Re-Hash Of An Old Story

 

Well excuse me for not being over-excited about a re-hash of an old story, the timing of which stinks to high heaven. The "hysterical drama queens on the left" are out in full force. Ahem

No sooner had the man who ran the National Security Agency for years been nominated to head the CIA than USA Today rushed out details of our efforts to use technical means to find terrorists using the phones. And no sooner had USA Today disclosed details of an apparent attempt by the National Security Agency to defend Americans from terrorists than the Democratic Party and its leading politicians and interest groups went on the attack. Not against the terrorists but against President Bush.[...]

Mrs. Clinton might want to have a talk with her husband. It was President Clinton who signed into law the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act of 1994, after it was passed in both the House and Senate by a voice vote. That law is an act "to make clear a telecommunications carrier's duty to cooperate in the interception of communications for law enforcement purposes, and for other purposes." The act made clear that a court order isn't the only lawful way of obtaining call information, saying, "A telecommunications carrier shall ensure that any interception of communications or access to call-identifying information effected within its switching premises can be activated only in accordance with a court order or other lawful authorization."

The law that President Clinton signed into law and that was approved by voice votes in 1994 by a Democrat-majority House and a Democrat-majority Senate not only made clear the phone companies' "duty" to cooperate, it authorized $500 million in taxpayer funds to reimburse the phone companies for equipment "enabling the government, pursuant to a court order or other lawful authorization, to access call-identifying information that is reasonably available to the carrier." Again, the law, by referring to "other lawful authorization," states clearly that a court order isn't the only form of lawful authorization possible.

It is hardly likely to get anyone's underwear in a twist unless there is a mass hysteria in progress to cancel your AT&T Bell South and Verizon accounts, although didn't you, um, authorize the NSA. The usual suspects are banging their old worn out drum about the "ACLU's lawsuit seeking an injunction against the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program", getting medieval on their own and screaming "If any Democrats start making noises about not investigating — because investigations are so unpleasant and upsetting and partisan — smack them fast and smack them hard", "The war on terror versus your privacy", "Ratings are down", "Bush lied people...", "Don't fear al-Qaeda, fear your President", after all this is preposterous, the President is advocating that the NSA should be allowed to do its job because "as a general matter every time sensitive intelligence is leaked it hurts our ability to defeat this enemy." Shocking:

This sent the nation into hysteria across the entire political spectrum -- a hysteria that should embarrass everyone, since this story hardly tells anyone anything new. This only repeats what James Risen and Eric Lichtblau reported on December 24th of last year in a follow-up to their December 16th revelation of the warrantless surveillance on international calls linked to terrorists. Risen and Lichtblau specifically reported on the data-mining exploits of the NSA at that time:

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

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation. ...

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

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

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

"Liberals are jumping up and down about USA Today's publication of another leak relating to the National Security Agency. It's considered a news flash that the NSA is collecting data on phone calls, with the cooperation of almost all of the major telecom companies, to look for suspicious patterns. This is a "data mining" project that does not involve listening in on conversations, but merely identifying phone numbers involved in possible terrorist communications."

There is nothing there that we do not already know. Michelle Malkin has an exclusive column in the NYPost this morning echoing the views of the majority of Americans who are in agreement. Really, get a life.

President Bush struck exactly the right notes yesterday. "So far we've been very successful in preventing another attack on our soil," Mr. Bush said. "As a general matter, every time sensitive intelligence is leaked, it hurts our ability to defeat this enemy. Our most important job is to protect the American people from another attack, and we will do so within the laws of our country." If he seemed calm about the latest disclosures, we can't help wondering whether it's because he recognizes that when Americans go to sleep at night, they're less worried about the "danger" that the government is looking for terrorists than they are about the danger that terrorists are looking for them.

This is the issue that the Democrats of the Howard-Dean-John-Kerry era just don't seem to prepared to credit. The Democrats who controlled the White House and both houses of Congress in 1994 showed signs of understanding the national security issues at stake here when they passed the law. Their understanding seems to have eroded since then. It can't be that they feel America faces less of a threat - if anything, the attacks of September 11, 2001, make the case for such programs even stronger. What's changed isn't the enemy threat but the party that now controls the White House. Which explains why Mrs. Clinton is "deeply disturbed" about activities legal under a law her husband signed.

