Bush Lets NSA Spy on Callers Without Courts

muckraker10021 · Jan 4, 2006

A Criminal Administration


by Paul Craig Roberts

January 2, 2006

 Caught in gratuitous and illegal spying on American citizens, the Bush administration has defended its illegal activity and <a href="http://msnbc.msn.com/id/10651154/">set the Justice (sic) Department on the trail </a> of the person or persons who informed the New York Times of Bush's violation of law. Note the astounding paradox: The Bush administration is caught red-handed in blatant illegality and responds by trying to arrest the patriot who exposed the administration's illegal behavior.
 Bush has actually declared it treasonous to reveal his illegal behavior! His propagandists, who masquerade as news organizations, have taken up the line: To reveal wrong-doing by the Bush administration is to give aid and comfort to the enemy.
 Compared to Spygate, Watergate was a kindergarden picnic. The Bush administration's lies, felonies, and illegalities have revealed it to be a criminal administration with a police state mentality and police state methods. Now Bush and his attorney general have gone the final step and declared Bush to be above the law. Bush aggressively mimics Hitler's claim that defense of the realm entitles him to ignore the rule of law.
 Bush's acts of illegal domestic spying are gratuitous because there are no valid reasons for Bush to illegally spy. The Foreign Intelligence Services Act (FISA) gives Bush all the power he needs to spy on terrorist suspects. All the administration is required to do is to apply to a secret FISA court for warrants. The Act permits the administration to spy first and then apply for a warrant, should time be of the essence. The problem is that Bush has totally ignored the law and the court.
 Why would President Bush ignore the law and the FISA court? It is certainly not because the court in its three decades of existence was uncooperative. According to attorney Martin Garbus ( <a href="http://www.observer.com/printpage.asp?iid=12108&ic=Wise%2BGuys">New York Observer </a>, 12-28-05), the secret court has issued more warrants than all federal district judges combined, only once denying a warrant.
 Why, then, has the administration created another scandal for itself on top of the WMD, torture, hurricane, and illegal detention scandals?
 There are two possible reasons.
 One reason is that the Bush administration is being used to concentrate power in the executive. The old conservative movement, which honors the separation of powers, has been swept away. Its place has been taken by a neoconservative movement that worships executive power.
 The other reason is that the Bush administration could not go to the FISA secret court for warrants because it was not spying for legitimate reasons and, therefore, had to keep the court in the dark about its activities.
 What might these illegitimate reasons be? Could it be that the Bush administration used the spy apparatus of the US government in order to influence the outcome of the presidential election?
 Could we attribute the feebleness of the Democrats as an opposition party to information obtained through illegal spying that would subject them to blackmail?
 These possible reasons for bypassing the law and the court need to be fully investigated and debated. No administration in my lifetime has given so many strong reasons to oppose and condemn it as has the Bush administration. Nixon was driven from office because of a minor burglary of no consequence in itself. Clinton was impeached because he did not want the embarrassment of publicly acknowledging that he engaged in adulterous sex acts in the Oval Office. In contrast, Bush has deceived the public and Congress in order to invade Iraq, illegally detained Americans, illegally tortured detainees, and illegally spied on Americans. Bush has upheld neither the Constitution nor the law of the land. A majority of Americans disapprove of what Bush has done; yet, the Democratic Party remains a muted spectator.
 Why is the Justice Department investigating the leak of Bush's illegal activity instead of the illegal activity committed by Bush? Is the purpose to stonewall Congress' investigation of Bush's illegal spying? By announcing a Justice Department investigation, the Bush administration positions itself to decline to respond to Congress on the grounds that it would compromise its own investigation into national security matters.
 What will the federal courts do? When Hitler challenged the German judicial system, it collapsed and accepted that Hitler was the law. Hitler's claims were based on nothing but his claims, just as the claim for extra-legal power for Bush is based on nothing but memos written by his political appointees.
 The Bush administration, backed by the neoconservative Federalist Society, has brought the separation of powers, the foundation of our political system, to crisis. The Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers, favors more " <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0029086817/qid=1136217316/sr=8-2/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i2_xgl14/103-4366619-1303849?/antiwarbookstore/">energy in the executive </a>." Distrustful of Congress and the American people, the Federalist Society never fails to support rulings that concentrate power in the executive branch of government. It is a paradox that conservative foundations and individuals have poured money for 23 years into an organization that is inimical to the separation of powers, the foundation of our constitutional system.
 September 11, 2001, played into neoconservative hands exactly as the 1933 Reichstag fire played into Hitler's hands. Fear, hysteria, and national emergency are proven tools of political power grabs. Now that the federal courts are beginning to show some resistance to Bush's claims of power, will another terrorist attack allow the Bush administration to complete its coup?

muckraker10021 · Jan 5, 2006

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Debunking Bush's NSA Lies:
A Handy Pocket Guide


by Arianna Huffington
01/05/06

 President Bush and his minions keep offering up "new and improved" (though already disproved) lies for the illegal NSA domestic spying operation.
 David Sirota offers a terrific breakdown of White House lies <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-sirota/from-it-was-legal-to-i_b_12692.html">of the shifts</a> from "it was legal" to "we needed to act faster" to "the paperwork was too hard."
 Now we have a new White House strategy: straight-up lying.
(Here's what <a href="http://www.first-draft.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=4881&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0">Holden had to say</a> about it).
 Of course, GOP loyalists have been quick to follow the administration's lead. In fact, over the holidays I ran into many prominent Republicans who dutifully mouthed the administration's talking points.
 So, in case you, like me, run into Republicans in the course of your life -- or even if you only run into them on TV -- and feel the need for a quick response to set the record straight, here is a handy pocket guide.
 Lie #1:
 Trying to prove that he wasn't acting unilaterally and without oversight, the president has taken to claiming that the spy program was "constantly reviewed by Justice Department officials" -- making it sound to all the world that the initiative had received the law enforcement community's seal of approval.
 Nothing could be further from the truth.
 Even Ashcroft refused to authorize the program. 
<a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10663996/site/newsweek/page/4/">http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10663996/site/newsweek/page/4/</a> 
<a href="http://www.warbly.com/democrats-dont-fear-bush-on-the-domestic-spying-issue/">http://www.warbly.com/democrats-dont-fear-bush-on-the-domestic-spying-issue/</a> 

 As the New York Times <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/01/politics/01spy.html?ei=5090&en=daa8cc35949989c3&ex=1293771600&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all">has reported</a>, there was widespread concern about the legality of the program at the Justice department, with a number of high-ranking officials raising objections to it, including deputy attorney general James Comey, who refused to sign off on its continuation. Comey's refusal prompted Andy Card and Alberto Gonzales (in his role as White House counsel) to go to the bedside of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery. But even Ashcroft had his doubts about the constitutionality of the program -- which tells you all you need to know about how dicey it really was.
 Their concerns led the White House to add some restrictions to the program -- but these restrictions weren't actually very restrictive since they still allowed the NSA to listen in on whatever calls it wanted without having to get the specific approval of Justice Department officials.
 So when Bush and company try to sell the idea that Justice was part of the no-warrant team, don't buy it. The program may have been "constantly reviewed" but it wasn't "approved."
 Lie # 2:
 Lie #2 is a companion to Lie #1's implication that everybody was on board with the spy program. It's the <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060101.html">president's insistence</a> that it was "reviewed by members of the United States Congress" and that it's "a program to which the Congress has been briefed."
 Again, it sounds like the legislative branch was consulted and signed off on what the White House was doing. Again, not true.
 Here are the facts: a very, very limited number of Senators and House members were briefed on the program -- with 14 of 535 senators and representatives <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/politics/21intel.html?ei=5090&en=ecb69f142833723e&ex=1292821200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=printv">receiving briefings</a> over the last four years. What's more, those receiving these highly classified briefings were strictly prohibited from speaking about what they heard -- which kind of puts a crimp in one's ability to mount any opposition to the program. Former intelligence committee counsel Suzanne Spaulding offers <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/23/AR2005122302050.html">chapter and verse</a> on this "Congress has been briefed" smokescreen.
 And getting briefed is a far, far, far cry from exerting oversight -- or even offering an opinion. As <a href="http://www.kansascity.com/mld/kansascity/news/nation/13533048.htm">Tom Daschle puts it</a>, "We were told we were being informed and not consulted."
 Indeed, as Media Matters <a href="http://mediamatters.org/items/200512230002">points out</a>: "Of the seven Democratic lawmakers known to have been briefed by the program, three objected at the time and three more say they weren't given adequate information about the program." Jay Rockefeller put his objections into a <a href="http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2005/12/19/191347/88">letter to Dick Cheney</a>, saying the program raised "profound oversight issues." Nancy Pelosi also <a href="http://americablog.blogspot.com/2005/12/pelosi-wants-her-letter-to-bush.html">put her concerns in writing</a>. Bob Graham says his briefing <a href="http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/18/graham-no-reference/">left out any mention</a> that the NSA would be listening in on calls of U.S. citizens. Even Jane Harman, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, and a supporter of the program, told me over the weekend that she wants to introduce legislation to curb its excesses.
 So much for the idea that Congress actually had a hand in this.
 Lie #3:
 Bush has repeatedly attempted to underplay the reach of the spy operation. "This is a limited program," he <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/01/20060101.html">claimed recently</a>, "designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America. And I repeat, limited. And it's limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States."
 Hogwash. First of all, it's not true that the program was "limited to calls from outside the U.S." Even the White House <a href="http://www.google.com/search?num=20&hs=gNv&hl=en&lr=&safe=off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aofficial&q=%22They+are+from+outside+the+country+to+in+the+country%2C+or+vice+versa.%22+site%3Awhitehouse.gov&btnG=Search">admits</a> that the NSA listened in on calls initiated in the U.S. too.
 Second, I don't know about you, but the fact that the NSA has eavesdropped on thousands of people doesn't strike me as "limited."
 And how does that stat jibe with the president's claim that the warrantless wiretaps were "limited" to "known numbers of al Qaeda members or affiliates"? Are there really thousands of known al Qaeda members or affiliates in the U.S.?
 Plus, the program allowed the NSA to tap into our telecommunication system's main arteries, creating what the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/24/politics/24spy.html?ei=5090&en=016edb46b79bde83&ex=1293080400&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=all">New York Times termed</a> "a large data-mining operation."
 I guess it all depends on what your definition of "limited" is. And of "reviewed." And of "briefed." And of "lying through your teeth."


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Bush's Enemies List.
Why Did Bush Commit an Illegal, Impeachable Act
When All His Lawyers Had to Do Was Walk Into a Secret Court?


buzzflash.com
Jan. 2006

Okay, so here's the real deal.

In the wake of the Nixon's abuses of our Constitution, our liberties and our privacy, Congress (in 1978) set up a secret court that the Executive Branch must -- by law -- go to if it is seeking wiretaps or surveillance of foreigners or Americans "suspected" of terrorism or espionage.

This is the law.

It was passed by Congress to prevent the kind of abuse that the Bush Administration is guilty of. This law is called the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

This secret court (the last we knew it was headed by GOP hack partisan federal judge David Sentelle -- who got Poindexter and North off the hook and put Kenneth Starr on the job -- but that may have changed) has never been known to deny a government request for wiretapping, surveillance or searches.

So, if the secret court always approves the White House requests for wiretapping, surveillance and searches, why did the White House get its approval in some cases (with a dramatic increase of court-approved spying under Bush) but not others?

Why did the Bush Administration need to engage in illegal spying on American citizens in hundreds if not thousands of cases, if the court so acquiescently approved of its requests?

We know that Bush fashions himself a dictator who can create the law as he sees fit. But why go to the trouble and potential legal and political problems if all his administration had to do was go to the secret court, which, we repeat, always approves the White House requests? And no one's known of a leak coming out of this secret court.

Ah, there's the rub.

The answer is that the White House didn't go through the legal process on these specific cases and, instead, committed a grossly illegal violation of the U.S. Constitution and a Congressional law specifically designed to provent such executive branch abuses for one reason -- and that reason likely has to do with who was under surveillance, who was being wiretapped and who was being illegally searched.

In short, if the American public were to see the list of hundreds -- and perhaps thousands of people, according to The New York Times -- the Bush Administration violated the law to spy on, we might see names akin to Nixon's "enemies list." Only in this case, it would be Bush's "enemies list."

Why, we might see names like Joe and Valerie Wilson, or Richard Clarke, or Cindy Sheehan, or John Kerry among others. The White House wouldn't want even a secret court to know that it was spying on political enemies. This was exactly why the FISA law was passed. To prevent just such illegal political spying by the White House.

The New York Times (which suddenly has awakened from a decades long slumber) also reported that the FBI was spying on domestic advocacy groups -- and let's just say that they weren't groups complaining that "liberals are conducting a war on Christmas." They were groups that are at odds with the Bush agenda, expressing their viewpoints -- as is their Constitutional right -- under the American Constitution.

So what we have here is a White House that is using illegal actions to spy on American citizens who the same White House considers not a threat to the United States, but a political threat to their one-party, dictatorial rule. 

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QueEx · Jan 7, 2006

<center>Report Rebuts Bush on Spying
Domestic Action's Legality Challenged</center>

Washington Post
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, January 7, 2006; Page A01

A report by Congress's research arm concluded yesterday that the administration's justification for the warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments.

The Congressional Research Service's report rebuts the central assertions made recently by Bush and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales about the president's authority to order secret intercepts of telephone and e-mail exchanges between people inside the United States and their contacts abroad.

The findings, the first nonpartisan assessment of the program's legality to date, prompted Democratic lawmakers and civil liberties advocates to repeat calls yesterday for Congress to conduct hearings on the monitoring program and attempt to halt it.

The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. citizens since the fall of 2001. Congress expressly intended for the government to seek warrants from a special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court before engaging in such surveillance when it passed legislation creating the court in 1978, the CRS report said.

The report also concluded that Bush's assertion that Congress authorized such eavesdropping to detect and fight terrorists does not appear to be supported by the special resolution that Congress approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, which focused on authorizing the president to use military force.

"It appears unlikely that a court would hold that Congress has expressly or impliedly authorized the NSA electronic surveillance operations here," the authors of the CRS report wrote. The administration's legal justification "does not seem to be . . . well-grounded," they said.

Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has pledged to hold hearings on the program, which was first revealed in news accounts last month, and the judges of the FISA court have demanded a classified briefing about the program, which is scheduled for Monday.

"This report contradicts the president's claim that his spying on Americans was legal," said Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.), one of the lawmakers who asked the CRS to research the issue. "It looks like the president's wiretapping was not only illegal, but also ensnared innocent Americans who did nothing more than place a phone call."

Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the president and the administration believe the program is on firm legal footing. "The national security activities described by the president were conducted in accord with the law and provide a critical tool in the war on terror that saves lives and protects civil liberties at the same time," he said. A spokesman for the National Security Agency was not available for a comment yesterday.

Other administration officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said the CRS reached some erroneous legal conclusions, erring on the side of a narrow interpretation of what constitutes military force and when the president can exercise his war powers.

Bush has said that he has broad powers in times of war and must exercise them to target not only "enemies across the world" but also "terrorists here at home." The administration has argued, starting in 2002 briefs to the FISA court, that the "war on terror" is global and indefinite, effectively removing the limits of wartime authority -- traditionally the times and places of imminent or actual battle.

Some law professors have been skeptical of the president's assertions, and several said yesterday that the report's conclusions were expected. "Ultimately, the administration's position is not persuasive," said Carl W. Tobias, a University of Richmond law professor and an expert on constitutional law. "Congress has made it pretty clear it has legislated pretty comprehensively on this issue with FISA," he said, referring to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. "And there begins to be a pattern of unilateral executive decision making. Time and again, there's the executive acting alone without consulting the courts or Congress."

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said the report makes it clear that Congress has exerted power over domestic surveillance. He urged Congress to address what he called the president's abuse of citizens' privacy rights and the larger issue of presidential power.

"These are absolutely central questions in American government: What exactly are the authorities vested in the president, and is he complying with the law?" Rotenberg said.

The report includes 1970s-era quotations from congressional committees that were then uncovering years of domestic spying abuses by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI against those suspected of communist sympathies, American Indians, Black Panthers and other activists. Lawmakers were very disturbed at how routinely FBI agents had listened in on U.S. citizens' phone calls without following any formal procedures. As they drafted FISA and created its court, the lawmakers warned then that only strong legislation, debated in public, could stop future administrations from eavesdropping.

"This evidence alone should demonstrate the inappropriateness of relying solely on executive branch discretion to safeguard civil liberties," they wrote. The lawmakers noted that Congress's intelligence committees could provide some checks and balances to protect privacy rights but that their power was limited in the face of an administration arguing that intelligence decisions must remain top secret.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6010601772.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

muckraker10021 · Jan 7, 2006

[WM]http://movies.crooksandliars.com/20060106_wiretap.wmv[/WM]

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Top 12 Media Myths and Falsehoods on the
Bush Administration's Spying Scandal

Media Matters presents the top 12 myths and falsehoods promoted by the media onPresident Bush's spying scandal stemming from the recent revelation inThe New York Times that he authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on domestic
communications without the required approval of the FISA court
 
mediamatters.org
As The New York Times first <a href="/rd?http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?ei=5090&en=e32072d786623ac1&ex=1292389200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">revealed</a> on December 16, President Bush issued a secret presidential order shortly after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks that authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on international phone and email communications that originate from or are received within the United States, and to do so without the court approval normally required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Facing increasing scrutiny, the Bush administration and its conservative allies in the media have defended the secret spying operation with false and misleading claims that have subsequently been reported without challenge across the media. So, just in time for the holidays, Media Matters for America presents the top myths and falsehoods promoted by the media on the Bush administration's spying scandal.
 1: Timeliness necessitated bypassing the FISA court
 Various media outlets have <a href="/items/200512200008">uncritically relayed</a> President Bush's claim that the administration's warrantless domestic surveillance is justified because "we must be able to act fast ... so we can prevent new [terrorist] attacks." But these reports have ignored emergency provisions in the current law governing such surveillance -- FISA -- that allow the administration to apply to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for a search warrant up to 72 hours after the government begins monitoring suspects' phone conversations. The existence of this 72-hour window debunks the argument that the administration had to bypass the law to avoid delay in obtaining a warrant. The fact that the administration <a href="/items/200512190013#20051223" target="_self">never retroactively sought a warrant</a> from the FISA court for its surveillance activities suggests that it was not the need to act quickly that prevented the administration from complying with the FISA statute, but, rather, the fear of being denied the warrant.
 <a name="2" id="2"></a>2: Congress was adequately informed of -- and approved -- the administration's actions
 Conservatives have sought to defend the secret spying operation by falsely suggesting that the Bush administration adequately informed Congress of its actions and that Congress raised no objections. For example, on the December 19 broadcast of Westwood One's The Radio Factor, host Bill O'Reilly claimed that the NSA's domestic surveillance "wasn't a secret program" because "the Bush administration did keep key congressional people informed they were doing this." The claim was also featured in a December 21 <a href="/rd?http://www.gop.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=6014">press release</a> by the Republican National Committee (RNC).
 In fact, both Republicans and Democrats in Congress have said that the administration likely did not inform them of the operation to the extent required by the <a href="/rd?http://www.intelligence.gov/0-natsecact_1947.shtml">National Security Act of 1947</a>, as amended in 2001. Members of both parties have also said that the objections they did have were ignored by the administration and couldn't be aired because the program's existence was highly classified.
 As The New York Times <a href="/rd?http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/politics/21intel.html?ei=5090&en=ecb69f142833723e&ex=1292821200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">reported</a> on December 21, Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-MI), former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), Senate Intelligence Committee ranking member John D. Rockefeller IV (D-WV), and Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) have stated that they did not receive written reports from the White House on the surveillance operation, as required by the National Security Act:
<blockquote>
 The demand for written reports was added to the National Security Act of 1947 by Congress in 2001, as part of an effort to compel the executive branch to provide more specificity and clarity in its briefings about continuing activities. President Bush signed the measure into law on Dec. 28, 2001, but only after raising an objection to the new provision, with the stipulation that he would interpret it "in a manner consistent with the president's constitutional authority" to withhold information for national-security or foreign-policy reasons.
 [...]
 n interviews, Mr. Hoekstra, Mr. Graham and aides to Mr. Rockefeller and Mr. Reid all said they understood that while the briefings provided by [Vice President Dick] Cheney might have been accompanied by charts, they did not constitute written reports. The 2001 addition to the law requires that such reports always be in written form, and include a concise statement of facts and explanation of an activity's significance.
</blockquote>
 Further, Rockefeller recently released a <a href="/rd?http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/19/AR2005121901641_pf.html">copy of a letter</a> he wrote to Cheney on July 17, 2003, raising objections to the secret surveillance operation. As the Times <a href="/rd?http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/politics/20spy.html?ei=5090&en=4478f86ff5527b51&ex=1292734800&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">reported</a> on December 20, Rockefeller said on December 19 that his concerns "were never addressed, and I was prohibited from sharing my views with my colleagues" because the briefings were classified. The December 21 Times <a href="/rd?http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/21/politics/21intel.html?ei=5090&en=ecb69f142833723e&ex=1292821200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">report</a> noted that House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) said she too sent a letter to the Bush administration objecting to the secret surveillance operation, and that Graham alleged that he was never informed "that the program would involve eavesdropping on American citizens."
 3: Warrantless searches of Americans are legal under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
 Conservatives such as nationally syndicated radio host <a href="/issues_topics/people/rushlimbaugh">Rush Limbaugh</a> and American Cause president Bay Buchanan have defended the administration by <a href="/items/200512210011">falsely claiming</a> that the administration's authorization of domestic surveillance by the NSA without warrants is legal under FISA. In fact, FISA, which was enacted in 1978, contains provisions that limit such surveillance to communications "exclusively between foreign powers," specifically stating that the president may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order only if there is "no substantial likelihood" that the communications of "a United States person" -- a U.S. citizen or anyone else legally in the United States -- will be intercepted. Such provisions do not allow for the Bush administration's authorization of domestic surveillance of communications between persons inside the United States and parties outside the country.
 FISA also allows the president and the attorney general to conduct surveillance without a court order for the purpose of gathering "foreign intelligence information" for "a period" no more than 15 days "following a declaration of war by the Congress." This provision does not permit Bush's conduct either, as he <a href="/rd?http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2005/12/20051219-2.html">acknowledged</a> that he had reauthorized the program more than 30 times since 2001, and said that the program is "reviewed approximately every 45 days." 

