NSA Programs

[99-1100896887]

In the good old days of 1970, I read Animal Farm with my students, and the students studied it. This was ana time in hirstory for this book. The students wondered when we were all going to be able to require a screen to watch everything that was done in their room, like Smith in 1984(which we also did). I posed this question to our parents at Christmas dinner. My father astounded me by saying" I don't have anything to hide; I've done nothing wrong". Despite my protestations of interference and spying, and invasion of privacy, etc. they did not see it as a problem. I wonder what he would have thought about the recent announcements from the white House, the National Guard re NSA spying , and all the Illegal infriengemnets of your civil rights today. Fortunately we don't live in such a country. Yet.
No matteer what you say, criddic, the phone tapping is gunning for YOU.

[kaytodd]

I wonder if the Nixon White House would like to have journalists' phone records?

[OscarGuy]

Frightened? Why? You are so f-ing unbelievable. BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT ONLY WARRANTLESS but THEY ARE ALSO DONE WITHOUT ANY KNOWLEDGE BEING GIVEN TO THE PERSON BEING INVESTIGATED!

Anyone remember that silly little thing called the constitution? Anyone in this administration EVER hear of due process? There's a specific passage that suggests that Americans cannot be subjected to illegal searches and seizures. The NSLs are an abridgement of our rights. Does it not disturb you that YOUR PHONE CALL RECORDS could be in the hands of the government?

When the government, through fear and intimidation, attempts to take away the rights of the people and the people don't fight back, they don't deserve the rights anyway. American Citizens. Constitution. Rights Removed. Welcome to Nazi Germany. or, if you don't like the analogy, perhaps you'd like the analogy of Hussein Iraq..."great" dictators think alike, I guess.

Thanks, George Orwell.

[criddic3]

Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL). The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.

You are frightened by this why?

Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.

I can see why you like this passage. The Times wants us to believe these leaks are heroic. I guess you agree with them. The last statement about the program being more for monitering reporters than terrorists is just ludicrous.

I. Lewis Libby, was acting at his boss' behest when Libby allegedly leaked information about Plame to reporters.

-- The article posted earlier by Oscarguy.

I seem to recall that Patrick fitzgerald made it clear that his indictment was NOT for leaking the name, but for obstructing his investigation. This may seem like splitting-hairs, but Libby has not been charged with leaking the information. Neither has anyone else to my knowledge. The fact is that much of what people were complaining about was declassified. And she wasn't event a covert agent at the time the info was released by rerporters.
__

By the way, an editorial can still be classified as an article. I seem to recall some people posting other people's views from other message boards to boost their cases and passing them off as straightforward articles. Many of the articles and links posted from others on this board are also editorials. I don't think that posting an editorial is wrong. If it makes a point that I want to make, it is useful to post them. Not all of the articles I post are editorials either. I have also posted Associated Press items and other similar peices, too. Is there a rule that only "straight news" should be posted? Some editorials bring up excellent points and facts or quotes. The New York Times is routinely posted on this board. They often frame their stories against the administration. The Frank Rich article is clearly an editorial.

I don't see why i shouldn't be able to post items that might be less critical of the President, especially when they often make good arguments.

[Sonic Youth]

Nazis. The final paragraph is terrifying.

FBI admits seeking journalists phone records
May 15, 2006 7:18 PM
The Blotter
ABC News

Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:

The FBI acknowledged late Monday that it is increasingly seeking reporters’ phone records in leak investigations.

“It used to be very hard and complicated to do this, but it no longer is in the Bush administration,” said a senior federal official.

The acknowledgement followed our blotter item that ABC News reporters had been warned by a federal source that the government knew who we were calling.

The official said our blotter item was wrong to suggest that ABC News phone calls were being “tracked.”

“Think of it more as backtracking,” said a senior federal official.

But FBI officials did not deny that phone records of ABC News, the New York Times and the Washington Post had been sought as part of a investigation of leaks at the CIA.

In a statement, the FBI press office said its leak investigations begin with the examination of government phone records.

“The FBI will take logical investigative steps to determine if a criminal act was committed by a government employee by the unauthorized release of classified information,” the statement said.

Officials say that means that phone records of reporters will be sought if government records are not sufficient.

Officials say the FBI makes extensive use of a new provision of the Patriot Act which allows agents to seek information with what are called National Security Letters (NSL).

The NSLs are a version of an administrative subpoena and are not signed by a judge. Under the law, a phone company receiving a NSL for phone records must provide them and may not divulge to the customer that the records have been given to the government.