Hugh Hewitt calls it Bush bashing dressed up as an assault on our civil liberties: "There's a reason why Chuck Schumer yesterday refused to criticize Michael Hayden on the grounds of the first NSA program, and why the general won't be widely opposed on this ground either: Both programs make obvious sense to the American people, and will continue to do so unless and until any actual abuse of innocent Americans is brought to light.

This is the folly of the hand-wringers. They have cried the Orwell's 1984 wolf too many times to get a rise out of the vast majority of Americans who recall that the enemy would still like to incinerate them and millions of their fellow citizens in their beds or behind their desks. Democrats are willing to be understood as believing this risk is secondary to the need not to have phone numbers collected in search of patterns that detect terrorist activity.  

Fine. Let the elections be fought over these two NSA programs. The Most Democrats oppose them.  Most Republicans don't.

Orin Kerr has a first take on the topic, and it is clear that no serious legal scholar is going to argue the Fourth Amendment on this one."

More @ Hugh Hewitt, Jeff Goldstein, Wizbang, Wizbang (2) JustOneMinute, Stop The ACLU, (2), Gateway Pundit, (2), Sigmund Carl and Alfred, Atlas Shrugs, Bill Faith, Radio Blogger, The Volokh Conspiracy, (2), Blogs for Bush, Sister Toldjah, (2) Flopping Aces, (2), A Blog For All, Dr. Sanity, Shrinkwrapped, Liberty & Justice, Decision '08, Decision '08 (2) Mark in Mexico, Hullabaloo, Scrapple Face, Betsy's Page, Balloon Juice, The Moderate Voice,  Big Lizards, The Strata-Sphere, (2), Zero Point, Riehl World View, The Washington Monthly, Hit and Run, PoliBlog, The American Thinker, QandO, Right Wing News, White House, News Hog, Right Winged, The Huffington Post, America Blog, Outside The Beltway, (2), Think Progress 

UPDATE MAY 13TH: There is a flurry of activity on the left scrambling for percentages and declaring the poll that does not suit their agenda under the banner of "polling hysteria", and of course the Newsweek one, with that huuuge majority, ahem, "a real poll". Yawn.

UPDATE MAY 14TH: Or better still let's rush out to do our own gallup poll, so as not to look like complete idiots with our, ahem, breaking story.

Comments

[Michael Galien]

Ron Jon Bovi Jovi;
I was about to post such a poll as well. Indeed; there are polls out there right now that the majority of American don't support the NSA program at all.

It is, in my opinion, a good thing that more and more conservatives are realizing that Bush does not at all represent American conservatism and that it is no longer the case that 'well the others are even worse'.

Conservative bloggers even, either withdraw their support from Bush or get battle fatigue. The Anchoress announced she is not going to post about politics for a while:
I’ve decided that if I’m going to keep blogging, I’m going to have to leave off writing or reading about politics for a little while, because it’s all making me sick.
[...]
I think some of us are just tired of all of the ugliness, on both sides.

Bruce Kesler writes about prof. Bainbridge, Ed Morrissey and Mark Tepscott:

Prof. Bainbridge explains in 'Bush Fatigue':
I don't really care one iota about "irredentist Democrats in Congress and their fifth-column in the media." I'm suffering from Bush fatigue brought on by the culmination of:

Failure to finish the 9/11 job by bringing Osama to justice
An unnecessary and unwise war of choice in Iraq, waged with inadequate resources and a degree of political interference unmatched since LBJ ran the Viet Nam War from the Oval Office, as forcefully demonstrated by the W$J's extended story on retired Maj. Gen. John Batiste
Runaway spending
(list goes on)

Mark Tapscott explains:
First, I am no longer convinced that it makes a sufficiently critical difference that the Bill Frists, Trent Lotts, Jerry Lewises and Bill Youngs are in control of Congress instead of Harry Reid, Teddy Kennedy or Nancy Pelosi.

The GOP majority has hiked spending and expanded entitlements at a rate that would astound LBJ. Congressional oversight has become a mere memory under the GOP's control for the past dozen years
[...]
Second, there is the fact of the congressional and national GOP's bad faith with conservatives for lo these many years. John N. Mitchell, Nixon's first Attorney General, reassured worried liberals that Nixon's conservative campaign rhetoric of 1968 was nothing more than talk.