 4: Clinton, Carter also authorized warrantless searches of U.S. citizens
 Another tactic conservatives have used to defend the Bush administration has been to claim that it is not unusual for a president to authorize secret surveillance of U.S. citizens without a court order, asserting that Democratic presidents have also done so. For example, on the December 21 <a href="/rd?http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,179435,00.html">edition</a> of Fox News's Special Report, host <a href="/issues_topics/people/brithume">Brit Hume</a> claimed that former presidents Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton issued executive orders "to perform wiretaps and searches of American citizens without a warrant."
 But as the ThinkProgress weblog <a href="/rd?http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/20/drudge-fact-check/">noted</a> on December 20, executive orders on the topic by Clinton and Carter were merely explaining the rules established by FISA, which do not allow for warrantless searches on "United States persons." Subsequent reports by NBC chief foreign affairs correspondent <a href="/rd?http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10565905/">Andrea Mitchell</a> and <a href="/rd?http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/21/AR2005122102253_pf.html">The Washington Post</a> also debunked the conservative talking point while noting that the claim was highlighted in the December 21 RNC <a href="/rd?http://www.gop.com/News/Read.aspx?ID=6014">press release</a>.
 From ThinkProgress, which documented how internet gossip Matt Drudge <a href="/rd?http://www.drudgereport.com/flash8.htm">selectively cited</a> from the Clinton and Carter executive orders to falsely suggest they authorized secret surveillance of U.S. citizens without court-obtained warrants:
<blockquote>
 What <a href="/rd?http://www.drudgereport.com/flash8.htm">Drudge says</a>:
<blockquote>
 Clinton, February 9, 1995: "The Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order"
</blockquote>
 What Clinton <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-12949.htm">actually signed</a>:
<blockquote>
 Section 1. Pursuant to section 302(a)(1) [50 U.S.C. 1822(a)] of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] Act, the Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order, to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year, if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that section.
</blockquote>
 That section requires the Attorney General to certify is the search will not involve "<a href="/rd?http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_sec_50_00001822----000-.html">the premises, information, material, or property of a United States person.</a>" That means U.S. citizens or anyone inside of the United States.
 The entire controversy about Bush's program is that, for the first time ever, allows warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens and other people inside of the United States. Clinton's 1995 executive order did not authorize that.
 Drudge pulls the same trick with Carter.
 What <a href="/rd?http://www.drudgereport.com/flash8.htm">Drudge says</a>:
<blockquote>
 Jimmy Carter Signed Executive Order on May 23, 1979: "Attorney General is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order."
</blockquote>
 What <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo12139.htm">Carter's executive order</a> actually says:
<blockquote>
 1-101. Pursuant to Section 102(a)(1) of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1802(a)), the Attorney General is authorized to approve electronic surveillance to acquire foreign intelligence information without a court order, but only if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that Section.
</blockquote>
 What the Attorney General has to certify under that section is that the surveillance will not contain "<a href="/rd?http://www4.law.cornell.edu/uscode/html/uscode50/usc_sec_50_00001802----000-.html">the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.</a>" So again, no U.S. persons are involved.
</blockquote>
 5: Only Democrats are concerned about the Bush administration's secret surveillance
 As part of a larger problem of imprecise reporting, a number of media reports have <a href="/items/200512200012#20051223" target="_self">falsely suggested</a> that the debate over the Bush administration's secret surveillance of domestic communications is purely a partisan dispute between Democrats and Republicans. For example, on the December 22 broadcast of NBC's Today, Newsweek chief political correspondent Howard Fineman said: "[W]hile the Bill of Rights is something we all cherish, I think the Democrats politically need to be careful, because the president's going to argue, as he already is, that post-9-11, strong surveillance measures are required."
 In fact, several prominent Republicans have expressed concern that the Bush administration's actions might violate the law or otherwise be objectionable. On December 18, Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-SC) said that "I don't know of any legal basis to go around" the requirement that the White House formally apply to the FISA court for a warrant to engage in domestic surveillance, while Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) said it is a "legitimate question" to ask why "the president chose not to use FISA." After Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales cited executive authority in defending the legality of the administration's actions, Sen. Arlen Specter (R-PA) -- who is in charge of organizing an investigation into the issue -- responded that he was "skeptical of the attorney general's citation of authority."
 6: Debate is between those supporting civil liberties and those seeking to prevent terrorism
 Many media figures have created a false dichotomy by framing the debate over the Bush administration's actions as one between those who support protecting civil liberties and those who favor protecting America from another deadly terrorist attack. For example, NBC host Katie Couric <a href="/items/200512190005">claimed</a> the debate amounted to "legal analysts and constitutional scholars versus Americans, who say civil liberties are important, but we don't want another September 11," while NBC's Mitchell <a href="/items/200512210004">wondered</a> whether Americans should be more concerned about "[a] terror attack or someone going into their hard drive and intercepting their emails."
 Such statements set up exactly the false debate put forth by Cheney and Bush to defend the administration's actions, as Mitchell subsequently noted on the December 21 <a href="/rd?http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10565905/">edition</a> of MSNBC's Hardball with Chris Matthews:
<blockquote>
 MITCHELL: [T]hey set up successfully, the White House, this premise of you're either for security and protecting the American people post-9-11 or you're worried about surveillance. This either-or proposition, when a lot of people say that's a false choice.
</blockquote>
 7: Bin Laden phone leak demonstrates how leak of spy operation could damage national security
 Several media outlets have uncritically cited a 1998 Washington Times report on Osama bin Laden as an example of how leaking information about the Bush administration's domestic spying operation could harm national security. The media have falsely suggested that the Washington Times report revealed that the United States was monitoring bin Laden's conversations on a satellite phone and that bin Laden quickly ceased using the phone after the report surfaced. In fact, the article only noted that bin Laden was using a satellite phone, not that the U.S. was monitoring it; according to a December 22 <a title="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/21/AR2005122101994_pf.html" href="/rd?http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/21/AR2005122101994_pf.html">report</a> by The Washington Post, bin Laden apparently had stopped using the phone by the time any newspaper reported that the U.S. had been monitoring his conversations. Further, the Post noted that another report on bin Laden's phone -- that relied on the Taliban as its source -- preceded the Washington Times article by nearly two years, while another report predating the Times article relied on bin Laden himself.
 One example of media misrepresenting the bin Laden incident occurred on the December 17 <a href="/rd?http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0512/17/cst.01.html">edition</a> of CNN Live Saturday, when correspondent Brian Todd reported:
<blockquote>
 TODD: We asked one expert how important it is for the NSA and its methods to be kept so secret. He cited one breach as an example, the damage done when it was made public that intelligence agencies were monitoring Osama bin Laden's cell phone calls.
</blockquote>
 In a December 19 <a href="/rd?http://www.cnn.com/2005/POLITICS/12/19/bush.transcript/">press conference</a>, Bush also highlighted the purported bin Laden leak as an example of why leaking information about the domestic spying operation was a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy":
<blockquote>
 QUESTION: Thank you, sir. Are you going to order a leaks investigation into the disclosure of the NSA surveillance program?
 [...]
 BUSH: My personal opinion is it was a shameful act, for someone to disclose this very important program in time of war.
 The fact that we're discussing this program is helping the enemy.
 [...]
 BUSH: Let me give you an example about my concerns about letting the enemy know what may or may not be happening.
 In the late 1990s, our government was following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone. And then the fact that we were following Osama bin Laden because he was using a certain type of telephone made it into the press as the result of a leak.
 And guess what happened. Osama bin Laden changed his behavior. He began to change how he communicated.
</blockquote>
 But as the December 22 Post <a href="/rd?http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/21/AR2005122101994_pf.html">report</a> documented, the August 21, 1998, Washington Times article in question "never said that the United States was listening in on bin Laden"; the article merely reported that bin Laden "keeps in touch with the world via computers and satellite phones." The Post also noted that the Washington Times report was not the first article to note bin Laden's use of a satellite phone: A December 16, 1996, Time magazine report cited the Taliban in reporting that bin Laden "uses satellite phones to contact fellow Islamic militants in Europe, the Middle East and Africa." And the day before the Times article, CNN terrorism analyst Peter Bergen cited a 1997 interview he conducted with bin Laden to report that bin Laden "communicates by satellite phone." Finally, the Post noted that it was not until "after bin Laden apparently stopped using his phone" that the Los Angeles Times first reported on September 7, 1998, that the U.S. had been monitoring his phone conversations. As a follow-up Post <a href="/rd?http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/22/AR2005122201800_pf.html">article</a> on December 23 noted, bin Laden stopped using the phone "within days of a cruise missile attack on his training camps in Afghanistan."
 The false claim that the Washington Times article was responsible for causing bin Laden to stop using the satellite phone apparently originated in the 9-11 Commission report, which <a href="/rd?http://www.9-11commission.gov/report/911Report_Ch4.htm">asserted</a>: "Worst of all, al Qaeda's senior leadership had stopped using a particular means of communication almost immediately after a leak to the Washington Times."
 8: Gorelick testimony proved Clinton asserted "the same authority" as Bush
 In a December 20 article headlined "<a href="/rd?http://www.nationalreview.com/york/york200512200946.asp">Clinton Claimed Authority to Order No-Warrant Searches</a>," National Review White House correspondent Byron York drew attention to then-Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick's July 14, 1994, <a href="/rd?http://thinkprogress.org/gorelick-testimony/">testimony</a> before the House Intelligence Committee, in which she stated that the president has "inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches." While York's article did not explicitly draw a parallel between the Clinton administration's 1994 policy regarding such searches and the current Bush administration controversy regarding unwarranted domestic surveillance, conservative media figures such as National Review editor <a href="/items/200512210012">Rich Lowry</a> and syndicated columnist <a href="/rd?http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/22/AR2005122201102_pf.html">Charles Krauthammer</a> have done just that.
 But Gorelick's testimony <a href="/items/200512210012">does not prove</a> that the Clinton administration believed it had the authority to bypass FISA regulations, as the Bush administration has argued in the case of the NSA's domestic wiretapping program.
 Unlike electronic surveillance, the "physical searches" to which Gorelick referred were not restricted by FISA at the time of her 1994 testimony. Therefore, by asserting the authority to conduct physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes, the Clinton administration was not asserting that it did not have to comply with FISA. In October 1994, Congress passed legislation -- with <a href="/rd?http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2001/10/06/MN183971.DTL">Clinton's support</a> -- to require FISA warrants for physical searches. Thereafter, the Clinton administration <a href="/rd?http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/20/the-gorelick-myth/">never argued</a> that any "inherent authority" pre-empted FISA. To the contrary, in February 1995 Clinton issued an <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/eo-12949.htm">executive order</a> that implemented the new FISA requirements on physical searches.
 By contrast, the Bush administration has argued that it has the authority to authorize surveillance of domestic communications without court orders, despite FISA's clear and longstanding restrictions on warrantless electronic eavesdropping.
 9: Aldrich Ames investigation is example of Clinton administration bypassing FISA regulations
 Some conservatives have specifically cited the joint CIA/FBI investigation of Aldrich Ames, a CIA analyst ultimately convicted of espionage, as an example of Clinton invoking executive authority to overstep FISA by authorizing a physical search of a suspect without a court order. For example, on the December 21 <a href="/rd?http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0512/21/sitroom.01.html">edition</a> of CNN's The Situation Room, Republican attorney Victoria Toensing <a href="/items/200512220011#20051223" target="_self">falsely claimed</a> that the Clinton administration did "carry out that authority" to bypass the FISA requirements "when they went into Aldrich Ames's house without a warrant."
 But as with Gorelick's testimony, the Ames investigation took place before the 1995 FISA amendment requiring warrants for physical searches. In other words, in conducting these searches, the Clinton administration did not bypass FISA because FISA did not address physical searches. Further, there is ample evidence that the Clinton administration complied with the FISA requirements that did exist on wiretapping: U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who previously served on the FISA court, has <a href="/rd?http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/sleeper/tools/lamberth.html">noted</a> the "key role" the court played in the Ames case to "authorize physical entries to plant eavesdropping devices"; and former deputy assistant attorney general Mark M. Richard established that "the Attorney General was asked to sign as many as nine certifications to the FISA court in support of applications for FISA surveillance" during the Ames investigation.
 10: Clinton administration conducted domestic spying
 Conservative media figures have claimed that during the Clinton administration, the NSA used a program known as Echelon to monitor the domestic communications of United States citizens without a warrant. While most have offered no evidence to support this assertion, NewsMax, a right-wing news website, <a href="/rd?http://www.newsmax.com/scripts/printer_friendly.pl?page=http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/12/18/221452.shtml">cited</a> a February 27, 2000, CBS News 60 Minutes <a href="/rd?http://cryptome.org/echelon-60min.htm">report</a> that correspondent <a href="/rd?http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/02/25/60minutes/main502014.shtml">Steve Kroft</a> introduced by asserting: "If you made a phone call today or sent an email to a friend, there's a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country's largest intelligence agency. The top-secret Global Surveillance Network is called Echelon, and it's run by the National Security Agency." NewsMax used the 60 Minutes segment to call into question The New York Times' December 16 <a href="/rd?http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/politics/16program.html?ei=5090&en=e32072d786623ac1&ex=1292389200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss&pagewanted=print">report</a> that Bush's "decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad."
 On December 19, Limbaugh read the NewsMax article on his nationally syndicated radio show. Limbaugh told listeners that Bush's surveillance program "started in previous administrations. You've heard of the NSA massive computer-gathering program called Echelon. 60 Minutes did a story on this in February of 2000. Bill Clinton still in office." The Echelon claim has also been repeated by Wall Street Journal columnist <a href="/rd?http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/0512/19/ldt.01.html">John Fund</a> and radio host <a href="/rd?http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10548164/">G. Gordon Liddy</a>.
 The 60 Minutes report appears to have been based largely on anecdotal evidence provided by a former Canadian intelligence agent and a former intelligence employee who worked at Menwith Hill, the American spy station in Great Britain, in 1979. In addition, the report contained footage of an assertion by then-Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) that "Project Echelon engages in the interception of literally millions of communications involving United States citizens." But the report also included comments from then-chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence Rep. Porter Goss (R-FL), who, Kroft reported, "still believes ... that the NSA does not eavesdrop on innocent American citizens." Kroft asked Goss: "[H]ow can you be sure that no one is listening to those conversations?" Goss responded, "We do have methods for that, and I am relatively sure that those procedures are working very well."
 While Goss did not say in his 60 Minutes interview that the NSA does not spy on the domestic communications of Americans without a warrant, then-director of central intelligence George J. Tenet and then-National Security Agency director Lt. Gen. <a href="/rd?http://www.nsa.gov/about/about00013.cfm">Michael V. Hayden</a> said exactly that to Goss's committee less than two months later. As ThinkProgress has <a href="/rd?http://thinkprogress.org/2005/12/20/the-echelon-myth/">noted</a>, Tenet testified before the intelligence committee on April 12, 2000. Denying allegations that Echelon was used to spy on Americans in the United States without a warrant, Tenet stated: "We do not target their conversations for collection in the United States unless a FISA warrant has been obtained from the FISA court by the Justice Department." In the same hearing, Hayden testified: "If [an] American person is in the United States of America, I must have a court order before I initiate any collection [of communications] against him or her."
 Hayden also denied the "urban myth" that the NSA "ask others to do on our behalf that which we cannot do for ourselves." This appears to have been a response to the allegation -- noted by 60 Minutes -- that the NSA was exchanging information with foreign intelligence services that did monitor the domestic communications of Americans. Hayden stated: "By executive order, it is illegal for us to ask others to do what we cannot do ourselves, and we don't do it."
 Tenet and Hayden's congressional testimony leaves two possibilities: Either they were not telling Congress the truth, or the claim that the NSA used the Echelon program to monitor the domestic communications of Americans is incorrect.
 Hayden now serves as principal deputy director of national intelligence and has vigorously defended Bush's warrantless domestic surveillance program. At a December 19 <a href="/rd?http://www.dni.gov/release_letter_121905.html">press conference</a>, he acknowledged that Bush's program goes beyond what is authorized under FISA. Hayden described it as "a more -- I'll use the word 'aggressive' program than would be traditionally available under FISA."
 <a name="11" id="11"></a>11: Moussaoui case proved that FISA probable-cause standard impedes terrorism probes
 Some of the administration's supporters have attempted to defend the domestic surveillance program by pointing to a purported situation where the cumbersome FISA regulations prevented crucial intelligence gathering. In a December 20 Washington Post <a href="/rd?http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/12/19/AR2005121901027.html">op-ed</a>, Weekly Standard editor William Kristol and American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Gary Schmitt cited the 2001 case of Zacarias Moussaoui as evidence that the "difficulty with FISA is the standard it imposes for obtaining a warrant aimed at" a domestic target. Kristol and Schmitt claimed that the evidence the FBI had compiled against Moussaoui did not "rise to the level of probable cause under FISA":
<blockquote>
 Consider the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, the French Moroccan who came to the FBI's attention before Sept. 11 because he had asked a Minnesota flight school for lessons on how to steer an airliner, but not on how to take off or land. Even with this report, and with information from French intelligence that Moussaoui had been associating with Chechen rebels, the Justice Department decided there was not sufficient evidence to get a FISA warrant to allow the inspection of his computer files. Had they opened his laptop, investigators might have begun to unwrap the Sept. 11 plot. But strange behavior and merely associating with dubious characters don't rise to the level of probable cause under FISA.
</blockquote>
 But contrary to Kristol and Schmitt's argument that the probable-cause standard established by FISA was too high in this case, a 2003 Senate Judiciary Committee <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_rpt/fisa.pdf">report</a> found that the FBI's evidence against Moussaoui was, in fact, sufficient. The report instead <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_rpt/fisa.pdf#page=19">asserted</a> that FBI personnel who handled the warrant application "failed miserably" in their efforts to convince FBI attorneys that the threshold for establishing probable cause that Moussaoui was an "agent of a foreign power" (and therefore subject to surveillance pursuant to FISA) had been met .
 The bipartisan report, compiled by Sens. Patrick Leahy (D-VT), Charles Grassley (R-IA), and Arlen Specter (R-PA), examined in detail the FBI's handling of the Moussaoui FISA application, which was delivered to FBI headquarters by the Minneapolis field office, handled by a supervisory special agent (SSA) there, and ultimately rejected as insufficient by FBI attorneys. The senators determined that the SSA in charge of the application <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_rpt/fisa.pdf#page=19">provided</a> the attorneys with a "truncated" version of the evidence compiled by the Minneapolis agents and <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_rpt/fisa.pdf#page=20">failed</a> to search for additional "information relevant to the application." Moreover, the report found that both the SSA and the attorneys had <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/congress/2003_rpt/fisa.pdf#page=26">employed</a> an "unnecessarily high standard" for probable cause -- one that exceeded the legal requirements set out by FISA:
<blockquote>
 In our view, the FBI applied too cramped an interpretation of probable cause and "agent of a foreign power" in making the determination of whether Moussaoui was an agent of a foreign power. FBI Headquarters personnel in charge of reviewing this application focused too much on establishing a nexus between Moussaoui and a "recognized" group, which is not legally required. Without going into the actual evidence in the Moussaoui case, there appears to have been sufficient evidence in the possession of the FBI which satisfied the FISA requirements for the Moussaoui application.
</blockquote>
 Despite this report's having established that the FBI's misunderstanding of the FISA requirements resulted in the rejection of the Moussaoui application, a December 23 New York Times <a href="/rd?http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/23/politics/23court.html?ex=1292994000&en=7a7b1ad577c9bf3b&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss">article</a> reported without challenge the FBI's argument that FISA's "cumbersome submission requirements" were to blame:
<blockquote>
 Some agents complained that the FISA court's cumbersome submission requirements and insistence on strict adherence to the law had contributed to the impression that the court itself was an obstacle to aggressive investigation of terror cases. As an example, these agents suggested F.B.I. lawyers did not seek a FISA warrant in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested shortly before the 2001 attacks, in part because they believed the court would reject it.
</blockquote>
 12: A 2002 FISA review court opinion makes clear that Bush acted legally
 Recently, conservative media figures have misleadingly cited a 2002 <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fiscr111802.html">opinion</a> by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review (FISCR) to claim that the president could authorize warrantless domestic electronic surveillance despite FISA's restrictions. They have pointed to the court's reiteration of the president's inherent constitutional authority to conduct foreign intelligence surveillance without a warrant, which FISA cannot encroach upon. Therefore, they argue, Bush could authorize NSA's warrantless monitoring of "U.S. persons," regardless of FISA's restrictions.
 But, as Media Matters <a href="/items/200512220007#20051223" target="_self">documented</a>, this argument is a red herring. Their citation of the decision to support the contention that Congress cannot encroach upon the president's constitutional authority ignores constitutional limits on that authority. Of course a law passed in 1978 would not trump the Constitution -- the supreme law of the land. The question is the scope of that presidential authority and whether it extends to acts that would violate the provisions of FISA protecting U.S. persons from excessive government intrusion. Contrary to these media figures' suggestions, the 2002 FISCR <a href="/rd?http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fiscr111802.html">opinion</a> does not address that question.
 Regardless, media figures have asserted that the FISCR opinion supports the contention that Bush is not bound by FISA.
 Most prominent among these has been National Review White House correspondent Byron York, who in a post on the National Review Online's weblog, The Corner, titled "<a href="/rd?http://corner.nationalreview.com/05_12_18_corner-archive.asp#085260">READ THIS IMPORTANT ARTICLE</a>," promoted a Chicago Tribune <a href="/rd?http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/chi-0512210142dec21,0,3553632.story?coll=chi-newsopinioncommentary-hed">op-ed</a> by John Schmidt, an associate attorney general under Clinton, supporting the legality of the administration's surveillance program. Schmidt wrote:
<blockquote>
 Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant. In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the ... courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority."
 [...]
 But as the 2002 Court of Review noted, if the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches, "FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional power."
</blockquote>
 The Drudge Report website also cited Schmidt's Tribune op-ed with a <a href="/rd?http://www.drudgereportarchives.com/data/2005/12/21/20051221_175400.htm">link</a> captioned "Associate attorney general under Clinton: President had legal authority to OK taps ..."
 Similarly, a December 20 Wall Street Journal <a href="/rd?http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110007703">editorial</a> asserted:
<blockquote>
 FISA established a process by which certain wiretaps in the context of the Cold War could be approved, not a limit on what wiretaps could ever be allowed.
 The courts have been explicit on this point, most recently in In Re: Sealed Case, the 2002 opinion by the special panel of appellate judges established to hear FISA appeals. In its per curiam opinion, the court noted that in a previous FISA case (U.S. v. Truong), a federal "court, as did all the other courts to have decided the issue [our emphasis], held that the President did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information." And further that, "We take for granted that the President does have that authority and, assuming that is so, FISA could not encroach on the President's constitutional power."
</blockquote>
 Fox News chief Washington correspondent Jim Angle made a similar claim on the December 20 edition of Fox News' Special Report with Brit Hume, stating, "In 2002, [FISA's] own court of review upheld the president's powers and pointed to an appeals court decision, noting that it, as did all other courts to have decided the issue, held that the president did have the inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information."
 Others who have repeated this claim in the media include Bradford Berenson, a former associate White House counsel, who made the assertion on the December 21 <a href="/rd?http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/fedagencies/july-dec05/nsa_12-21.html">broadcast</a> of PBS' The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Berenson <a href="/rd?http://www.sidley.com/news/pub.asp?PubID=17153282003">worked</a> in the Bush White House from 2001 to 2003, and after the September 11 attacks "played a significant role in the executive branch's counterterrorism response."
</div>
</div>
 —A.S., J.K., J.S., S.S.M., & R.S.K.
</body>