[Sonic Youth]

Will the Real Traitors Please Stand Up?
By Frank Rich
The New York Times

Sunday 14 May 2006

When America panics, it goes hunting for scapegoats. But from Salem onward, we've more often than not ended up pillorying the innocent. Abe Rosenthal, the legendary Times editor who died last week, and his publisher, Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, were denounced as treasonous in 1971 when they defied the Nixon administration to publish the Pentagon Papers, the secret government history of the Vietnam War. Today we know who the real traitors were: the officials who squandered American blood and treasure on an ill-considered war and then tried to cover up their lies and mistakes. It was precisely those lies and mistakes, of course, that were laid bare by the thousands of pages of classified Pentagon documents leaked to both The Times and The Washington Post.

This history is predictably repeating itself now that the public has turned on the war in Iraq. The administration's die-hard defenders are desperate to deflect blame for the fiasco, and, guess what, the traitors once again are The Times and The Post. This time the newspapers committed the crime of exposing warrantless spying on Americans by the National Security Agency (The Times) and the C.I.A.'s secret "black site" Eastern European prisons (The Post). Aping the Nixon template, the current White House tried to stop both papers from publishing and when that failed impugned their patriotism.

President Bush, himself a sometime leaker of intelligence, called the leaking of the N.S.A. surveillance program a "shameful act" that is "helping the enemy." Porter Goss, who was then still C.I.A. director, piled on in February with a Times Op-Ed piece denouncing leakers for potentially risking American lives and compromising national security. When reporters at both papers were awarded Pulitzer Prizes last month, administration surrogates, led by bloviator in chief William Bennett, called for them to be charged under the 1917 Espionage Act.

We can see this charade for what it is: a Hail Mary pass by the leaders who bungled a war and want to change the subject to the journalists who caught them in the act. What really angers the White House and its defenders about both the Post and Times scoops are not the legal questions the stories raise about unregulated gulags and unconstitutional domestic snooping, but the unmasking of yet more administration failures in a war effort riddled with ineptitude. It's the recklessness at the top of our government, not the press's exposure of it, that has truly aided the enemy, put American lives at risk and potentially sabotaged national security. That's where the buck stops, and if there's to be a witch hunt for traitors, that's where it should begin.

Well before Dana Priest of The Post uncovered the secret prisons last November, the C.I.A. had failed to keep its detention "secrets" secret. Having obtained flight logs, The Sunday Times of London first reported in November 2004 that the United States was flying detainees "to countries that routinely use torture." Six months later, The New York Times added many details, noting that "plane-spotting hobbyists, activists and journalists in a dozen countries have tracked the mysterious planes' movements." These articles, capped by Ms. Priest's, do not impede our ability to detain terrorists. But they do show how the administration, by condoning torture, has surrendered the moral high ground to anti-American jihadists and botched the war of ideas that we can't afford to lose.

The N.S.A. eavesdropping exposed in December by James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The Times is another American debacle. Hoping to suggest otherwise and cast the paper as treasonous, Dick Cheney immediately claimed that the program had saved "thousands of lives." The White House's journalistic mouthpiece, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, wrote that the Times expose "may have ruined one of our most effective anti-Al Qaeda surveillance programs."

Surely they jest. If this is one of our "most effective" programs, we're in worse trouble than we thought. Our enemy is smart enough to figure out on its own that its phone calls are monitored 24/7, since even under existing law the government can eavesdrop for 72 hours before seeking a warrant (which is almost always granted). As The Times subsequently reported, the N.S.A. program was worse than ineffective; it was counterproductive. Its gusher of data wasted F.B.I. time and manpower on wild-goose chases and minor leads while uncovering no new active Qaeda plots in the United States. Like the N.S.A. database on 200 million American phone customers that was described last week by USA Today, this program may have more to do with monitoring "traitors" like reporters and leakers than with tracking terrorists.

Journalists and whistle-blowers who relay such government blunders are easily defended against the charge of treason. It's often those who make the accusations we should be most worried about. Mr. Goss, a particularly vivid example, should not escape into retirement unexamined. He was so inept that an overzealous witch hunter might mistake him for a Qaeda double agent.

Even before he went to the C.I.A., he was a drag on national security. In "Breakdown," a book about intelligence failures before the 9/11 attacks, the conservative journalist Bill Gertz delineates how Mr. Goss, then chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, played a major role in abdicating Congressional oversight of the C.I.A., trying to cover up its poor performance while terrorists plotted with impunity. After 9/11, his committee's "investigation" of what went wrong was notoriously toothless.

Once he ascended to the C.I.A. in 2004, Mr. Goss behaved like most other Bush appointees: he put politics ahead of the national interest, and stashed cronies and partisan hacks in crucial positions. On Friday, the F.B.I. searched the home and office of one of them, Dusty Foggo, the No. 3 agency official in the Goss regime. Mr. Foggo is being investigated by four federal agencies pursuing the bribery scandal that has already landed former Congressman Randy (Duke) Cunningham in jail. Though Washington is titillated by gossip about prostitutes and Watergate "poker parties" swirling around this Warren Harding-like tale, at least the grafters of Teapot Dome didn't play games with the nation's defense during wartime.