"Watch what we do, not what we say," Mitchell cooed and thereby set a pattern that has been followed ever since, with only the Reagan years being an exception. This is why the GOP Establishment loves the conservatives voter on Election Day but the day after always forgets the promises made to get us to the polls.

Read them all; really worth the read.

Conservative bloggers have had it.

[Ron Jon Bovi Jovi]

For the record, I think y'all were a bit too quick on your "Americans support the NSA program" poll. Support for this program will just go down from here.

Newsweek Poll: Americans Wary of NSA Spying
Bush’s approval ratings hit new lows as controversy rages.

By David Jefferson
Updated: 11:59 a.m. ET May 13, 2006

May 13, 2006 - Has the Bush administration gone too far in expanding the powers of the President to fight terrorism? Yes, say a majority of Americans, following this week’s revelation that the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the September 11 terrorist attacks. According to the latest NEWSWEEK poll, 53 percent of Americans think the NSA’s surveillance program “goes too far in invading people’s privacy,” while 41 percent see it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism.

[masaccio]

I am a member of a neighborhood association formed by covenants in my deed. One of my rights is access by sidewalk to the part of this development that contains the pool.
Some of my neighbors wanted to get rid of the sidewalk, held a vote and won, by a 2/3 majority. Guess what. I did not agree, and I won, the sidewalk is still here.

The frightened people posting here can waive all the rights they want to. I don't agree, and guess what, the constitution and the laws of the country are here for me.

Waive away cowards. Your rights will be here when you wake up from your nightmare.

[Ghost Dansing]

""Pierce, the fact is you have absolutely no clue what Dubya and his boys are doing.""

"[laughing] Whereas you are privy to their innermost secrets?"

Of course, you missed the point: The whole point is that each new revelation throws into question the last round of lies...and because a Republican majority is in control of most branchs of government, nothing is investigated.

"There are great many things that the executive branch does without special oversight from Congress because -- hello -- the people primarily responsible for monitoring his performance are the voters."

Oh really...I've heard that myth before...thanks for sharing it.

Impeachment in the United States is an expressed power of the legislature which allows for formal charges to be brought against a high official of government for conduct committed in office. The trial or removal of an official is separate from the act of impeachment. Typically, the lower house of the legislature will impeach the official and the upper house will conduct the trial.

Article 1, Section 3, Clause 6--"The Senate shall have the sole power to try all impeachments. When sitting for that purpose, they shall be on oath or affirmation. When the President of the United States is tried, the Chief Justice shall preside: And no person shall be convicted without the concurrence of two thirds of the members present."

An impeachment and removal does not activate the double jeopardy clause of the Fifth Amendment. The ex-officer may face criminal indictments and trials for the same conduct that led to their impeachment and removal from office.

Let's just mock-up one possible impeachment article...just to see what it looks like. You'll note there is no sex scandal involved, so Republicans might loose interest:

In his conduct while President of the United States, George W. Bush, in violation of his constitutional oath faithfully to execute the office of President of the United States and, to the best of his ability, preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States, and in violation of his constitutional duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, has subverted the principles of democracy, by the following acts:

-Providing misinformation to the United Nations Security Council, Congress, and the American people overstating the offensive capabilities of Iraq, including weapons of mass destruction, as justification for military action against Iraq.

-Repeatedly manipulating the sentiments of the American people by erroneously linking Iraq with the terrorist attacks of September 11th by Al-Qaeda.

-Repeatedly claiming that satellite photos of sites in Iraq depicted factories for weapons of mass destruction in contradiction with the results of ground inspections by United Nations teams.

-Stating that "Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa" in his State of the Union Address after being told by the CIA that this was untrue and that the supporting documents were forged.

-Influencing, manipulating and distorting intelligence related to Iraq with the intention of using that intelligence to support his goal of invading Iraq.

-Repeatedly ordering the NSA to place illegal wiretaps on American citizens without a court order from FISA.

-Retaliating against whistle-blowers who try to point out errors in statements made by President Bush.

-Directing millions of dollars in government funds to companies associated with White House officials in no-bid contracts that pose serious conflicts of interest. One example is Halliburton, of which Richard Cheney was once CEO.

This can be done in a Liberal Democracy...Dictators (Deciders?) usually get away with many serious transgressions, as we well know.

[RunningRoach]

Ghost,

I don't usually comment on the comments of others BUT your case of BDR (Bush Derangement Syndrome) takes ignorance of recent (50 years) American history to new heights.