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

muckraker10021 · Jan 15, 2006

Bush Authorized Domestic Spying Before 9/11

 by Jason Leopold

t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Friday 13 January 2006 

The National Security Agency advised President Bush in early 2001 that it had been eavesdropping on Americans during the course of its work monitoring suspected terrorists and foreigners believed to have ties to terrorist groups, according to a declassified document.

The NSA's vast data-mining activities began shortly after Bush was sworn in as president and the document contradicts his assertion that the 9/11 attacks prompted him to take the unprecedented step of signing a secret executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor a select number of American citizens thought to have ties to terrorist groups.

In its "Transition 2001" report, the NSA said that the ever-changing world of global communication means that "American communication and targeted adversary communication will coexist."

"Make no mistake, NSA can and will perform its missions consistent with the Fourth Amendment and all applicable laws," the document says.

However, it adds that "senior leadership must understand that the NSA's mission will demand a 'powerful, permanent presence' on global telecommunications networks that host both 'protected' communications of Americans and the communications of adversaries the agency wants to target."

What had long been understood to be protocol in the event that the NSA spied on average Americans was that the agency would black out the identities of those individuals or immediately destroy the information.

But according to people who worked at the NSA as encryption specialists during this time, that's not what happened. On orders from Defense Department officials and President Bush, the agency kept a running list of the names of Americans in its system and made it readily available to a number of senior officials in the Bush administration, these sources said, which in essence meant the NSA was conducting a covert domestic surveillance operation in violation of the law.

James Risen, author of the book State of War and credited with first breaking the story about the NSA's domestic surveillance operations, said President Bush personally authorized a change in the agency's long-standing policies shortly after he was sworn in in 2001.

"The president personally and directly authorized new operations, like the NSA's domestic surveillance program, that almost certainly would never have been approved under normal circumstances and that raised serious legal or political questions," Risen wrote in the book. "Because of the fevered climate created throughout the government by the president and his senior advisers, Bush sent signals of what he wanted done, without explicit presidential orders" and "the most ambitious got the message."

The NSA's domestic surveillance activities that began in early 2001 reached a boiling point shortly after 9/11, when senior administration officials and top intelligence officials asked the NSA to share that data with other intelligence officials who worked for the FBI and the CIA to hunt down terrorists that might be in the United States. However the NSA, on advice from its lawyers, destroyed the records, fearing the agency could be subjected to lawsuits by American citizens identified in the agency's raw intelligence reports.

The declassified report says that the "Director of the National Security Agency is obligated by law to keep Congress fully and currently formed of intelligence activities." But that didn't happen. When news of the NSA's clandestine domestic spying operation, which President Bush said he had authorized in 2002, was uncovered last month by the New York Times, Democratic and Republican members of Congress appeared outraged, claiming that they were never informed of the covert surveillance operation. It's unclear whether the executive order signed by Bush removes the NSA Director from his duty to brief members of Congress about the agency's intelligence gathering programs.

Eavesdropping on Americans required intelligence officials to obtain a surveillance warrant from a special court and show probable cause that the person they wanted to monitor was communicating with suspected terrorists overseas. But Bush said that the process for obtaining such warrants under the 1978 Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act was, at times, "cumbersome."

In a December 22, letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella wrote that the "President determined it was necessary following September 11 to create an early warning detection system. FISA could not have provided the speed and agility required for the early warning detection system."

However, what remains murky about that line of reasoning is that after 9/11, former Attorney General John Ashcroft undertook a full-fledged lobbying campaign to loosen the rules and the laws governing FISA to make it easier for the intelligence community to obtain warrants for wiretaps to spy on Americans who might have ties to terrorists. Since the legislative change, more than 4,000 surveillance warrants have been approved by the FISA court, leading many to wonder why Bush selectively chose to bypass the court for what he said were a select number of individuals.

More than a dozen legal scholars dispute Moschella's legal analysis, saying in a letter just sent to Congress that the White House failed to identify "any plausible legal authority for such surveillance."

"The program appears on its face to violate existing law," wrote the scholars of constitutional law, some of whom worked in various senior capacities in Republican and Democratic administrations, in an extraordinary letter to Congress that laid out, point by point, why the president is unauthorized to permit the NSA to spy on Americans and how he broke the law by approving it.

"Even conceding that the President in his role as Commander in Chief may generally collect 'signals intelligence' on the enemy abroad, Congress indisputably has authority to regulate electronic surveillance within the United States, as it has done in FISA," the letter states. "Where Congress has so regulated, the President can act in contravention of statute only if his authority is exclusive, that is, not subject to the check of statutory regulation. The DOJ letter pointedly does not make that extraordinary claim. The Supreme Court has never upheld warrantless wiretapping within the United States."

Additionally, "if the administration felt that FISA was insufficient, the proper course was to seek legislative amendment, as it did with other aspects of FISA in the Patriot Act, and as Congress expressly contemplated when it enacted the wartime wiretap provision in FISA," the letter continues. "One of the crucial features of a constitutional democracy is that it is always open to the President - or anyone else - to seek to change the law. But it is also beyond dispute that, in such a democracy, the President cannot simply violate criminal laws behind closed doors because he deems them obsolete or impracticable."

Jeffrey Smith, the former General Counsel for the CIA under the Clinton administration, also weighed in on the controversy Wednesday. Smith said he wants to testify at hearings that Bush overstepped his authority and broke the law. His own legal opinion on the spy program was included in a 14-page letter to the House Select Committee on Intelligence that said that President Bush does not have the legal authority to order the NSA to spy on American citizens, aides to Congressman John Conyers said Wednesday evening.

"It is not credible that the 2001 authorization to use force provides authority for the president to ignore the requirements of FISA," Smith wrote, adding that if President Bush's executive order authorizing a covert domestic surveillance operation is upheld as legal "it would be a dramatic expansion of presidential authority affecting the rights of our fellow citizens that undermines the checks and balances of our system, which lie at the very heart of the Constitution."

Still, one thing that appears to be indisputable is that the NSA surveillance began well before 9/11 and months before President Bush claims Congress gave him the power to use military force against terrorist threats, which Bush says is why he believed he had the legal right to bypass the judicial process.

According to the online magazine Slate, an unnamed official in the telecom industry said NSA's "efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president's now celebrated secret executive order. The source reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a 'data-mining' operation, which might eventually cull 'millions' of individual calls and e-mails."

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QueEx · Jan 17, 2006

Greed said:
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.

QueEx said:
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.

<center>Groups Sue to Stop Domestic Spying Program</center>

Jan 17, 8:39 PM (ET)
Associated Press
By LARRY NEUMEISTER

NEW YORK (AP) - Two lawsuits were filed Tuesday in federal court that seek to end President Bush's electronic eavesdropping program, saying it is illegal and exceeds his constitutional powers.

The lawsuits - one filed in New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights and the other in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups - say the program bypasses safeguards in a 1978 law requiring court approval of electronic monitoring.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is suing Bush, the head of the National Security Agency and the heads of the other major security agencies.

The organization, which represents hundreds of men held as enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, must now audit old communications to determine whether "anything was disclosed that might undermine our representation of our clients," said Bill Goodman, the center's director.

The Detroit lawsuit, which names the National Security Agency and its director, said the program has impaired plaintiffs' ability to gather information from sources abroad as they try to locate witnesses, represent clients, do research or engage in advocacy.

It was filed by the ACLU, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Greenpeace and individuals on behalf of journalists, scholars, attorneys and national nonprofit organizations that communicate with people in the Middle East, Asia and elsewhere.

A spokesman for the Justice Department disputed the lawsuits' assertions.

"We believe these cases are without merit and plan to vigorously defend against the charges," Brian Roehrkasse said.

A message left with the National Security Agency was not immediately returned.

Bush maintains the program is legal under a congressional resolution passed after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It authorizes eavesdropping on international phone calls and e-mails of people deemed terror risks.

The New York lawsuit noted that federal law already lets the president order warrantless surveillance during the first 15 days of a war and allows courts to authorize surveillance of agents of foreign powers or terrorist groups.

The 1978 law requiring court approval was established after public fury erupted over surveillance of individuals, including Martin Luther King Jr.

"I'm personally outraged that my confidential communication with my clients may have been listened to by the U.S. government," said Rachel Meeropol, an attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights.

Attorneys have long relied on privacy to gather facts to ensure fair trials, lawyer Josh Dratel said in a statement supporting the ACLU case. He has represented people accused of terrorism-related crimes.

"That comfort level no longer exists, and it has sent a chill through the legal community," he said.

The program will further isolate U.S. social scientists, journalists and researchers from those who report on political developments or human rights abuses, said Larry Diamond, a Stanford University professor and plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit.

"One reason why the United States is held in such low esteem ... today is because we are seen as hypocritical," he said. "We vow to promote individual freedom as the central purpose of foreign policy, and then we violate individual freedom with this secret warrantless surveillance."

---

On the Net:

http://www.aclu.org

http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20060118/D8F6POP84.html?PG=home&SEC=news

Greed · Jan 18, 2006

i'm not sure i was thinking of just the filing of a civil lawsuit, but whatever. either way their fishing expedition of i COULD have been targeting doesnt look promising.

i'll still stand by my statement though and go on record as saying shit aint going to change.

those republican and democrats in congress already know what they are going to do, and it aint what you hope, its what i said.

QueEx · Jan 18, 2006

Greed said:
i'm not sure i was thinking of just the filing of a civil lawsuit, but whatever. either way their fishing expedition of i COULD have been targeting doesnt look promising.

i'll still stand by my statement though and go on record as saying shit aint going to change.

those republican and democrats in congress already know what they are going to do, and it aint what you hope, its what i said,

You may be right, the lawsuit might not get any place.

On the other hand, I have to think these are some smart lawyers and they knew the pitfalls of "early dismissal" of the suit going in -- I know I would have. That tells me (as I would be thinking), you have to have at least enough to get discovery started (discovery = having the other side produce documents and testimony that might be beneficial to your cause). Now, the government is going to fight like shit to prevent discovery and/or to severely limit its scope. But, there will be, at the minimum, narrow areas that plaintiffs' lawyers will be allowed to probe. If they are able to get even a glimpse that the activity is posing a serious threat to the 4th Amendment, the government's defense will start to collapse, if not literally -- then at least politically. That means, IMO, the government will compromise on its means and methods of domestic spying -- and will retreat back to "legal" means -- maybe with some new congressionally imposed guidelines tacked on to FISA.

The result, shit will change. And yes, some shit will remain the same. I see political progress as small leaps backward and forward -- with the end result, the synthesis, being a small step or two ahead of where things began. Progress.

QueEx

QueEx · Jan 25, 2006

<center>Analysis: White House Tries to Spin Spying</center>

Washington Post
By KATHERINE SHRADER
The Associated Press
Wednesday, January 25, 2006; 5:21 PM

WASHINGTON -- President Bush and his top national security advisers are trying to change the debate _ and even the vocabulary _ about the National Security Agency's controversial electronic monitoring program.

Don't call it domestic spying, they say. It's a terrorist surveillance program.

Americans have been uneasy about the program since it was first disclosed last month. According to polls, slightly more than half think the government should first get a warrant before eavesdropping on people in the United States whose calls and e-mails the government believes involve al-Qaida.

Bush, along with the nation's top military intelligence officer and the attorney general, has made the case in a three-day pitch.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the government's No. 2 intelligence official, tried to drive the point home using air travel.

"I've taken literally hundreds of domestic flights," Hayden said this week at the National Press Club. "I have never boarded a domestic flight in the United States of America and landed in Waziristan," a Pakistani region where some think Osama bin Laden may be hiding.

With that in mind, Hayden said, calling the monitoring program "domestic spying" isn't accurate when the calls start or end in another country _ for example, when al-Qaida's operations chief in Pakistan may have called someone in Maryland.

According to law, the rules and procedures for monitoring domestic communications apply even when only one end of the call is on U.S. soil. That's why Bush signed a highly classified directive approving the program, and has to reapprove it every 45 days.

The renewed public case from Bush and his advisers comes more than a month after the monitoring program was revealed and puts one of the government's most secretive intelligence agencies in an unusual spot. Most NSA employees would prefer to toil with no notice at their Fort Meade, Md., campus, roughly 25 miles from the White House.