Besides driving out career employees, underperforming on Iran intelligence and scaling back a daily cross-agency meeting on terrorism, Mr. Goss's only other apparent accomplishment at the C.I.A. was his war on those traitorous leakers. Intriguingly, this was a new cause for him. "There's a leak every day in the paper," he told The Sarasota Herald-Tribune when the identity of the officer Valerie Wilson was exposed in 2003. He argued then that there was no point in tracking leaks down because "that's all we'd do."

What prompted Mr. Goss's about-face was revealed in his early memo instructing C.I.A. employees to "support the administration and its policies in our work." His mission was not to protect our country but to prevent the airing of administration dirty laundry, including leaks detailing how the White House ignored accurate C.I.A. intelligence on Iraq before the war. On his watch, C.I.A. lawyers also tried to halt publication of "Jawbreaker," the former clandestine officer Gary Berntsen's account of how the American command let Osama bin Laden escape when Mr. Berntsen's team had him trapped in Tora Bora in December 2001. The one officer fired for alleged leaking during the Goss purge had no access to classified intelligence about secret prisons but was presumably a witness to her boss's management disasters.

Soon to come are the Senate's hearings on Mr. Goss's successor, Gen. Michael Hayden, the former head of the N.S.A. As Jon Stewart reminded us last week, Mr. Bush endorsed his new C.I.A. choice with the same encomium he had bestowed on Mr. Goss: He's "the right man" to lead the C.I.A. "at this critical moment in our nation's history." That's not exactly reassuring.

This being an election year, Karl Rove hopes the hearings can portray Bush opponents as soft on terrorism when they question any national security move. It was this bullying that led so many Democrats to rubber-stamp the Iraq war resolution in the 2002 election season and Mr. Goss's appointment in the autumn of 2004.

Will they fall into the same trap in 2006? Will they be so busy soliloquizing about civil liberties that they'll fail to investigate the nominee's record? It was under General Hayden, a self-styled electronic surveillance whiz, that the N.S.A. intercepted actual Qaeda messages on Sept. 10, 2001 - "Tomorrow is zero hour" for one - and failed to translate them until Sept. 12. That same fateful summer, General Hayden's N.S.A. also failed to recognize that "some of the terrorists had set up shop literally under its nose," as the national-security authority James Bamford wrote in The Washington Post in 2002. The Qaeda cell that hijacked American Flight 77 and plowed into the Pentagon was based in the same town, Laurel, Md., as the N.S.A., and "for months, the terrorists and the N.S.A. employees exercised in some of the same local health clubs and shopped in the same grocery stores."

If Democrats - and, for that matter, Republicans - let a president with a Nixonesque approval rating install yet another second-rate sycophant at yet another security agency, even one as diminished as the C.I.A., someone should charge those senators with treason, too.

[Mister Tee]

criddic, what you posted, of course, is not an "article"...it's an op-ed piece by a partisan Republican.

I challenge you: find an actual news article backing up any of your viewpoints from a mainstream source (that of course excludes Fox News, The Washington Times, NewsMax, and the assorted right-wing mouthpieces you regularly cite here). Dare to live outside the echo chamber.

[Sonic Youth]

The NSA isn't the only federal agency that's data mining:


Fonegate part of fed spying


BY RICHARD SISK
NEW YORK DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU

WASHINGTON - The federal government's massive grab of nearly all the nation's phone records was just a small part of a vast array of official "data mining" projects whose legality has come into question.

In two reports since 2004, the Government Accountability Office said 52 of the 128 government agencies surveyed had either carried out or planned such projects - resulting in 199 separate efforts to collect information.

Five of the agencies - including the FBI, State Department and Internal Revenue Service - failed to comply with federal privacy and communications safeguards in their efforts to track terrorists and catch criminals, the GAO said.

The failures "increased the risk that personal information could be improperly exposed or altered," the GAO reports said of the searches for patterns, trends and relationships in huge databases.

The survey by the GAO, the investigative arm of Congress, did not include the National Security Agency's collection of hundreds of millions of phone records going back nearly five years.

In his weekly radio address yesterday, President Bush again defended the NSA project without confirming its existence.

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," Bush said. "We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

But a Newsweek poll released yesterday found 53% of Americans think the NSA's surveillance "goes too far in invading people's privacy," while 41% saw it as a necessary tool to combat terrorism. That contrasts sharply with an ABC News/Washington Post poll conducted Thursday - the day the snooping news broke in USA Today - in which two-thirds of those polled said the actions were acceptable.

The disclosure of the NSA's ongoing collection of phone call information came just days after the Federal Trade Commission filed court complaints charging five Web-based companies with illegally obtaining and selling personal and business phone records.