I think gringoman and Kenny Pierce have gone beyond the call in helping you to see reality with their well supported (factually) comments.

There are lots of ways to close that gap in your apparent lack of historical perspective.
As a starter you might try your local library or take advantage of the literally millions of sources on line. You might even pick up a copy of the Constituition. They are free, you know.

Start with that Democrat hero FDR interring about 100,000 Japanise Americans at the start of WWII. No warrants, no due process...AND the SCOTUS upheld what he did as constitional!!

Then work your way through Korea, the JFK/Cuba debacle, Viet Nam and the great leadership of LBJ,(I was there.) and Nixon's antics. Then take a pause in 1979 when SCOTUS ruled in favor of the government doing the same type of telephone record collection that NSA is conducting now.(I don't have the case caption handy, but I am sure you can find it if you take the time to look.) BTW, This new filing on Tuesday by the ACLU et al is a canard.

Then carefully consider the Clinton presidency and the "untested" (by the courts) nonsense he pulled. (Forget Monica and consider China, North Korea, Kosovo, FBI files etc. etc.)

There is so much more to learn, on say, The History Channel, rather than CNN, ( "All the news that's worthy of bull shitting about.) Kos, Democrat Underground, MoveOn and so many other manic depressive sites of other BDR sufferers.

Get Well Soon,

JCC

[Kenny Pierce]

"Pierce, the fact is you have absolutely no clue what Dubya and his boys are doing."

[laughing] Whereas you are privy to their innermost secrets?

What oversight, pray tell, do you wish to impose upon Howard Dean in his own datamining exercise? "Oversight" has become the no-thought-required word for Bush-haters to use just as "stare decisis" was a principle that liberals had absolutely no use for right up until the point at which it sank in on them that courts would not always be dominated by liberals -- at which point it became more important to know that a judge would respect "stare decisis" than that he could read (not that Blackmun was qualified on either count). There are great many things that the executive branch does without special oversight from Congress because -- hello -- the people primarily responsible for monitoring his performance are the voters. If you say that a particular set of actions requires Congressional oversight, and you mean to say with a straight face that this requirement is derived from the Constitution, then you implicitly claim to know enough about the nature of the action to know how to classify it. And "Democrats didn't come up with the program and think they might be able to use it as an excuse to attack a man whose name they can't pronounce without spittle's coming out of the corner of their mouth" is not something that, to my knowledge, the Constitution recognizes as sufficient cause to require oversight.

By the way, since you apparently believe that you know in such detail what it is that Dubya and the boys are doing, I can't imagine why you didn't respond to my original quest for a link.

You do that by typing < and then an a and then href=" and then the URL and then ">, and then you put in whatever words you want to be highlighted so that people can click on them and go to the source of your "facts", and then you type another < and \a>. So now that you know how, I'll expect to see a link right away to show us somebody who Knows The Nefarious Truth About What Dubya And The Boys Are Doing.

[Ghost Dansing]

Pierce, the fact is you have absolutely no clue what Dubya and his boys are doing. The whole point is that each new revelation throws into question the last round of lies...and because a Republican majority is in control of most branchs of government, nothing is investigated.

Some here are apparently comfortable with monarchies, strong-man governments and kleptocracies of various manifestations that abide in other areas of the world. However, this is America, and Americans should not be comfortable with that.

I'll reiterate:

The issue is not whether or not the government should monitor domestic telephone call records.

The issue is whether or not the Executive branch should be able to do this without oversight. That is what this Republican administration has been consistently challenging, and with little opposition from the Republican majorities in Congress.

One of the major elements of the Constitution is the system of checks and balances. To say the Executive branch can do whatever it deems necessary, in secrecy and without oversight by the other two branches of government is a mockery of not only the words, but also the spirit of the Constitution.

The Framers were well aware of consequences of an unchecked and unquestioned executive (another George, in fact, King George III).

Republicans apparently, have forgotten...apparently sanguine about a political philosophy and policies that are totalitarian; Communist or Fascist in nature.