Yet, on Wednesday Bush stopped by to rally the 30,000 workers _ at headquarters or worldwide by video. Reporters came along, but weren't allowed to listen to his speech.

"We must be able to quickly detect when someone linked to al-Qaida is communicating with someone inside of America," Bush said afterward. "That's one of the challenges of protecting the American people."

Like Bush, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales have sought to remind the nation of the morning of Sept. 11, 2001. They also have invoked bin Laden's message last week threatening the United States.

And they said the government is only interested in calls from suspected terrorists, not average Americans.

"When you're talking to your daughter at state college, this program cannot intercept your conversations," Hayden said. "And when she takes a semester abroad to complete her Arabic studies, this program will not intercept your communications."

Yet current and former government officials familiar with electronic monitoring say that accidental eavesdropping _ so-called "incidental intercepts" _ are part of the business. When it happens, the NSA has procedures to protect the identities of Americans and their privacy.

Hayden broadly addressed some of the procedures Monday, but even those who support the monitoring program concede the rules don't fit into ready-made public explanations.

Congress gets involved next month. The administration will face tough questions from lawmakers who want to enforce a robust check on the executive branch.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., wrote Gonzales Wednesday, laying out a series of subjects he wants to see addressed at his committee's Feb. 6 hearing: Why did the White House not ask Congress for changes to a 1978 foreign surveillance law? Why didn't the administration go to an established intelligence court to get approval for the monitoring? Will the White House consider doing that now?

Democrats want to see the committee call more witnesses than now planned, including former Deputy Attorney General James Comey, who reportedly had misgivings about the program. Senate Intelligence Committee Democrats are also requesting that their panel investigate.

In the end, the issue may land in the gray areas of intelligence gathering.

Former CIA Director James Woolsey sides with the president, but recently said it's a close call. "If anyone says it's a crystal clear issue one way or another, that is the only position I regard as wrong," Woolsey said.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE _ Katherine Shrader covers intelligence and national security for the Associated Press.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/01/25/AR2006012501689.html

muckraker10021 · Jan 29, 2006

<img src="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Components/Video/050701/n_s_turley_oconnor_050701.300w.jpg">

“The President Committed A Crime” - Jonathan Turley
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Non-Republican, Non-Democrat, respected by all, Independent Constitutional scholar Jonathan Turley succinctly destroys the bush junta propaganda regarding their illegal domestic spying.

He says “The President Committed A Crime” and he quickly debunks the “legal justification” lies of bush butt-boy Alberto Gonzales.
Listen to the 7 minute video below.
Why did his testimony only appear on C-SPAN.
When he backed the RepubliKlan impeachment of Clinton he was on the mainstream media virtually every day.
Let’s see if Arlen Specter calls him as a witness during the hearings next month


[wm]mms://media.canofun.com/TurleyPresidentCommittingaCrime[/wm]

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QueEx · Feb 6, 2006

[frame]http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB178/index.htm[/frame]

Greed · Feb 6, 2006

Convicted terrorist wants case thrown out based on NSA spying

Convicted terrorist wants case thrown out based on NSA spying
ASSOCIATED PRESS
3:37 p.m. February 3, 2006

COLUMBUS, Ohio – A lawyer for an Ohio trucker who pleaded guilty to plotting to destroy the Brooklyn Bridge asked a federal judge Friday to throw out the case on the grounds that the government illegally spied on him.

Iyman Faris' challenge is among the first to seek evidence of warrantless electronic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, a practice that began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Government officials have reportedly credited the practice with uncovering Faris' terrorist plot and several others.

A motion filed by Faris' attorney David Smith in U.S. District Court in Alexandria, Va., argues that investigators improperly obtained evidence against Faris and that his trial lawyer was ineffective.

Given the likelihood that Faris' phone conversations or e-mails had been electronically monitored, Faris' trial lawyer, Frederick Sinclair, should have asked for evidence of such surveillance, Smith said in the motion.

“Had he done so, the government would have been in a real bind and this would have enabled Faris to, at a minimum, negotiate a much more favorable plea bargain,” the motion said.

Messages seeking comment from Sinclair and the Justice Department were not immediately returned Friday.

Faris, 36, pleaded guilty in 2003 to conspiracy and aiding and abetting terrorism, and was sentenced to 20 years in prison. He has tried to withdraw his plea, saying everything in his agreement with prosecutors was false.

According to prosecutors, Faris traveled to Pakistan and Afghanistan, carrying out low-level missions for terrorists.

Prosecutors said he investigated, but ultimately ruled out, the possibility of using a gas cutter to burn through the Brooklyn Bridge's suspension cables, and that he received attack instructions from top terrorist leader Khalid Shaikh Mohammed for what they suggested might have been a second wave of terror attacks in New York and Washington.

At his sentencing, prosecutors acknowledged that federal agents were led to Faris by a telephone call intercepted in another investigation.

Critics say the NSA's warrantless wiretaps are unconstitutional, contending that the government must go through a secretive court set up to approve surveillance warrants in the United States during national security investigations. The Bush administration has staunchly defended the practice, saying the agency only monitors calls in which one party is outside the United States and the call is believed to be related to terrorism.

A lawyer for Ali al-Timimi, an Islamic scholar in northern Virginia serving a life sentence for exhorting followers to fight U.S. troops, has said he plans to challenge his case based on NSA involvement. So has an attorney for Adham Amin Hassoun, a Lebanese-born Palestinian living in Florida who is charged with being part of a cell dedicated to supporting violent Muslim extremists.

http://www.signonsandiego.com/news/nation/terror/20060203-1537-domesticspying-challenge.html

QueEx · Feb 9, 2006

Re: Convicted terrorist wants case thrown out based on NSA spying

<center>Secret Court's Judges Were Warned
About NSA Spy Data
Program May Have Led Improperly to Warrants</center>

Washington Post
By Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, February 9, 2006; Page A01

Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush's eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.

The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly -- who, like her predecessor, Royce C. Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.

The two heads of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were the only judges in the country briefed by the administration on Bush's program. The president's secret order, issued sometime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allows the National Security Agency to monitor telephone calls and e-mails between people in the United States and contacts overseas.

James A. Baker, the counsel for intelligence policy in the Justice Department's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, discovered in 2004 that the government's failure to share information about its spying program had rendered useless a federal screening system that the judges had insisted upon to shield the court from tainted information. He alerted Kollar-Kotelly, who complained to Justice, prompting a temporary suspension of the NSA spying program, the sources said.

Yet another problem in a 2005 warrant application prompted Kollar-Kotelly to issue a stern order to government lawyers to create a better firewall or face more difficulty obtaining warrants.

The two judges' discomfort with the NSA spying program was previously known. But this new account reveals the depth of their doubts about its legality and their behind-the-scenes efforts to protect the court from what they considered potentially tainted evidence. The new accounts also show the degree to which Baker, a top intelligence expert at Justice, shared their reservations and aided the judges.

Both judges expressed concern to senior officials that the president's program, if ever made public and challenged in court, ran a significant risk of being declared unconstitutional, according to sources familiar with their actions. Yet the judges believed they did not have the authority to rule on the president's power to order the eavesdropping, government sources said, and focused instead on protecting the integrity of the FISA process.

It was an odd position for the presiding judges of the FISA court, the secret panel created in 1978 in response to a public outcry over warrantless domestic spying by J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. The court's appointees, chosen by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, were generally veteran jurists with a pro-government bent, and their classified work is considered a powerful tool for catching spies and terrorists.

The FISA court secretly grants warrants for wiretaps, telephone record traces and physical searches to the Justice Department, whose lawyers must show they have probable cause to believe that a person in the United States is the agent of a foreign power or government. Between 1979 and 2004, it approved 18,748 warrants and rejected five.

Lamberth, the presiding judge at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks, and Kollar-Kotelly, who took over in May 2002, have repeatedly declined to comment on the program or their efforts to protect the FISA court. A Justice Department spokesman also declined to comment.

Both presiding judges agreed not to disclose the secret program to the 10 other FISA judges, who routinely handled some of the government's most highly classified secrets.

So early in 2002, the wary court and government lawyers developed a compromise. Any case in which the government listened to someone's calls without a warrant, and later developed information to seek a FISA warrant for that same suspect, was to be carefully "tagged" as having involved some NSA information. Generally, there were fewer than 10 cases each year, the sources said.

According to government officials familiar with the program, the presiding FISA judges insisted that information obtained through NSA surveillance not form the basis for obtaining a warrant and that, instead, independently gathered information provide the justification for FISA monitoring in such cases. They also insisted that these cases be presented only to the presiding judge.

Lamberth and Kollar-Kotelly derived significant comfort from the trust they had in Baker, the government's liaison to the FISA court. He was a stickler-for-rules career lawyer steeped in foreign intelligence law, and had served as deputy director of the office before becoming the chief in 2001.

Baker also had privately expressed hesitation to his bosses about whether the domestic spying program conflicted with the FISA law, a government official said. Justice higher-ups viewed him as suspect, but they also recognized that he had the judges' confidence and kept him in the pivotal position of obtaining warrants to spy on possible terrorists.

In 2004, Baker warned Kollar-Kotelly he had a problem with the tagging system. He had concluded that the NSA was not providing him with a complete and updated list of the people it had monitored, so Justice could not definitively know -- and could not alert the court -- if it was seeking FISA warrants for people already spied on, government officials said.

Kollar-Kotelly complained to then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, and her concerns led to a temporary suspension of the program. The judge required that high-level Justice officials certify the information was complete -- or face possible perjury charges.

In 2005, Baker learned that at least one government application for a FISA warrant probably contained NSA information that was not made clear to the judges, the government officials said. Some administration officials explained to Kollar-Kotelly that a low-level Defense Department employee unfamiliar with court disclosure procedures had made a mistake.

Kollar-Kotelly asked Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to ensure that wouldn't happen again, government officials said.

Baker declined to comment through an office assistant, who referred questions about his FISA work to a Justice Department spokesman. Pentagon spokeswoman Cynthia Smith also declined to comment and referred questions to Justice officials. Justice spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the department could not discuss its work with the FISA court.

"The department always strives to meet the highest ethical and professional standards in its appearances before any court, including the FISA court," Roehrkasse said. "This is especially true when department attorneys appear before a court on an ex parte basis, as is the case in the FISA court."

Shortly after the warrantless eavesdropping program began, then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden and Ashcroft made clear in private meetings that the president wanted to detect possible terrorist activity before another attack. They also made clear that, in such a broad hunt for suspicious patterns and activities, the government could never meet the FISA court's probable-cause requirement, government officials said.

So it confused the FISA court judges when, in their recent public defense of the program, Hayden and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales insisted that NSA analysts do not listen to calls unless they have a reasonable belief that someone with a known link to terrorism is on one end of the call. At a hearing Monday, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee that the "reasonable belief" standard is merely the "probable cause" standard by another name.

Several FISA judges said they also remain puzzled by Bush's assertion that the court was not "agile" or "nimble" enough to help catch terrorists. The court had routinely approved emergency wiretaps 72 hours after they had begun, as FISA allows, and the court's actions in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks suggested that its judges were hardly unsympathetic to the needs of their nation at war.

On Sept. 12, Bush asked new FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III in a Cabinet meeting whether it was safe for commercial air traffic to resume, according to senior government officials. Mueller had to acknowledge he could not give a reliable assessment.

Mueller and Justice officials went to Lamberth, who agreed that day to expedited procedures to issue FISA warrants for eavesdropping, a government official said.

The requirement for detailed paperwork was greatly eased, allowing the NSA to begin eavesdropping the next day on anyone suspected of a link to al Qaeda, every person who had ever been a member or supporter of militant Islamic groups, and everyone ever linked to a terrorist watch list in the United States or abroad, the official said.

In March 2002, the FBI and Pakistani police arrested Abu Zubaida, then the third-ranking al Qaeda operative, in Pakistan. When agents found Zubaida's laptop computer, a senior law enforcement source said, they discovered that the vast majority of people he had been communicating with were being monitored under FISA warrants or international spying efforts.

"Finally, we got some comfort" that surveillance efforts were working, said a government official familiar with Zubaida's arrest.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...6020802511.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

Greed · Mar 2, 2006

Defunct Saudi charity files NSA spying suit: WPost

Defunct Saudi charity files NSA spying suit: WPost
2 hours, 12 minutes ago

Documents cited in a federal lawsuit by a defunct Islamic charity may provide the first detailed evidence of U.S. residents being spied upon by U.S. President George W. Bush's warrantless domestic spying program, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

The newspaper said The Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a Saudi organization that once operated a U.S. branch in Oregon, filed a description of classified government records in a lawsuit on Tuesday and asked a judge to review the documents privately.

According to the newspaper, a source familiar with the records said they indicate the National Security Agency (NSA) intercepted conversations in 2004 between the foundation's director Suliman al-Buthe, who was in Saudi Arabia, and two U.S. citizens in Washington who were lawyers for the organization.

The lawsuit says government officials provided al-Buthe -- apparently by accident -- copies of conversations he had with the attorneys, the Post said.

Al-Haramain alleges that the government intercepted the conversations without court permission and in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act made spying on American citizens in the United States illegal without the approval of a special secret court.

President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, adopted after the September 11 attacks, allows the monitoring of international communications into and out of the United States of persons linked to al Qaeda or related terrorist groups.

In September 2004, the United States added the U.S. branch of Al-Haramain and al-Buthe to its terrorist list, citing ties to al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060302...ARZ.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTA5aHJvMDdwBHNlYwN5bmNhdA--

GET YOU HOT · Mar 3, 2006

VegasGuy said:
Who believes any of this shit is brand new only after the 9/11 attack? I hate it when some prick wants to sell a new book he just wrote, which if you don't know is the reason this shit is in the news all of a sudden, just to get everybody all pumped up, pissed off to run to the polls to vote next year.

Ask any playa if he believed the feds haven't been doing this shit all along even before 9/11. If they tell you it hasn't been going on they lying there asses off. Fuck these politician thug ass republicrats in Washington. They want to run this Orsen Wells bullshit to get you to vote and for me this is no reason to re-elect these punks. How is this bullshit spy novel shit going to improve anything? Fuck em, they need a new game because this one doesn't move me.

-VG

INDEED, THE NSA HAS BEEN SPYING ON ALOT OF PEOPLE FOR A LONG TIME NOW...KEYWORD: PROJECT SHAMROCK & PROJECT MINARET, HAD BEEN APPROVED & IN EFFECT,

LONG BEFORE BUSH!

