABIT EVEN.

IF YOU'RE THAT SCARED OF THESE ORGANIZATIONS THEN YOU MAY NEED TO BE KIDNAPPED AND TORTURED YOUR DAMNSELF !!!!!!!

Oh You tough NOW....but you was whining like a lil Bitoch on the First Page about your post not getting any attention...Keep spending your time in the Political Forum Whining about your post, crying like girl about what you posted got no attention!!! :lol:

Sad ass clown!!!

African Herbsman · Dec 30, 2005

Probing the leak but not the spying. Typical

Justice Dept. Probing Domestic Spying Leak

By TONI LOCY, Associated Press Writer 40 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department has opened an investigation into the leak of classified information about
President Bush's secret domestic spying program.

The inquiry focuses on disclosures to The New York Times about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, officials said.

The Times revealed the existence of the program two weeks ago in a front-page story that acknowledged the news had been withheld from publication for a year, partly at the request of the administration and partly because the newspaper wanted more time to confirm various aspects of the program.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy said Justice undertook the action on its own, and the president was informed of it on Friday.

"The leaking of classified information is a serious issue. The fact is that al-Qaida's playbook is not printed on Page One and when America's is, it has serious ramifications," Duffy told reporters in Crawford, Texas, where Bush was spending the holidays.

Catherine Mathis, a spokeswoman for The Times, said the paper will not comment on the investigation.

Revelation of the secret spying program unleashed a firestorm of criticism of the administration. Some critics accused the president of breaking the law by authorizing intercepts of conversations — without prior court approval or oversight — of people inside the United States and abroad who had suspected ties to al-Qaida or its affiliates.

The surveillance program, which Bush acknowledged authorizing, bypassed a nearly 30-year-old secret court established to oversee highly sensitive investigations involving espionage and terrorism.

Administration officials insisted that Bush has the power to conduct the warrantless surveillance under the Constitution's war powers provision. They also argued that Congress gave Bush the power to conduct such a secret program when it authorized the use of military force against terrorism in a resolution adopted within days of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The Justice Department's investigation was being initiated after the agency received a request for the probe from the NSA.

Special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has been conducting a separate leak investigation to determine who in the administration leaked
CIA operative Valerie Plame's name to the media in 2003.

Several reporters have been called to testify before a grand jury or to give depositions. New York Times reporter Judith Miller spent 85 days in jail, refusing to reveal her source, before testifying in the probe.

The administration's legal interpretation of the president's powers allowed the government to avoid requirements under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in conducting the warrantless surveillance.

The act established procedures that an 11-member court used in 2004 to oversee nearly 1,800 government applications for secret surveillance or searches of foreigners and U.S. citizens suspected of terrorism or espionage.

Congressional leaders have said they were not briefed four years ago, when the secret program began, as thoroughly as the administration has since contended.

Former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle said in an article printed last week on the op-ed page of The Washington Post that Congress explicitly denied a White House request for war-making authority in the United States.

"This last-minute change would have given the president broad authority to exercise expansive powers not just overseas ... but right here in the United States, potentially against American citizens," Daschle wrote.

Daschle was Senate Democratic leader at the time of the 2001 terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington. He is now a fellow at the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington think tank.

The administration formally defended its domestic spying program in a letter to Congress last week, 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 Bush authorized conducting electronic surveillance without first obtaining a warrant in an effort to thwart terrorist acts against the United States.

Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella acknowledged "legitimate" privacy interests. But he said those interests "must be balanced" against national security.

Hung Lo · Dec 30, 2005

Mr. Equator said:
Oh You tough NOW....!!!

And I guess you're the big, bad, equator.

Shut you scared ass up! I post what I want to post. You or no one else is going to make me do otherwise. It's a forum board. I think you wanted my attention, and guess what, you got it. Now move on and find someone else's coat to pull on Attention Whore!

QueEx · Dec 30, 2005

Equator
Hung Lo

Knock of the damn personals and get on with debate, comment, etc.
If you don't have anything else to do, read the Rules of the Board.

QueEx

QueEx · Jan 2, 2006

The following was originally posted in a new thread
by GhostofMarcus, but is moved to this thread on
the same subject.
__________________________________________

Bush caught in more lies about domestic spying

Capitol Hill Blue | January 2 2006

President George W. Bush, caught in a growing web of lifes about his domestic spying program, clung to his claim of "limited" eavesdropping activities Sunday amit revelations that top Justice Department Officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft, refused to sign off on the snooping on Americans by the National Security Agency.