Oh, and the "outnumbered" issue? You're kidding right? Entire totalitarian regimes have had "majority" backing, sometimes even undoing Liberal Democracies...it is one of the pitfalls of Liberal Democracies in that it has potentially within its structure the ability to undermine itself. That is why simple "voting" and simple "majority rule" was not a hallmark of the revolutionary American ideal. Simple "majority" thinking can always find somebody or some group to whom it wishes to deny Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness. When the Constitutional goal is to ensure that ALL individuals are equal under the Law, the bar is set rather high and the fact that this has never been fully achieved is obvious; thus revealing the lie that "conservatism" is even a legitimate political philosophy within this context. American "conservatism" is nothing but a history of who they wanted to exclude in each period of this Nation's evolution.

I have every faith that the American People will eventually flush the Bushites and Bushism (modern Republicanism) down the toilet.

The next manifestation of the Republican Party, in fact, is well on the road to a moderate position and the ousting of its intellectually inbred ideology.

[gringoman]

Kenny Pierce,

Unfortunately for Ghost Dancing, he's out-numbered. And not only by you and me. According to the latest polls, apparently over 60% of Americans trust today's NSA more than they trust the Osamatons, the ACLU, the NY Times, the Soros workers or even the hand-wringing of Ghost Dancing. But perhaps the unkindest cut of all is the fact that the Clintons, despite The Hillary's current screech about "spying on Americans," themselves inaugurated a vast, an enormous surveillance program, Eschalon, back in the 90's. And that's not even counting the 1100 FBI files The Slick Ones got on "enemies," i.e. political enemies. For many conservatives, of course, 'Hillary' is usually just another word for Hell. Maybe she now hopes to trade that in for 'Hypocrisy'? A slight image make-over? Maybe it's considered better than "Hell" in reaching out to "independents"?

============================================================

White House Accuses Gore of Hypocrisy
Associated Press ^ | 1/17/06 | NEDRA PICKLER

Posted on 01/17/2006 7:36:39 AM PST by presidio9

White House accused former Vice President Al Gore of hypocrisy Tuesday for his assertion that President Bush broke the law by eavesdropping on Americans without court approval.

"If Al Gore is going to be the voice of the Democrats on national security matters, we welcome it," White House press secretary Scott McClellan said in a swipe at the Democrat, who lost the 2000 election to Bush only after the Supreme Court intervened.

Gore, in a speech Monday, called for an independent investigation of the administration program that he says broke the law by listening in — without warrants — on Americans suspected of talking with terrorists abroad.

Gore called the program, authorized by President Bush, "a threat to the very structure of our government" and charged that the administration acted without congressional authority and made a "direct assault" on a federal court set up to authorize requests to eavesdrop on Americans.

Meanwhile, two civil liberties groups — the American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights — filed federal lawsuits Tuesday seeking to block the eavesdropping program, which they called unconstitutional electronic surveillance of American citizens.

McClellan said the Clinton-Gore administration had engaged in warrantless physical searches, and he cited an FBI search of the home of CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames without permission from a judge. He said Clinton's deputy attorney general, Jamie Gorelick, had testified before Congress that the president had the inherent authority to engage in physical searches without warrants.

"I think his hypocrisy knows no bounds," McClellan said of Gore.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1559570/posts

[Kenny Pierce]

Ghost,

Since you apparently believe that (a) datamining efforts are a deep and vital threat to the freedom and privacy of Americans, and (b) only dastardly Republicans would dare subvert the Constitution and separation of powers in this manner, perhaps you care to answer the following questions posed by Andrew McCarthy?

• Do the Democratic Party and/or the Democratic members of Congress maintain databases of American citizens for fundraising purposes?
• Do those databases contain names, addresses, telephone numbers, e-mail addresses, and other identifying information?
• Do the databases contain information about the interests of the citizens who have been entered into them? About candidates or causes to which they have previously donated money?
• Are those databases searchable? If so, what search criteria do you use to divide these American citizens into various categories?
• Do you do targeted mailings for purposes of raising funds or pushing particular issues?
• When you target, how do you know whom to target? That is, what kind of information do you maintain in your databases to guide you about which potential donors or voters might be fruitful to tap on which particular issues?
• Do you trade information about American citizens with other politicians and organizations in the expectation that they might reciprocate and you all might mutually exploit the benefits?

I realize, Ghost, that you probably aren't privy to the answers to those questions. So, would you fully support a Congressional hearing complete with subpeonas requiring Howard Dean, Nancy Pelosi, et alia to respond to those questions in full?