GET YOU HOT · Mar 4, 2006

Although, there are 2 seperate issues raised at this link, the first applies to NSA spying... Total Information Awareness, now known as "BASKETBALL" :hmm:

http://play.rbn.com/?url=demnow/demnow/demand/2006/feb/video/dnB20060227a.rm&proto=rtsp&start=10:50

:devil:

QueEx · Mar 11, 2006

[frame]http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20060309/index.htm[/frame]

GET YOU HOT · Apr 1, 2006

Senate Panel Declines Domestic Survaillance Probe :angry:

[RM]http://www.npr.org/dmg/dmg.php?prgCode=ME&showDate=08-mar-2006&segNum=1&NPRMediaPref=RM&getUnderwriting=1[/RM]

Greed · May 11, 2006

NSA kept domestic calls data: report

NSA kept domestic calls data: report
1 hour, 34 minutes ago

The agency in charge of a domestic spying program has been secretly collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, including calls made within the United States, USA Today reported on Thursday.

It said the National Security Agency has been building up the database using records provided by three major phone companies -- AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. -- but that the program "does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations."

USA Today said its sources for the story were "people with direct knowledge of the arrangement," but it did not give their names or describe their affiliation.

The existence of an NSA eavesdropping program launched after the September 11 attacks was revealed in December.

Defending the controversial program, President Bush and his administration officials have said it aims to uncover links between international terrorists and their domestic collaborators and only targets communications between a person inside the United States and a person overseas.

But USA Today said that calls originating and terminating within the United States have not escaped the NSA's attention.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," the paper quoted one source as saying. The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within U.S. borders, it said the source added.

The NSA has "access to records of billions of domestic calls," USA Today said. Although customers' names and addresses are not being handed over, "the phone numbers the NSA collects can easily be cross-checked with other databases to obtain that information," it said.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, who headed the NSA from 1999 to 2005 and was nominated by Bush on Monday as director of the CIA, would have overseen the call-tracking program, the paper said.

Hayden, as well as NSA and White House officials, declined to discuss the program, USA Today said.

Among major U.S. telecommunications companies, only Qwest Communications International Inc. has refused to help the NSA program, the paper said.

Qwest, with 14 million customers in the Western United States, was "uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants," USA Today said.

It said the three companies cooperating with the NSA "provide local and wireless phone service to more than 200 million customers."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20060511/pl_nm/security_usa_phonecalls1_dc

African Herbsman · May 11, 2006

Re: NSA kept domestic calls data: report

living in a police state...

muckraker10021 · May 11, 2006

The ‘Bush Crime Family’ continues to display utter contempt and amoral petulance, for the Constitution of the United States, and the Senate & House which are this nations co-equal branches of government

…..But they reserve their highest level of despisement for the citizens of America, who they regard as nothing more than gravel beneath their feet, to be stepped on and be grinded perpetually into useless dust.

Despite the reality of a 69% domestic disapproval rate, and an 82% foreign disapproval rate, the Bush Junta continues to tell America & the World “FUCK YOU”. 

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[wm]http://movies.crooksandliars.com/news_Countdown_Turley_051006.wmv[/wm]

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<img src="http://www.chicagotribune.com/images/chinews/newlogo2.gif">

Gen. Hayden Earns His
`Bones' and a Nomination

"Hayden earned his bones by implementing the NSA operation despite clear federal law declaring such surveillance to be a criminal act. He can now join the rest of the made men of the Bush administration."


by Jonathan Turley
Published May 10, 2006

The nomination of four-star Gen. Michael Hayden as the next CIA director shocked many people, including civil libertarians who associate Hayden with the controversial National Security Agency domestic spying program--an operation viewed as criminal by many experts. Even Republican senators expressed dismay this week at yet another controversial nomination by President Bush.

Despite the vocal surprise, Hayden's nomination is actually all too predictable. While alleged violations of federal laws have long been viewed as a negative resume item, it doesn't appear to be a problem for Bush's inner circle.

From his very first appointments, Bush appeared inclined toward officials who appear willing to treat the law as a mere technicality.

Some people were taken aback when, in his first term, Bush filled his administration with top officials accused of criminal and unethical conduct during his father's term and the Reagan administration. They included people like Elliott Abrams to oversee Middle Eastern affairs, despite his pleading guilty to a federal crime during the Reagan years. There also was Otto Reich, accused of running an unlawful domestic propaganda operation for Reagan; he was tapped as a special envoy. Bush also recruited Adm. John Poindexter, convicted of various federal crimes stemming from his service as national security adviser to Reagan. (The convictions were later overturned.) Poindexter was chosen by Bush to head the controversial Total Information Awareness data-mining project, an operation viewed as so dangerous to privacy and civil liberties that it was formally stopped by Congress.

There was also John Negroponte, accused of shielding human-rights violations and unlawfully supporting the Nicaraguan contras. After Negroponte's stint as ambassador to the United Nations, Bush made him the director of national intelligence.

Likewise, then-White House Counsel Alberto Gonzales was accused of signing the infamous "torture memo" that not only approved of forms of torture but also suggested that the president could violate federal law. Gonzales was later made attorney general.

Other officials involved in controversial programs were given other rewards, ranging from judgeships to presidential honors. Former CIA Director George Tenet was accused of the most serious intelligence blunders of the century. It was Tenet who gave Bush the excuse to invade Iraq by stating that the presence of weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk." Bush gave Tenet the prestigious Presidential Medal of Freedom. Now comes Hayden, accused of being the architect of the administration's domestic spying program where, without securing a court order, the Bush administration unilaterally engaged in surveillance of phone calls and e-mails between people in the U.S. and people abroad who are thought to have Al Qaeda connections.

Congress is still debating how to deal with the NSA program, and Republicans and Democrats have denounced the operation. Now Hayden is about to be elevated to one of the two highest intelligence positions in government, with the controversial Negroponte holding the other office.

There appears to be more here than simply a tendency of Bush's to hang around with a bad group of kids. Bush himself has long displayed an equally dismissive view of the law, claiming the right to violate federal law when he considers it to be in the nation's interest.

As these shadowy figures multiply, you can understand why civil libertarians increasingly see the White House like a gathering at Tony Soprano's Bada Bing! club. In Soprano's world, you cannot become a "made man" unless you first earn your bones by "doing" some guy or showing blind loyalty. Only when you have proven unquestioning loyalty does Tony "open the books" for a new guy.

Hayden earned his bones by implementing the NSA operation despite clear federal law declaring such surveillance to be a criminal act. He can now join the rest of the made men of the Bush administration.

----------

Jonathan Turley is a law professor at George Washington University. He testified in Congress against the NSA domestic surveillance program.

Greed · May 11, 2006

the democrats should be ashamed of themselves

i dont blame you muckraker, you're just a victim.

they know you're more concerned with being mad than being right and they take advantage of that with no remorse.

they dont deserve you as a loyal blind base.

i just cant wait until this comes out in the hearings and you think of a new way to ignore it. good times are coming.

WALLACE: Let me ask you about a different side of this. Officials at the very top of the Bush administration say that when they came up with this program, they suggested amending the law, and it was congressional leaders who said no, they didn't think that was a good idea.

You were in every one of those congressional briefings. Is that true?

HAYDEN: I don't want to get too much into detail. I mean, obviously, these meetings were private. But I think the attorney general has said, and I will second it, that the general body of thought in the meeting, the general agreement, consensus, in the meeting — that it would be very difficult to change the law and not reveal aspects of the program that were protecting America — in other words, revealing our tactics, techniques and procedures to our enemies.

WALLACE: But in fact, and I just want to press the point without breaking any confidences here...

HAYDEN: Sure.

WALLACE: ... is it true, as top administration officials have told me, that they raised the issue of amending the law and it was congressional leaders who said no, because it would end up disclosing the existence of the program?

HAYDEN: Chris, I don't remember the specific dialogue. The question of amending came up. And there was agreement among congressional leaders that that would be very difficult to do without revealing too much about the program.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,183844,00.html

muckraker10021 · May 12, 2006

The underlying vitality of our very young American experience with democracy is transparency. Transparency is an anathema to the bush Neo-Con cabal that has seized executive branch power. Utilizing arrogant intimidation and the cudgel of raw political power, the bush white house has cowed their majority party into submission. No opposition is allowed to Cheney-Rove-Bush, none. In the House, Tom Delay 'hammered' the RepubliKlan into submission. In the Senate majority leader Bill Frist, Pat Roberts and other key senators laid prostrate before any policy Cheney-Rove-Bush, set forth.

As far as the Democrats are concerned the Cheney-Rove-Bush strategy is to pick off a few sycophants like Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, and Fuck all the others.
Under the bush junta for the first time in US history when a bill goes to conference committee, the minority party (the democrats) were not included at the meeting. They might as well be eunuchs. Utilizing this strategy the Cheney-Rove-Bush white house effectively ran the all three branches of the United States government.

Now specifically to the illegal NSA wiretapping. Let's be clear about this. The Cheney-Rove-Bush white house knows that they are breaking the law. All of the sophistry and dissembling that we'll hear from the white house and General Hayden during his confirmation hearings will just be elite bull shit. The real test of this entire illegal NSA wiretapping will occur as several cases wind their way through the Federal court system. That reality that the white house committed a felony when it bypassed the FISA court is bullet proof. Their legal strategy is to claim inherent powers in the constitution under war powers blah, blah, blah. The congress or the senate could cut-to-the-chase tomorrow, by issuing a subpoenas for the names of everyone who was wiretapped without approval of a FISA court but, with both houses in RepubliKlan control the Cheney-Rove-Bush white house has been able to smack-down such a request. Someone mentioned John Kerry & others being spied on as being a farfetched idea. We won't know until the full list of non-FISA court approved taps is revealed. This is one of the myriad of reasons why the RepubliKlan is scared to death of the possibility of losing control of one or both chambers of congress. Despite an inept, cowardly Democratic establishment leadership, it looks like one of the houses will slip from RepubliKlan grasp.

The other war that the Cheney-Rove-Bush has been waging has been against the bedrock of our very young American experience with democracy, the professional civil servants who are all sworn to uphold the Constitution, not whoever happens to be their immediate boss. Under Cheney-Rove-Bush any professional civil servant who objects to their shredding of the constitution has been removed and replaced with a partisan hack.
I could delineate how this process has worked from the departments of State, Defense, Treasury, EPA etc. but I'll concentrate on the Justice Department since that's where the battle over this illegal NSA wiretapping occurred. As I said earlier The Cheney-Rove-Bush white house knows that they are breaking the law. They went to then attorney general Ashcroft, while he was in a hospital bed, to get him to authorize their breaking-of-the-law, he refused. Put down the RepubliKlan "talking points" and Read the article below if you really want to understand how the "Bush Crime Family" maneuvers when it wants to break the law. The question that remains unanswered is whether or not they will be held accountable. Will members of their own party finally stand up to Cheney-Rove-Bush and say "Not In My Country".


<a target="_blank" href="http://www.newsweek.com/id/57101">
<img src="http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Sections/Newsweek/Components/Art/Article_bantops/nw_a_btop_politics_m10.gif">
Palace Revolt 
They were loyal conservatives, and Bush appointees.
They fought a quiet battle to rein in the president's power
in the war on terror.And they paid a price for it.
A NEWSWEEK investigation.</a>

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muckraker10021 · May 12, 2006

[wm]http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TSR-Cafferty-Dictatorship-5-11-06.wmv[/wm]

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Telcos Could Be Liable For Tens of Billions of Dollars For Illegally Turning Over Phone Records 

by Peter Swire and Judd Legum
May 11th 2006
 This morning, USA Today reported that three telecommunications companies – AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth – provided “<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm">phone call records of tens of millions of Americans</a>” to the National Security Agency. Such conduct appears to be illegal and could make the telco firms liable for tens of billions of dollars. Here’s why:
<blockquote>
 1. It violates the Stored Communications Act. The Stored Communications Act, <a href="http://www.cybercrime.gov/ECPA2701_2712.htm">Section 2703(c)</a>, provides exactly five exceptions that would permit a phone company to disclose to the government the list of calls to or from a subscriber: (i) a warrant; (ii) a court order; (iii) the customer’s consent; (iv) for telemarketing enforcement; or (v) by “administrative subpoena.” The first four clearly don’t apply. As for administrative subpoenas, where a government agency asks for records without court approval, there is a simple answer – the NSA has no administrative subpoena authority, and it is the NSA that reportedly got the phone records.
 2. The penalty for violating the Stored Communications Act is $1000 per individual violation. <a href="http://www.cybercrime.gov/ECPA2701_2712.htm">Section 2707</a> of the Stored Communications Act gives a private right of action to any telephone customer “aggrieved by any violation.” If the phone company acted with a “knowing or intentional state of mind,” then the customer wins actual harm, attorney’s fees, and “in no case shall a person entitled to recover receive less than the sum of $1,000.”
 (The phone companies might say they didn’t “know” they were violating the law. But <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm">USA Today</a> reports that Qwest’s lawyers knew about the legal risks, which are bright and clear in the statute book.)
 3. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act doesn’t get the telcos off the hook. According to USA Today, the <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm">NSA did not go to the FISA court</a> to get a court order. And Qwest is quoted as saying that the Attorney General would not certify that the request was lawful under FISA. So FISA provides no defense for the phone companies, either.
</blockquote>
 In other words, for every 1 million Americans whose records were turned over to NSA, the telcos could be liable for $1 billion in penalties, plus attorneys fees. You do the math.

GET YOU HOT · May 12, 2006

Let me know when the class action suit comes out so we can all get paid :yes:

muckraker10021 · May 12, 2006

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No Need For Congress, No Need For Courts

<img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10028/thumb.jpg" align="right">



by Glenn Greenwald
May 11th 2006

http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/


(Bio)
For the past 10 years, I was a litigator in NYC specializing in First Amendment challenges (including some of the highest-profile free speech cases over the past few years), civil rights cases, and corporate and security fraud matters. 

I just this morning read the obviously significant USA Today <a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm">article</a> detailing the fact that the NSA is maintaining a comprehensive data base of every call made by every American – both internationally and domestically – whether they have anything to do with terrorism or not, obviously all of this without warrants or oversight of any kind. I'm not going to pretend to have all of the legal issues figured out in two hours, and so I won't yet opine as to whether there are serious grounds for arguing either that this is legal or that it’s illegal.

But there is one highly significant, and revealing, item buried in the USA Today article regarding Qwest's refusal to cooperate with the NSA’s demands (and it heroic refusal to capitulate to the NSA’s intimidation tactics and threats) that it turn over its customers' calling data:
<blockquote>
The NSA, which needed Qwest's participation to completely cover the country, pushed back hard.

Trying to put pressure on Qwest, NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.
</blockquote>

This theme emerges again and again. We continuously hear that the Bush administration has legal authority to do anything the President orders. Claims that he is acting illegally are just frivolous and the by-product of Bush hatred. And yet, As I <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/05/avoiding-judicial-review.html">detailed here</a>, each and every time the administration has the opportunity to obtain an adjudication of the legality of its conduct from a federal court (which, unbeknownst to the administration, is the branch of our government which has the authority and responsibility to interpret and apply the law), it does everything possible to avoid that adjudication.