James Comey, a deputy to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, questioned legality of the NSA program and refused to extend it in 2004. White House aides then turned to Ashcroft while the attorney general was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, but Ashcroft, author of the controversial USA Patriot Act, also refused to endorse the spyhing.

"This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America," Bush claimed after visiting wounded troops at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio. But with mountain evidence showing otherwise, calls increased for a Senate inquiry into spying on Americans.

The NSA program "listens to a few numbers called from the outside of the United States and of known al Qaeda or affiliate people," he said. "If somebody from al Qaeda is calling you, we'd like to know why," Bush said.

White House spokesman Trent Duffy later said that while the president focused on calls being made from abroad, the eavesdropping program was also conducted on communications originating from inside the United States.

"We're at war," Bush said. "I've got to use the resources at my disposal, within the law, to protect the American people. And that's what we're doing."

Democratic Sen. Charles Schumer of New York, a member of the Judiciary Committee, said he would ask committee Chairman Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, to seek testimony from Comey, Ashcroft, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and White House Chief of Staff Andrew Card.

"Today's revelations really heighten concerns about this," Schumer said on "Fox News Sunday."

Capitol Hill Blue revealed last year that Bush authorized the NSA to monitor, without court approval, the international telephone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens suspected of links to foreign terrorists. The New York Times knew about the spying last year as well but withheld the story under pressure from the White House, choosing instead to publish the information two weeks ago.

A 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, makes it illegal to spy on U.S. citizens in the United States without the approval of a special court.

Schumer said if the president thought the law hampered the war on terrorism he should have asked Congress to consider making changes.

In an attempt to divert attention away from the legal questions surrounding the spying, Republican Sen. Mitch McConnell of Kentucky said on "Fox News Sunday" that Congress should focus on investigating who in the U.S. government leaked the existence of the program.

The Senate Intelligence Committee, which usually meets in closed session, would be a better place than the judiciary panel to investigate the program, McConnell said.

Comey's refusal to reauthorize the NSA program prompted Card and Gonzales to try to get approval from Ashcroft in March 2004 while he was in a Washington hospital for gallbladder surgery.

Ashcroft also refused to give his authorization to continue with aspects of the program.

But the Bush administration went ahead with the program without approval from the nation's top law enforcement officials.

muckraker10021 · Jan 2, 2006

<img src="http://www.npr.org/politics/watergate/nixon.jpg">
"When the president does it, that means it's not illegal"
....Richard Nixon - 1971

<img src="http://www.calvin.edu/news/releases/2004_05/commencement/george-w-bush.jpg">
"Yes, I am above the law—I am the law"
.....George W. Bush - 2005

<hr noshade color="#333333" size="14"></hr>

<body>
<table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="5" width="95" align="left" border="0">
<tbody>
<tr>
<td width="16%"><a href="/dean"><img src="http://images.findlaw.com/writ/john.dean.jpg" border="0" /></a>
John Dean</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>

 
    <center>George W. Bush as the
New Richard M. Nixon </center>
Both Wiretapped Illegally,and Impeachably Both Claimed That a President May Violate Congress' Laws to Protect National Security 

<a href="/dean">By JOHN W. DEAN 
</a>----
<div align="right">Friday, Dec. 30, 2005 
</div>
 On Friday, December 16, the New York Times published a major scoop by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau: They reported that Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on Americans without warrants, ignoring the procedures of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). 
 It was a long story loaded with <a href="http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1216-01.htm" target="blank" ?left-link?>astonishing information</a> of lawbreaking at the White House. It reported that sometime in 2002, Bush issued an executive order authorizing NSA to track and intercept international telephone and/or email exchanges coming into, or out of, the U.S. - when one party was believed to have direct or indirect ties with al Qaeda. 