Or is it instead your opinion that, while the "privacy rights" of Americans cannot be violated for the trival purpose of, say, keeping terrorists from being able to set off a nuclear bomb in New York Harbor, those rights have to yield in the face of genuinely important matters such as ensuring that our next President is a Democrat?

Or do you just not have a freakin' clue about what datamining is?

Or do you have rational objections that you have been withholding judiciously while you wait for the right moment to spring them on us, filling space in the meantime with drivellous rants? (If that's what the deal is, then I respectfully submit that the time for rationality and sensible discussion, is now.)

[Kenny Pierce]

Gringo,

Couldn't have expressed it better myself. Bush and the Republican Congress drive me crazy. And then the Dems give me John Kerry or Nancy Pelosi or Hillary Clinton and say, "Here's your alternative."

You know the really truly frightening thing? Not only have Dubya and the Republicans been the best available choice for the last few years, but the America run by Dubya and the Republicans is pretty close to the best choice out there when you start looking at governance of other countries around the world, especially once you leave the Anglosphere.

Which says one thing loud and clear: the world is SO screwed, baby...

Ghost, are you alleging that tens of millions of Americans are having their phone calls eavesdropped on and their e-mails read? If so, do you mind posting a link? I would explain to you the difference between datamining and eavesdropping except that Gringoman already took care of that.

[Ghost Dansing]

At least now we know that the Bush administration's name for spying on Americans without first seeking court approval -- the "terrorist surveillance program" -- isn't an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak after all. It's just a bald-faced lie.

You'll recall that when it was revealed last year that the NSA was eavesdropping on phone calls and reading e-mails without first going to court for a warrant, the president said his "terrorist surveillance program" targeted international communications in which at least one party was overseas, and then only when at least one party was suspected of some terrorist involvement. Thus no one but terrorists had anything to worry about.

Not remotely true, it turns out, unless tens of millions of Americans are members of al-Qaeda sleeper cells.

There's an understandable tendency, with this administration, to succumb to a kind of "outrage fatigue." Pre-cooked intelligence on Iraq, secret CIA prisons, Abu Ghraib -- the accretion is numbing, and it's easy just to say "there they go again" and count the months until the Decider heads home to Texas for good. Bush and his people have tried to turn flouting the law into a virtue if it's a law they find inconvenient. They've tried to radically change our concept of privacy. We already knew the NSA was somehow monitoring phone calls, so what's the big deal?

Dubya has tried to convince us that the overwhelming majority of Americans are not affected by domestic surveillance, but now we know that the opposite is true: The overwhelming majority of us are.

Shame on us, in being so far behind and so willing to rubber-stamp anything this administration does.

The issue is not whether or not the government should monitor domestic telephone call records.

The issue is whether or not the Executive branch should be able to do this without oversight. That is what this Republican administration has been consistently challenging, and with little opposition from the Republican majorities in Congress.

One of the major elements of the Constitution is the system of checks and balances. To say the Executive branch can do whatever it deems necessary, in secrecy and without oversight by the other two branches of government is a mockery of not only the words, but also the spirit of the Constitution.

The Framers were well aware of consequences of an unchecked and unquestioned executive (another George, in fact, King George III).

Republicans apparently, have forgotten...apparently sanguine about a political philosophy and policies that are totalitarian; Communist or Fascist in nature.

[gringoman]

As for the tech behind this latest Libstream "expose"---a tech which any polemical pete can rant about and which probably extremely few thoroughly understand and master, no matter what epithets they sling, I take the liberty--assuming no one minds--of re-posting this from Pamela's AtlasShrugs....

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

Phony Phone Foolishness

I am stunned by the lunatics elected by the uninformed (thank the media) scream bloody murder about the latest NSA canard. The 12th imam is on his way (at least ah-mad-mini-me seems to think so), the worldwide Islamic extremist movement means to take us out, and Hitler part II is playing with nuclear weaponry. To better understand the latest phone kerfuffle, Ben wrote the following ;

Traffic Analysis

As a public service, I thought I would shed some light on what it is the NSA is doing with all those phone records. It’s not what the media implies it is. For starters, what they are not doing: NSA analysts are not sitting at their consoles with their headphones listening to your conversation. They don’t know about your mistress, how smart your son is, who Emily is going out with, your dinner plans, why you hate your boss, and they don’t care. They don’t have the time to bother because:

1) They have phone records, not taped conversations.