This continuous evasion of judicial review by the administration is much more serious and disturbing than has been discussed and realized. By proclaiming the power to ignore Congressional law and to do whatever it wants in the area of national security, it is seizing the powers of the legislative branch. But by blocking courts from ruling on the multiple claims of illegality which have been made against it, the administration is essentially seizing the judicial power as well. It becomes the creator, the executor, and the interpreter of the law. And with that, the powers of all three branches become consolidated in The President, the single greatest nightmare of the founders. As <a href="http://www.constitution.org/fed/federa47.htm">Madison warned</a> in Federalist 47:
<blockquote>
From these facts, by which Montesquieu was guided, it may clearly be inferred that, in saying "There can be no liberty where the legislative and executive powers are united in the same person, or body of magistrates," or, "if the power of judging be not separated from the legislative and executive powers," he did not mean that these departments ought to have no partial agency in, or no control over, the acts of each other.

His meaning, as his own words import, and still more conclusively as illustrated by the example in his eye, can amount to no more than this, that where the whole power of one department is exercised by the same hands which possess the whole power of another department, the fundamental principles of a free constitution are subverted. This would have been the case in the constitution examined by him, if the king, who is the sole executive magistrate, had possessed also the complete legislative power, or the supreme administration of justice; or if the entire legislative body had possessed the supreme judiciary, or the supreme executive authority.
</blockquote>

The attribute which most singularly defines this administration is its insistence that our Government is based on unilateral and unreviewed Presidential Decree. The President directs the telecom companies to turn over this information and they obey. That’s how our Government works, as they see it. And if the telecom companies are concerned about their legal liability as a result of laws which strongly suggest that they are acting illegally if they comply with the President’s Decree, and thus request a judicial ruling first, that request, too, is denied. There is no need for a judicial ruling once the President speaks. What he orders is, by definition, legal, and nobody can say otherwise, including courts.

Amazingly, again and again, they don't even want their own Justice Department to know what they are doing because they are afraid that DoJ lawyers will tell them that it is against the law. They don't want to hear that it is against the law. As USA Today reported: "For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events." They know very well that their conduct might be, and in some cases that it is definitely is, illegal, but they are purposely avoiding having the DoJ be able to opine on the legality of their behavior.

That is the same inherently corrupt motive which led the NSA <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Domestic-Spying.html?_r=1&oref=slogin">to refuse to give</a> DoJ lawyers security clearance to enable the DoJ to investigate whether their lawyers acted unethically in connection with the NSA illegal eavesdropping program. As intended, that refusal caused the DoJ to shut down its investigation. As Jack Balkin <a href="http://balkin.blogspot.com/2006/05/tales-from-unitary-executive-nsa-and.html">notes</a> about that cover-up, also disclosed yesterday:
<blockquote>
Note the irony: While private phone company employees at AT&T and other corporations must have sufficient security clearances to know what is going on in the NSA program- because they are helping to run it-- the Justice Department's own ethics lawyers do not. It's a convenient way to forestall any investigation into wrongdoing.</blockquote>

They desperately avoid not only a ruling from a court as to whether their conduct is legal, but also opinions from their own Justice Department lawyers, likely driven by the fact that many DoJ lawyers opined that the NSA program was illegal -- something they do not want to ever hear again.

Ultimately, I think that the impact of this disclosure may be more political than legal. I think most Americans will find it simply creepy that the Administration bullied the telecom companies to provide them with data to enable it to keep track of every single call every American ever makes, no matter who they are.

But beyond that, when the NSA scandal first broke, the administration’s <a href="http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2005/12/administrations-very-bad-people.html">principal political defense</a> was to continuously assure Americans that they were eavesdropping only on international calls, not domestic calls. Many, many Americans do not ever make any international calls, and it was an implicit way of assuring the heartland that the vast bulk of the calls they make – to their Aunt Millie, to arrange Little League practice, to cite just a few of the administration’s condescending examples – were not the type of calls being intercepted. The only ones with anything to worry about were the weird and suspect Americans who call overseas to weird and suspect countries. If you’re not calling Pakistan or Iran, the Government has no interest in what you’re doing.

That has all changed. We now learn that when Americans call their Aunt Millie, or their girlfriend, or their psychiatrist, or their drug counselor, or their priest or rabbi, or their lawyer, or anyone and everyone else, the Government is very interested. In fact, they are so interested that they make note of it and keep it forever, so that at any time, anyone in the Government can look at a record of every single person whom every single American ever called or from whom they received a call. It doesn't take a professional privacy advocate to find that creepy, invasive, dangerous and un-American.

UPDATE: Two additional points worth making: (1) One of the disturbing aspects of the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program was that it was seen by many intelligence professionals as a radical departure from the <a href="http://www.pbs.org/now/politics/intellservices.html">agency's tradition</a> of not turning its spying capabilities on the American public domestically. The program disclosed yesterday decimates that tradition by many magnitudes. This is a program where the NSA is collecting data on the exclusively domestic communications of Americans, communicating with one another, on U.S. soil -- exactly what the NSA was supposed to never do.

(2) The legal and constitutional issues, especially at first glance and without doing research, reading cases, etc., are complicated and, in the first instance, difficult to assess, at least for me. That was also obviously true for Qwest's lawyers, which is why they requested a court ruling and, when the administration refused, requested an advisory opinion from DoJ.

But not everyone is burdened by these difficulties. Magically, <a href="http://confederateyankee.mu.nu/archives/176165.php">hordes</a> of <a href="http://www.rightwinged.com/2006/05/todays_bogusmanufactured_nsa_a.html">brilliant</a> pro-Bush <a href="http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005177.htm">legal scholars</a> have been able to determine instantaneously -- as in, within hours of the program's disclosure -- that the program is <a href="http://media.nationalreview.com/post/?q=YjI1ZWM5NmQ4N2ZlMmEwMjExODdjYWExZTgxNGM5MTY=">completely legal</a> and constitutional (just like so many of them were able confidently to opine within hours of the disclosure of the warrantless eavesdropping program that it, too, was perfectly legal and constitutional). Having said that, there are some generally <a href="http://justoneminute.typepad.com/main/2006/05/usa_today_on_th.html">pro-Bush</a> <a href="http://www.theamericanmind.com/mt-test/archives/018379.html">bloggers</a> expressing <a href="http://www.qando.net/details.aspx?entry=3850">serious skepticism</a> over the legality and/or advisability of this program.



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GET YOU HOT · May 12, 2006

Cafferty Commentary....Spector, NSA spying

[WM]http://movies.crooksandliars.com/TSR-Cafferty-Dictatorship-5-11-06.wmv[/WM]

Greed · May 13, 2006

Tracking Patterns in Database of Millions of Calls

as usual, the only bunch of liberals that can look at things rationally is NPR.

Tracking Patterns in Database of Millions of Calls
by Robert Siegel

All Things Considered, May 11, 2006 · Tracking and analyzing domestic phone calls would require pattern-recognition software and intense traffic analysis, two of the newest tools in the intelligence trade.

Steven M. Bellovin, computer science professor at Columbia University, says the National Security Agency would have to use such techniques to analyze the huge databases turned over to the NSA by phone companies.

Robert Siegel talks with Bellovin about the agency's efforts. 4 min 6 sec

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5399270

muckraker10021 · May 13, 2006

The only people willing to overlook the Bush Junta’s naked attempt to shred the US constitution & grab illegal dictatorial power over The United States are:

The goosestepping corporatist elite, for whom the bush junta has been a - -$$$$-Financial-$$$ Gold Mine

The actual ‘made’ members of the Bush crime family (Negroponte, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Elliot Abrams, etc.)

And the bewildered “faith-based” rabble, who would follow their “Dear Leader” on a march over a 1,000 foot cliff

The rest of us in the 71%     click the link below
Wall Street Journal Poll - BUSH FALLS TO NEW LOW 29%
including principled conservatives such As Scarborough and Gingrich (see below) aren’t buying the “Bush Junta’s” lies , deception and criminality.



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GET YOU HOT · May 13, 2006

I'm thinking that the American public is so brainwashed, and media eating out of Bush's hands that they overlook channels like C-Span that have live feeds of actual decison making. Even and still, Bush do what he pleases because he has overridden the most basic motions to Impeach him. He just overrode 750 some laws alone, last week! Right under the public's view, did you hear bout that one?

Greed · May 13, 2006

dont worry i know you didnt listen to what i posted.

NPR didnt agree with bush, you could hear the venom in their voices, but at least they will clearly explain the government's position before they spit all over it.

NPR actually knows what they are against.

most of you dirty libs think bush is listening to tens of millions of conversation then proceed to proclaim that you're all living in nazi germany.

muckraker10021 · May 13, 2006

I heard the NPR interview with Professor Steven M. Bellovin. I’ve heard him and other technologist on other media outlets. What is your point? He and others explain the nascent technology of data mining. The explanation of how the technology could work is irrelevant to the issue of the illegality of the bush junta gathering data on virtually every American.

Stop bull-shitting yourself. Let me bring you into the 21st century.
The email and phone calls of serious professional terrorist groups like Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and others are as impenetrable as the email and phone calls of Fortune 100 corporate officers –IF THEY DON’T WANT ANYONE TO LISTEN & READ WHAT THEY ARE SAYING-

Do some research & reading on corporate espionage. Read CEO Magazine, or Institutional Investor. Corporate espionage and Counter-corporate espionage are multi-million dollar businesses. Look at the advertisements in the back of these type of magazines, for encryption software, 2048 bit keys etc. Read the cover article about Bill Gates in an issue, last year of Fortune magazine, if I have time I’ll post it. Gates says that every email he writes is looked over by 30 Lawyers, and then is encrypted with a proprietary key that you could probably crack by the year 2010. 

As we know from the 911 report, FBI computers can’t even do more than a 2 word GOOGLE search. The CIA, DIA, NSA etc. were not in much better shape. You think they are going to intercept and break Phillip Morris’ or Hezbollah’s 2048 bit key. Get real!

Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program” has nothing to do with catching terrorist. It’s about illegally, without FISA court, or US Justice Department sanction, spying on ordinary Americans, who don’t know shit about encryption software and 2048 bit keys.

Use the neurons in your brain. The Bush Junta will not allow it’s own Gonzalez led Justice Department , to be privy to the intimate details of their data gathering and spying. Why? Because except for loyal toady Gonzalez & a few others, "The Professionals", the long term career lawyers who work their and respect the US Constitution, would not allow what the bush junta is doing.

No the issue is not the technology. Wake Up.

The articles below will Illuminate this reality further

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This Time, It Really Is Orwellian



By Robert Parry

May 12, 2006
http://www.consortiumnews.com/index.html

 Given George W. Bush’s history of <a href="http://www.consortiumnews.com/2006/041306.html">outright lying</a>, especially on national security matters, it may seem silly to dissect his words about the new disclosure that his administration has collected phone records of some 200 million Americans.
 But Bush made two parse-able points in reacting to USA Today’s story about the National Security Agency building a vast database of domestic phone calls. “We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans,” Bush said, adding “the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.”
 In his brief remarks, however, Bush didn’t define what he meant by “ordinary Americans” nor whether the data-mining might cover, say, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, just not “millions.”
 For instance, would a journalist covering national security be regarded as an “ordinary American”? What about a political opponent or an anti-war activist who has criticized administration policies in the Middle East? Such “unordinary” people might number in the tens of thousands, but perhaps not into the millions.
 Also, isn’t it reasonable to suspect that the Bush administration would be tempted to tap into its huge database to, say, check on who might have been calling reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker – or now USA Today – where significant national security stories have been published?
 Or during Campaign 2004, wouldn’t the White House political apparatchiks have been eager to know whether, say, Sen. John Kerry had been in touch with foreign officials who might have confided that they were worried about Bush gaining a second term?
 Or what about calls to and from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald while he investigates a White House leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer married to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an Iraq War critic?
 What if one of these “unordinary” Americans had placed a lot of calls to an illicit lover or a psychiatrist? Wouldn’t Bush’s aggressive political operatives know just how to make the most of such information?
 Paranoia?
 While such concerns might seem paranoid to some observers, Bush has blurred his political fortunes with the national interest before, such as his authorization to Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff in mid-2003 to put out classified material on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction to undercut Ambassador Wilson.
 Though Plame was an undercover CIA officer working on sensitive WMD investigations, her classified identity was bandied about – and ultimately disclosed – by the likes of White House political adviser Karl Rove, who had no real “need to know” a discrete intelligence secret that sensitive.
 In a court filing on April 5, 2006, Fitzgerald said his investigation uncovered government documents that “could be characterized as reflecting a plan to discredit, punish, or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson” because of his criticism of the administration’s handling of the evidence on Iraq’s alleged pursuit of enriched uranium in Africa.
 There are also historical reasons to suspect that the administration might be inclined to use its huge database against its critics. Some senior administration officials, such as Cheney, held key government jobs in the 1970s when one of the goals of spying on Americans was to ferret out suspected links between U.S. dissidents and foreign powers.
 It had become an article of faith for some government officials that the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War protests must have been orchestrated and financed by some international enemy of the United States.
 Some of the excesses in those investigations, such as the bugging of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and break-ins targeting Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, led to new laws in the 1970s limiting the power of the Executive.
 For instance, in 1978, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which tried to balance the government’s legitimate interest in tracking foreign agents and the citizens’ constitutional right of protection against unreasonable searches.
 However, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush asserted “plenary” – or unlimited – powers as Commander in Chief and brushed aside legal requirements that the government obtain a warrant through a special FISA court before eavesdropping on phone calls inside the United States.
 Cover-up
 After making that decision, Bush lied to conceal what he had done. On April 20, 2004, he <a href="http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2004/04/20040420-2.html">told</a> a crowd in Buffalo, N.Y., that warrants were still required for all wiretaps.
 “By the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires – a wiretap requires a court order,” Bush said. “Nothing has changed, by the way. When we’re talking about chasing down terrorists, we’re talking about getting a court order before we do so.”
 After the New York Times disclosed the warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005, Bush continued to misrepresent the program, calling it “limited” to “taking known al-Qaeda numbers – numbers from known al-Qaeda people – and just trying to find out why the phone calls are being made.”
 In his folksy style, he told an audience in Louisville, Kentucky, on Jan. 11, 2006, that “it seems like to me that if somebody is talking to al-Qaeda, we want to know why.”
 But the program that Bush described could easily have been accomplished through warrants under the FISA law, which lets the government wiretap for 72 hours before going to a secret court for a warrant.
 Even before the USA Today disclosure on May 11, 2006, it was clear that Bush’s spying program was much larger than he had let on. Indeed, the operation was reportedly big enough to generate thousands of tips each month, which were passed on to the FBI.
 “But virtually all of [the tips], current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans,” the New York Times reported. “FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. … Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.” [NYT, Jan. 17, 2006]
 Also, undermining Bush’s claims about the limited nature of the NSA’s activities is why the administration would need to possess the complete phone records of the 200 million customers of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth – if the government were only conducting what Bush and his aides have called a “targeted terrorist surveillance program.”
 (Qwest, a Colorado-based company with about 14 million customers, refused to turn over its records to the government because there was no court order, USA Today reported.)
 The stated goal of tracking phone numbers that had been called by al-Qaeda operatives could be easily done with warrants from the FISA court. There would be no need to compile every personal and business call made by 200 million Americans.
 “It’s the largest database ever assembled in the world,” one person told USA Today. The program’s goal is “to create a database of every call ever made” within the nation's borders, the person said. [<a href="http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/2006-05-10-nsa_x.htm">USA Today, May 11, 2006</a>]
 In describing Bush’s policies over the past several years, the word “Orwellian” has sometimes been overused. But a government decision to electronically warehouse the trillions of phone numbers called by its citizens over their lifetimes is the essence of George Orwell’s Big Brother nightmare.