 Initially, Bush and the <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051216-1.html" target="blank" ?left-link?>White House stonewalled</a>, neither confirming nor denying the president had ignored the law. Bush refused to discuss it in <a href="http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051216/ap_on_go_pr_wh/bush_nsa" target="blank" ?left-link?>his interview with Jim Lehrer</a>. 
 Then, on Saturday, December 17, in his radio broadcast, Bush admitted that the New York Times was correct - and thus conceded he had committed an impeachable offense. 
 There can be no serious question that warrantless wiretapping, in violation of the law, is impeachable. After all, Nixon was charged in Article II of his bill of impeachment with illegal wiretapping for what he, too, claimed were national security reasons. 
 These parallel violations underscore the continuing, disturbing parallels between this Administration and the Nixon Administration - parallels I also discussed in <a href="http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/dean/20020510.html" target="blank" ?left-link?>a prior column</a>.
 Indeed, here, Bush may have outdone Nixon: Nixon's illegal surveillance was limited; Bush's, it is developing, may be extraordinarily broad in scope. First reports indicated that NSA was only monitoring foreign calls, originating either in the USA or abroad, and that no more than 500 calls were being covered at any given time. But later reports have suggested that NSA is "data mining" literally millions of calls - and has been given access by the telecommunications companies to "switching" stations through which foreign communications traffic flows. 
 In sum, this is big-time, Big Brother electronic surveillance.
 Given the national security implications of the story, the Times said they had been sitting on it for a year. And now that it has broken, Bush has ordered a criminal investigation into the source of the leak. He suggests that those who might have felt confidence they would not be spied on, now can have no such confidence, so they may find other methods of communicating. Other than encryption and code, it is difficult to envision how.
 Such a criminal investigation is rather ironic - for the leak's effect was to reveal Bush's own offense. Having been ferreted out as a criminal, Bush now will try to ferret out the leakers who revealed him.
 Nixon's Wiretapping - and the Congressional Action that Followed
 Through the FBI, Nixon had wiretapped five members of his national security staff, two newsmen, and a staffer at the Department of Defense. These people were targeted because Nixon's plans for dealing with Vietnam -- we were at war at the time -- were ending up on the front page of the New York Times. 
 Nixon had a plausible national security justification for the wiretaps: To stop the leaks, which had meant that not only the public, but America's enemies, were privy to its plans. But the use of the information from the wiretaps went far beyond that justification: A few juicy tidbits were used for political purposes. Accordingly, Congress believed the wiretapping, combined with the misuse of the information it had gathered, to be an impeachable offense.
 Following Nixon's resignation, Senator Frank Church chaired a committee that investigated the uses and abuses of the intelligence derived from the wiretaps. From his <a href="http://www.icdc.com/~paulwolf/cointelpro/churchfinalreportIIIe.htm" target="blank" ?left-link?>report on electronic surveillance</a>, emerged the proposal to create the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The Act both set limits on electronic surveillance, and created a secret court within the Department of Justice - the FISA Court -- that could, within these limits, grant law enforcement's requests to engage in electronic surveillance. 
 The legislative history of FISA makes it very clear that Congress sought to create laws to govern the uses of warrantless wiretaps. Thus, Bush's authorization of wiretapping without any application to the FISA Court violated the law.
 Whether to Allow Such Wiretaps, Was Congress' Call to Make
 No one questions the ends here. No one doubts another terror attack is coming; it is only a question of when. No one questions the preeminent importance of detecting and preventing such an attack. 
 What is at issue here, instead, is Bush's means of achieving his ends: his decision not only to bypass Congress, but to violate the law it had already established in this area. 
 Congress is Republican-controlled. Polling shows that a large majority of Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties to prevent another terror attack. The USA Patriot Act passed with overwhelming support. So why didn't the President simply ask Congress for the authority he thought he needed?
 The answer seems to be, quite simply, that Vice President Dick Cheney has never recovered from being President Ford's chief of staff when Congress placed checks on the presidency. And Cheney wanted to make the point that he thought it was within a president's power to ignore Congress' laws relating to the exercise of executive power. Bush has gone along with all such Cheney plans.
 No president before Bush has taken as aggressive a posture -- the position that his powers as commander-in-chief, under <a href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/article02/" target="blank" ?left-link?>Article II of the Constitution</a>, license any action he may take in the name of national security - although Richard Nixon, my former boss, took a similar position.
 Presidential Powers Regarding National Security: A Nixonian View
 Nixon famously claimed, after resigning from office, that when the president undertook an action in the name of national security, even if he broke the law, <a href="http://www.landmarkcases.org/nixon/nixonview.html" target="blank" ?left-link?>it was not illegal</a>. 
 Nixon's thinking (and he was learned in the law) relied on the precedent established by Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. Nixon, quoting Lincoln, said in an interview, "Actions which otherwise would be unconstitutional, could become lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the Constitution and the Nation." 