2) Even if they had conversations, they wouldn’t have a fraction of the analysts needed to listen to more than a tiny, tiny subset of conversations, and they cannot waste their time on your personal issues.

In fact, they don’t even know what number you called, when, and where. Yes, thisSorry_wrong_number_academy_promo information exists, but buried inside machines. No one “knows” it, just as a librarian does not “know” a fact merely because it exists in a book on a shelf in a library. And this information will stay buried, unknown, secure and personal unless something very unusual turns up.

So here is what is being done: traffic analysis. This is an arcane art-science, in which the analyst, or more precisely, in this case, the algorithms designed by analysts, glean information not from the conversations themselves, but from the patterns those communications generate in time and space. Some of it is obvious and self evident: you can tell the difference in communications patterns between passing information and coordinating an activity, because the coordination conversations will have short return messages initiated by the non-node elements, while information is generally passed to a node from only one element, and then distributed to a larger group by the node.

After 9-11, a lot of people talked about “connecting the dots”. This is connecting the dots. This is using a computer to pluck patterns out of the virtual “information space” in which people communicate, without actually monitoring the information itself. Of course, should a particular pattern be red flagged by an algorithm, it could lead to actual monitoring.

In a New Century kind of way, it’s not unlike scanning the airspace for signs of enemy bombers- something taken for granted back in the Cold War but inappropriate today, now that we have an enemy that doesn’t bother to maintain old fashioned conventional air forces. Today we have to scan information space for signs of enemy activity.

Exactly what can be gained from traffic analysis is highly classified for obvious reasons. Any enemy, aware that certain communications patterns meant certain things to analysts, would make an effort to change patterns, or send “false positives” to the analysts. The New York Times is aware of this too, and so would make every effort to get this information to terrorist groups and help them thwart intelligence analysts.

The people railing against this are still living with September 10th Mentalities. I’ve heard it over and over; it’s “Wrong” to gather intelligence unless there is a clear sign of law breaking. On 9-11, some of those hijackers hadn’t actually committed a felony UNTIL they took over the planes- what dots, then, were we supposed to connect? Traffic Analysis is dot connection at work. It is not wiretapping, it is not eavesdropping. No personal information comes into contact with another human being unless it is part of a very suspicious pattern.

Thanks Ben.
In other words, STFU already and start fighting the real war. BTW, most Americans agree.

Posted by Pamela aka "Atlas" on Friday, May 12, 2006 at 11:17 AM in Democrats, Dhimmicrats, Democraps ........aka The Fifth Column, How the Left Destroys the Nation, Radical Islam: The War on Jihadism, Simmering Civil War in America, W

[gringoman]

Bushism can drive you,sometimes, at least to consider a Democrat/Libstream alternative. Spending like a Dem. Inability or not caring to dominate or control or at least significantly affect the dialogue on Iraq, let alone the little-reported corruption there which may have reached Vietnam proportions. The astounding border collusion with Mexico's narco-republica. The readiness to let the USA morph from a nation into a multy-cult global free trade entity.... You begin to wonder. Could the Dems really be any worse? And then they offer yet another example of the unabashedly disingenuous, like this NSA flap redux, where they and their media procurers demonstrate their willingness to confuse today's problem of national security with spying on grandma. They did it again. They think the ACLU and Mother Sheehan mean liberty. You looked for something, but they did it again. You wondered: could things be any worse with these people in charge, who think that World Jihad is more or less just a Karl Rove election ploy? The answer seems to be inescapable: Yes, maybe it could be worse. Yes. OMG, yes. Scylla & Charybdis, anyone? Ulysses? Will you choose your monster?

[masaccio]

You might want to learn something about data mining before you decide whether your panties are twisted. Suppose that the NSA actually has the phone number or e-mail address of a terrorist. The data base of phone calls is examined starting with that number or address or both and going out ten or twenty nodes. The data are used to define a template.

Then, the entire data base is examinied, looking for other examples of that template. Your template could look like that of the terrorist. That would be enough to get you looked at, spied upon, kind of like a governmental peeping tom.

It doesn't have anything to do with something to hide. It has to do with your sense of yourself, with your sense of personal honor. It has to do with self-respect. Are you so afraid you will just surrender, to this government? Shame.

[weekenderman]

I just think it's hilarious that the leftists are rejoicing over a "newsworthy" report in USA Today . . . not exactly a bastion of serious reporting (unless it has to do with sports, of course). :)