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Bush's 'Big Brother' Blunder


by Robert Parry

May 13, 2006

http://www.consortiumnews.com/index.html

George W. Bush’s warrantless phone data collection may not only violate the U.S. Constitution but expend so much money and manpower that America is made less safe – by diverting resources away from more practical steps, like inspecting cargo and hiring translators.
 Yet, because the operation is wrapped in layers and layers of secrecy – based on the dubious argument that al-Qaeda might not realize it’s being spied on – the public doesn’t know how much the project costs, who’s getting contracts and whether it does any good.
 So far, however, what administration officials and computer experts have been willing to describe shouldn’t give Americans much confidence that their trade-off of Fourth Amendment freedoms for a little extra safety is a particularly good deal.
 The project’s designers say the National Security Agency’s electronic warehousing of trillions of phone records from calls made by some 200 million Americans is intended to seek out “patterns” from conversations involving alleged terrorists and then to apply the digital outline to the stockpiled records.
 That search, presumably, then spits out the phone numbers of other callers in the United States who fit into the “patterns.” These computer-generated tips then go to the FBI, which may question the suspects or use other investigative strategies.
 There are, however, logical flaws to this “Big Brother” computer scheme, especially the idea that the project is likely to discern many usable “patterns” of phone calls that if applied to the population would detect much suspicious activity.
 The 9/11 hijackers, for instance, made very few substantive calls about their plot, recognizing the risk of electronic surveillance and preferring face-to-face meetings as a way to avoid detection, according to the 9/11 Commission Report.
 Most of the calls cited by the report relate to personal matters, such as contacting friends or searching for housing. For instance, Flight 93 hijacker Ziad “Jarrah made hundreds of phone calls to [his girlfriend] and communicated frequently by e-mail,” the report said.
 On Jan. 20, 2001, Flight 173 hijacker Marwan al “Shehhi telephoned [his family in the United Arab Emirates] and said he was still living and studying in Hamburg,” Germany, the report said. The cell-phone records of 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta showed him calling about lodging in Florida on April 6, 9, 10 and 11, 2001.
 Meaningful communications about the 9/11 plot almost always occurred in direct meetings between participants, often in foreign countries. According to the 9/11 report, al-Qaeda leader Osama bin-Laden passed on his final instructions to Atta through intermediary Ramzi Banalshibh in Spain.
 Little Advantage
 So, even with the most expensive computers, it’s hard to see how a “social-network analysis” would likely lead to revealing a terrorist plot, unless the analysis was aided by effective human intelligence. In other words, old-fashioned intelligence-gathering, not new-fangled gimmicks, still would be the key to stopping terrorism.
 That seems to be the conclusion, too, of a Washington Post source who helped develop the technology.
 “Let’s say lots [of data] comes in and we don’t see anything interesting,” the source said. “Tomorrow we find out someone is communicating with a known terrorist. When you go back and look at the past data, there may be information that you missed. A pattern that was meaningless suddenly makes sense.”
 That information would then guide the NSA in selecting which telephones in the United States to bug, the Post reported. [Washington Post, May 12, 2006]
 But that example could be handled almost as easily while complying with constitutional requirements and getting a warrant. The case also presumes that there was a break in the investigation elsewhere that identified one of the contacts as a terrorist.
 Once there is “probable cause” of terrorist activity, a secret warrant could be obtained from a special court under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – or a wiretap could be started 72 hours before the request is made. The terrorist’s contacts then could be traced lawfully.
 According to other published accounts, Bush’s warrantless surveillance operation also has had negative consequences, sending FBI investigators off on too many wild goose chases. The warrantless wiretapping generated thousands of tips each month, the New York Times reported..
 “But virtually all of [the tips], current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans,” the Times wrote. “FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. … Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans’ privacy.” [NYT, Jan. 17, 2006]
 Perhaps the best that can be said for storing trillions of American phone records – as disclosed in a May 11 article by USA Today – is that the NSA could move a bit faster in checking out leads that might arise from identifying a terrorist.
 The FISA law allows the government to start immediate wiretaps, but the NSA would probably save some time in not having to get the data from the phone companies, since it would already be stored.
 To get that slight advantage in speed, however, large sums of money is spent, funds that might be better used for training counter-terrorism agents, hiring more translators and inspecting more than five percent of the cargo containers entering U.S. ports.
 ‘Big Brother’
 An even more troubling trade-off is the possibility that Bush or some future President could exploit the stockpiled data for political ends.
 The Founders enacted the Fourth Amendment because they considered freedom from unreasonable search and seizure an “unalienable” right of all citizens. The principle has been largely upheld over more than two centuries of American constitutional history, including moments of danger arguably far more extreme than what is presented today by a small band of al-Qaeda terrorists.
 But after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush quickly assembled a system of secrecy and snooping that may have been unprecedented in U.S. history. While some of Bush’s supporters cite prior suspensions of constitutional rights during the Civil War and World War II, those eras lacked today’s technology to pry into the most personal details of the lives of Americans.
 Even in the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Richard Nixon had relatively crude means for invading the privacy of Americans. Bugs were placed on phones; agents were infiltrated into political organizations; and burglars were sent into homes and offices searching for embarrassing or incriminating information.
 By contrast, today’s modern technology would let the government collect and analyze trillions of bytes of data from transactions and communications. Indeed, in 2002, the Bush administration did explore the creation of a system for capturing the electronic footprint of just about everybody as they move through everyday life.
 The concept, called Total Information Awareness, would have pulled together data on virtually every action that is connected to a computer: books borrowed from a library, fertilizer bought at a farm-supply outlet, movies rented at a video store, prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets reserved for travel, borders crossed, rooms rented at a motel, and hundreds of other examples.
 The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon’s top research and development arm, commissioned a comprehensive plan for electronic spying that would track everyone in the world who is part of the modern economy.
 “Transactional data” would be gleaned from electronic data on every kind of activity – “financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources, government, communications,” according to DARPA’s Information Awareness Office.
 The program would then cross-reference this data with the “biometric signatures of humans,” data collected on individuals’ faces, fingerprints, gaits and irises. The project sought to achieve what it called “total information awareness” as a way to fight the War on Terror.
 The Information Awareness Office even boasted a logo that looked like some kind of clip art from George Orwell’s 1984. The logo showed the Masonic symbol of an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid peering over the globe, with the slogan, “scientia est potentia,” Latin for “knowledge is power.”
 Heading the office was Ronald Reagan’s former national security adviser, John Poindexter, who had been a leading figure in the Iran-Contra scandal. Poindexter was convicted of five felonies in 1990, but his case later was overturned by a conservative-dominated three-judge appeals court panel.

After the Information Awareness Office came under public scrutiny in 2002, Poindexter resigned and the project was supposedly shut down. What’s now clear, however, is that elements of “total information awareness” survived in other forms.
 Indeed, given the disclosures about the NSA collecting the phone records of some 200 million Americans, a logical extension for the Bush administration would be to factor in more of Poindexter’s ideas.
 The argument could be made that if phone records were merged with credit card purchases and other electronic data, the chances of locating a terrorist actually might be increased. For Americans who put their personal safety over the nation’s “unalienable rights,” that might be trade-off they would find acceptable.
 But for Americans who believe that fear should never be allowed to trump liberty, a voluntary surrender of the freedoms that have defined the United States – in exchange for some questionable assurances of a little more safety – would be unthinkable.
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GET YOU HOT · May 13, 2006

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, accusing the White House of ''very blatant encroachment" on congressional authority, said yesterday he will hold an oversight hearing into President Bush's assertion that he has the power to bypass more than 750 laws enacted over the past five years.

''There is some need for some oversight by Congress to assert its authority here," Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said in an interview. ''What's the point of having a statute if . . . the president can cherry-pick what he likes and what he doesn't like?"

Specter said he plans to hold the hearing in June. He said he intends to call administration officials to explain and defend the president's claims of authority, as well to invite constitutional scholars to testify on whether Bush has overstepped the boundaries of his power.

SOURCE: http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com/2006/05/specter-to-hold-hearings-on-bushs.html

Greed · May 14, 2006

I heard the NPR interview with Professor Steven M. Bellovin. I’ve heard him and other technologist on other media outlets. What is your point? He and others explain the nascent technology of data mining. The explanation of how the technology could work is irrelevant to the issue of the illegality of the bush junta gathering data on virtually every American.

My point is that you didn’t really hear any of them if that’s all you got out of it. If those other interviews were like the NPR one then I’m sure they didn’t waste time explaining how the technology works to a bunch of laymans, they clearly explained that the data gathering isn’t for gratuitous reasons like you assert. There is a practical reason why the government would want to collect all this data, and your pure hatred of bush only allows you to focus on the made up political reasons. Now despite all this please let us know who declared this illegal?

You not liking bush doesn’t make something illegal, no matter how hard you wish and pray to whatever thing godless liberals pray to.

Stop bull-shitting yourself. Let me bring you into the 21st century.
The email and phone calls of serious professional terrorist groups like Hezbollah, al-Qaeda and others are as impenetrable as the email and phone calls of Fortune 100 corporate officers –IF THEY DON’T WANT ANYONE TO LISTEN & READ WHAT THEY ARE SAYING-

More evidence you have no idea what’s going on other than bush did something so you have to be against it. Who accused bush of listening to these tens of millions of Americans? Our only source for information says he doesn’t listen but instead, in a nutshell, look for who dials patterns of what numbers and whom those numbers in turn called.

And another thing think about what you’re saying. “La la la I’m the NSA and I’m collecting all this data, hey look some one out of a million people is using encrypted technology let me pay MORE attention to it.” Wouldn’t a terrorist want to be inconspicuous? But then again how dare I question your covert operations expertise.

Bush is not accused of listening to the conversation by anyone who cares about being right, which is why you have him bugging the Kerry campaign.

Do some research & reading on corporate espionage. Read CEO Magazine, or Institutional Investor. Corporate espionage and Counter-corporate espionage are multi-million dollar businesses. Look at the advertisements in the back of these type of magazines, for encryption software, 2048 bit keys etc. Read the cover article about Bill Gates in an issue, last year of Fortune magazine, if I have time I’ll post it. Gates says that every email he writes is looked over by 30 Lawyers, and then is encrypted with a proprietary key that you could probably crack by the year 2010. 

Again, what does this matter if the government isn’t accused of actually trying to listen to these phone calls. By accused I mean by anyone that matters.

Bush’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program” has nothing to do with catching terrorist. It’s about illegally, without FISA court, or US Justice Department sanction, spying on ordinary Americans, who don’t know shit about encryption software and 2048 bit keys.

Terrorist Surveillance Program and data mining program are 2 different things and who says either has nothing to do with what’s been publicly stated? Feingold who says lets censure bush for doing something while at the same time talk about how he should be doing it and continue to do it even after getting censured because it’s a vital program for our national security. Maybe Feinstein, whom you raved about while she was calling Dr. Rice a liar during her confirmation hearing, she was briefed on it and called it an impressive program. Let me guess once again the democrat have been tricked by bush into thinking it’s a necessary program.

Are these the people who you rave about sometimes and now you choose to totally ignore them?

Use the neurons in your brain. The Bush Junta will not allow it’s own Gonzalez led Justice Department , to be privy to the intimate details of their data gathering and spying. Why? Because except for loyal toady Gonzalez & a few others, "The Professionals", the long term career lawyers who work their and respect the US Constitution, would not allow what the bush junta is doing.

Once again since when is the NSA data mining consider new and since when is it illegal.

No the issue is not the technology. Wake Up.

The articles below will Illuminate this reality further

All in all, ever since I've been on this board I've felt so sorry for the democratic party that you’re their base. The fact that your outrageousness is what they have to feed is sad and explains a lot about the state of that party.

Your consistent hatred for bush makes you jump to the absolute worse case scenario, which never allows you to consider that bush is still the president, despite the mental pain it causes you, and he just might be trying to take his ultimate duty seriously by using the resources of this country’s intelligence service to actually try to find a terrorist. But no, in your mind he’s after Kerry. In your mind someone who matters has already declared this illegal.

muckraker10021 · May 14, 2006

<img src="http://mywebpage.netscape.com/camarilla10025/Cognitave+Dissonance.jpg">

You have a severe case of “Cognitive Dissonance”. :confused:

Facts are irrelevant to you.
Stay “In The Bunker” with your “Dear Leader” and the 29% who are still with him, stay there! Like the pathetic sycophant Harriet Myers, you also believe -“Bush is the smartest man she knows”. Stay “In The Bunker” with Harriet, Condi, Rush, Hannity, Savage, Beck, and the few others, who just like bush can’t find fault with anything he has done. Outside “The Bunker”, 71% of us recognize this criminal regime for what it is. Hate has nothing to do with it. Many hated Nixon, but they respected him for some of the things that he did. Bush is an INCOMPETENT Fool. You know it…but…that ‘cognitive dissonance’ has got you by the short hairs, so you refuse to acknowledge reality. By the way, as anyone who can read can see, nothing in your rant contravenes “those stubborn facts” which detail, the illegality & stupidity of the entire warrantless, No-FISA court approval, No-Justice department approval, surveillance programs. No matter what INCOMPETENT bush does you will never have the intellectual integrity, guts & balls to face reality and say as Newt Gingrich said “I’m not going to defend the indefensible”.


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Bush Lets NSA Spy on Callers Without Courts

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