 David Frost, the interviewer, immediately countered by pointing out that the anti-war demonstrators upon whom Nixon focused illegal surveillance, were hardly the equivalent of the rebel South. Nixon responded, "This nation was torn apart in an ideological way by the war in Vietnam, as much as the Civil War tore apart the nation when Lincoln was president." It was a weak rejoinder, but the best he had. 
 Nixon took the same stance when he <a href="http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/church/reports/book4/html/ChurchB4_0075a.htm" target="blank" ?left-link?>responded to interrogatories</a> proffered by the Senate Select Committee on Government Operations To Study Intelligence Operations (best know as the "Church Committee," after its chairman Senator Frank Church). In particular, he told the committee, "In 1969, during my Administration, warrantless wiretapping, even by the government, was unlawful, but if undertaken because of a presidential determination that it was in the interest of national security was lawful. Support for the legality of such action is found, for example, in the concurring opinion of Justice White in <a href="http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=us&vol=389&invol=347" target="blank" ?left-link?>Katz v. United States</a>." (Katz is the opinion that established that a wiretap constitutes a "search and seizure" under the Fourth Amendment, just as surely as a search of one's living room does - and thus that the Fourth Amendment's warrant requirements apply to wiretapping.)
 Nixon rather presciently anticipated - and provided a rationalization for - Bush: He wrote, "there have been -- and will be in the future -- circumstances in which presidents may lawfully authorize actions in the interest of security of this country, which if undertaken by other persons, even by the president under different circumstances, would be illegal." 
 Even if we accept Nixon's logic for purposes of argument, were the circumstances that faced Bush the kind of "circumstances" that justify warrantless wiretapping? I believe the answer is no.
 Is Bush's Unauthorized Surveillance Action Justified? Not Persuasively.
 Had Bush issued his Executive Order on September 12, 2001, as a temporary measure - pending his seeking Congress approval - those circumstances might have supported his call. 
 Or, had a particularly serious threat of attack compelled Bush to authorize warrantless wiretapping in a particular investigation, before he had time to go to Congress, that too might have been justifiable. 
 But several years have passed since the broad 2002 Executive Order, and in all that time, Bush has refused to seek legal authority for his action. Yet he can hardly miss the fact that Congress has clearly set rules for presidents in the very situation in which he insists on defying the law.
 Bush has given one legal explanation for his actions which borders on the laughable: He claims that implicit in Congress' authorization of his use of force against the Taliban in Afghanistan, following the 9/11 attack, was an exemption from FISA. 
 No sane member of Congress believes that the Authorization of Military Force provided such an authorization. No first year law student would mistakenly make such a claim. It is not merely a stretch; it is ludicrous.
 But the core of Bush's defense is to rely on the very argument made by Nixon: that the president is merely exercising his "commander-in-chief" power under Article II of the Constitution. This, too, is a dubious argument. Its author, John Yoo, is a bright, but inexperienced and highly partisan young professor at Boalt Law School, who has been in and out of government service. 
 To see the holes and fallacies in Yoo's work - embodied in a recently published book -- one need only consult <a href="http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18431?email" target="blank" ?left-link?>the analysis of Georgetown University School of Law professor David Cole</a> in the New York Review of Books. Cole has been plowing this field of the law for many years, and digs much deeper than Yoo.
 Since I find Professor Yoo's legal thinking bordering on fantasy, I was delighted that Professor Cole closed his real-world analysis on a very realistic note: "Michael Ignatieff has written that 'it is the very nature of a democracy that it not only does, but should, fight with one hand tied behind its back. It is also in the nature of democracy that it prevails against its enemies precisely because it does.' Yoo persuaded the Bush administration to untie its hand and abandon the constraints of the rule of law. Perhaps that is why we are not prevailing." 
 To which I can only add, and recommend, the troubling report by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, who are experts in terrorism and former members of President Clinton's National Security Council. They write in their new book The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting It Right, that the Bush Administration has utterly failed to close the venerable loopholes available to terrorist to wreak havoc. The war in Iraq is not addressing terrorism; rather, it is creating terrorists, and diverting money from the protection of American interests. 
 Bush's unauthorized surveillance, in particular, seems very likely to be ineffective. According to experts with whom I have spoken, Bush's approach is like hunting for the proverbial needle in the haystack. As sophisticated as NSA's data mining equipment may be, it cannot, for example, crack codes it does not recognize. So the terrorist communicating in code may escape detection, even if data mining does reach him. 
 In short, Bush is hoping to get lucky. Such a gamble seems a slim pretext for acting in such blatant violation of Congress' law. In acting here without Congressional approval, Bush has underlined that his Presidency is unchecked - in his and his attorneys' view, utterly beyond the law. Now that he has turned the truly awesome powers of the NSA on Americans, what asserted powers will Bush use next? And when - if ever - will we - and Congress -- discover that he is using them?
</body>