"Trafficking in consumers' confidential telephone records is outrageous," said Lydia .Parnes, head of the FTC's Bureau of Consumer Protection. "It robs consumers of their privacy and exposes them to everything from snoops to stalkers."

The FTC complaints had no bearing on the NSA's project, but Nancy Libin, staff counsel at the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, an advocacy group, said "it is somewhat ironic" to have one government agency acting against phone record collection while a second agency amasses the same data.

Verizon was named in a multibillion-dollar lawsuit Friday over claims it illegally cooperated with the Bush administration's request for customer records.

[OscarGuy]

There are big differences between this President and President Nixon. Nixon was his own worst enemy. An intelligent, sometimes brilliant man, whose paranoia led to his downfall. Some people from his party unlawfully break and enter into the DNC headquarters. An investigation begins and the administration unravels. That was intentional law-breaking, and Nixon was helping to cover it up. Though it must be said that to this day we still don't know just how much Nixon knew or when he knew it.

President Bush has consulted lawyers and judges, senators and congressmen. They tell him what he has ordered is legitimate and legal. He continues the programs. Someone from the CIA decides to leak the classified info to some hotshot newsman, who in turn thinks it would be a great way to bring down a President. It will become clear eventually that the only ones breaking the law here are these boneheaded individuals who have deluded themselves into thinking they are heroes.

You've just summed up the Bush administration...oh...I mean the Nixon administration...perfectly. The only correlation not there is the intelligent part.

Sure the leakage of national security information is bad. Who ever said that it was but you know what it does? It helps us find out who's breaking the law. By saying what you said below, then you should admonish the Bush administration for assisting to leak Valerie Plame's identity. No, you won't admonish them. You'll say that it was entirely Libby's doing or maybe even not admit that at all and suggest the information came from elsewhere. However, there's a new article here:


Leak Case

This one shows that the focus is narrowing and there may be complicitness from Cheney. He's only a heartbeat away from the presidency...If this pans out, either it will prove that Bush knew what was going on or that Bush is a puppet for the machinations of Dick Cheney and his Republican cronies.

[criddic3]

An article:

NSA Programs

[criddic3]

He's like a brainwashed puppy who thinks scientology is the neato. You can't change his mind and no manner of factual, thought-provoking, legitimate claim will make him question his loyalties.

Very good, indeed. Wrong, but it sounds good.

Guys: Please ignore criddic If you ignore hime, he will go away.

Is cam aware that a survey was once started on this board, asking if I should be banned?

Loyalty is good but look at what happened to those loyal to Ken Lay? Those loyal to Nixon? They go down with the ship when the ship goes down. One has to manage his priorities but Criddic will never get over his hero worship of one of the worst leaders our country has had.

There are big differences between this President and President Nixon. Nixon was his own worst enemy. An intelligent, sometimes brilliant man, whose paranoia led to his downfall. Some people from his party unlawfully break and enter into the DNC headquarters. An investigation begins and the administration unravels. That was intentional law-breaking, and Nixon was helping to cover it up. Though it must be said that to this day we still don't know just how much Nixon knew or when he knew it.

President Bush has consulted lawyers and judges, senators and congressmen. They tell him what he has ordered is legitimate and legal. He continues the programs. Someone from the CIA decides to leak the classified info to some hotshot newsman, who in turn thinks it would be a great way to bring down a President. It will become clear eventually that the only ones breaking the law here are these boneheaded individuals who have deluded themselves into thinking they are heroes.

[99-1100896887]

Great post, Wes.

[Mister Tee]

Ah, vindication so quickly for those of us who questioned ABC/Wash. Post's rushing out that hack-job of a poll. When you follow the normal rules of polling, the 67% approving mysteriously drops to 41% -- which would appear to be more than margin of error.


New Newsweek poll:

A majority of Americans polled, 53 percent, believe that reports that the NSA has been secretly collecting the phone records of U.S. citizens since the 9/11 terrorist attacks to create a database of calls goes too far in invading people's privacy, according to the new Newsweek Poll, while 41 percent feel it is a necessary tool to combat terrorism. In light of this news and other actions by the Bush-Cheney administration, 57 percent of Americans say they have gone too far in expanding presidential power, while only 38 percent say they have not.

[OscarGuy]

Don't waste your breath, Cam...He's not going away and no one is going to force him to go away. I don't care if he stays or leaves but a lot of people like using him as an administration whipping boy. He supports nearly everything the administration puts out despite the growing number of citizens who are turning away from him. He's like a brainwashed puppy who thinks scientology is the neato. You can't change his mind and no manner of factual, thought-provoking, legitimate claim will make him question his loyalties. Loyalty is good but look at what happened to those loyal to Ken Lay? Those loyal to Nixon? They go down with the ship when the ship goes down. One has to manage his priorities but Criddic will never get over his hero worship of one of the worst leaders our country has had.

[Sonic Youth]

I don't think most of us here want him to go away.