<hr noshade color="#FF0000" size="14"></hr>


The Hidden State Steps Forward



by JONATHAN SCHELL

January 2nd 2006 

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.

But in the wiretapping matter, he has so far exhibited no such vacillation. Secret law-breaking has been supplanted by brazen law-breaking. The difference is critical. If abuses of power are kept secret, there is still the possibility that, when exposed, they will be stopped. But if they are exposed and still permitted to continue, then every remedy has failed, and the abuse is permanently ratified. In this case, what will be ratified is a presidency that has risen above the law.

The danger is not abstract or merely symbolic. Bush's abuses of presidential power are the most extensive in American history. He has launched an aggressive war ("war of choice," in today's euphemism) on false grounds. He has presided over a system of torture and sought to legitimize it by specious definitions of the word. He has asserted a wholesale right to lock up American citizens and others indefinitely without any legal showing or the right to see a lawyer or anyone else. He has kidnapped people in foreign countries and sent them to other countries, where they were tortured. In rationalizing these and other acts, his officials have laid claim to the unlimited, uncheckable and unreviewable powers he has asserted in the wiretapping case. He has tried to drop a thick shroud of secrecy over these and other actions.

There is a name for a system of government that wages aggressive war, deceives its citizens, violates their rights, abuses power and breaks the law, rejects judicial and legislative checks on itself, claims power without limit, tortures prisoners and acts in secret. It is dictatorship.

The Administration of George W. Bush is not a dictatorship, but it does manifest the characteristics of one in embryonic form. Until recently, these were developing and growing in the twilight world of secrecy. Even within the executive branch itself, Bush seemed to govern outside the normally constituted channels of the Cabinet and to rely on what Secretary of State Colin Powell's chief of staff has called a "cabal." Former Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill reported the same thing. Cabinet meetings were for show. Real decisions were made elsewhere, out of sight. Another White House official, John DiIulio, has commented that there was "a complete lack of a policy apparatus" in the White House. "What you've got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm." As in many Communist states, a highly centralized party, in this case the Republican Party, was beginning to forge a parallel apparatus at the heart of government, a semi-hidden state-within-a-state, by which the real decisions were made.

With Bush's defense of his wiretapping, the hidden state has stepped into the open. The deeper challenge Bush has thrown down, therefore, is whether the country wants to embrace the new form of government he is creating by executive fiat or to continue with the old constitutional form. He is now in effect saying, "Yes, I am above the law--I am the law, which is nothing more than what I and my hired lawyers say it is--and if you don't like it, I dare you to do something about it."

Members of Congress have no choice but to accept the challenge. They did so once before, when Richard Nixon, who said, "When the President does it, that means it's not illegal," posed a similar threat to the Constitution. The only possible answer is to inform Bush forthwith that if he continues in his defiance, he will be impeached.

If Congress accepts his usurpation of its legislative power, they will be no Congress and might as well stop meeting. Either the President must uphold the laws of the United States, which are Congress's laws, or he must leave office. 

<hr noshade color="#FF0000" size="14"></hr>

Great1 · Jan 3, 2006

I kept hearing a fleeting argument about which president knew or utilized spying on US citizens without TRUE probable cause and did not go through the courts. For DECADES, the US has been spying, infiltrating and often sabotaging organizations. Might I remind everyone about the Conintelpro.

Greed · Jan 4, 2006

so bush is actually conducting a counterintelligence program while he was also monitoring john kerry's election campaign, and currently monitoring random citizens with no connection to terrorist overseas.

interesting.

Bush Lets NSA Spy on Callers Without Courts

Rising Star

Rising Star

Star

Star

Superstar *****

Rising Star

Rising Star

Rising Star

Star

Rising Star

Star

Star

Star

The Quizatz Haderach

Rising Star

Star

Rising Star

Rising Star

Star

Star

Superstar *****

Star

Star

Rising Star

Star

Superstar *****

Hung Lo

Guest

Star

Star

Hung Lo

Guest

Rising Star

Rising Star

Superstar *****

Potential Star

Star