Even more through FISA explanations

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Commenter Los Diablo on Daily Kos.

Dwight D. Eisenhower; Nov.7, 1966 Interview

From U.S. News & World Report talking about concentrating too much power in the hands of the president.."I read where members of the so-called intelligentsia, some professors, urge a strong President.  They are deluding themselves, their readers, and everyone else, with this idea of an all-powerful Chief Executive.  A strong President is one who will be concerned about doing things in a constitutional way, respecting the legislative and the judiciary.  Yet some writers are beginning to worship this concept of "strongman" government.  This has a very serious connotation for America.  It means autocracy in the long run."

Kevin Drum, blogger with the Washington Monthly, breaks down the FISA bullshit legislation even more here:

Second, and more fundamentally, the bill gives wholesale approval for NSA to conduct bulk monitoring of electronic communications (primarily email and phone calls). This is the issue that catapulted FISA into prominence in the first place, and it's getting surprisingly little attention this time around. As near as I can tell, this is because bulk monitoring is now widely accepted on both sides of the aisle. For example, in his interview with Jake Tapper last week, Barack Obama made a point of correcting him on this score:

TAPPER: There has not been a terrorist attack within the U.S. since 9/11. And [the Bush administration says] the reason that is, is because of the domestic programs, many of which you opposed, the NSA surveillance program, Guantanamo Bay, and other programs. How do you know that they're wrong? It's not possible that they're right?

OBAMA: Well, keep in mind I haven't opposed, for example, the national security surveillance program, the NSA program. What I've said that we can do it within the constraints of our civil liberties and our Constitution.

At this point we have to engage in a bit of guesswork since the details of the NSA program are classified, but the basic problem is the same as it's always been: NSA's program isn't targeted at particular people or even particular organizations. Nor is it targeted solely at foreign-to-foreign communications since modern communications technology makes it very difficult to be sure where a particular message originates or terminates. Rather, it's based on complex computer algorithms, something that's genuinely uncharted territory.

To repeat something I said a couple of years ago, the nice thing about probable cause and reasonable suspicion and other similar phrases is that they have a long history behind them. There are hundreds of years of statutory definition and case law that define what they mean, and human judges interpret them in ways that most of us understand, even if we disagree about which standard ought to be used for issuing different kinds of wiretap warrants.

But the NSA's domestic spying program doesn't rely on the ordinary human understanding of these phrases. Instead, it appears to rely primarily on software algorithms that determine whether or not a person is acting in a way that merits eavesdropping. The details are still murky, but what the NSA appears to be doing is very large scale data mining on virtually every phone call and email between the United States and overseas, looking for patterns that fit a profile of some kind. Maybe twice or three-times removed links to suspected terrorist phone numbers. Or anyone who makes more than 5% of their calls to Afghanistan. Or people who make a suspiciously large volume of calls on certain dates or from certain mosques. Stuff like that.

Then, if you happen to fit one of these profiles, your phone is tapped and an NSA analyst decides if you're really a terrorist suspect. This apparently happens tens of thousands of times a year and most are washed out. Perhaps a thousand or two thousand a year are still suspicious enough to pass on the FBI, and most of these wash out too. At the end of the year, five or ten are still of enough interest to justify getting a domestic wiretap warrant.

Is this useful? Maybe. But we're not listening in on al-Qaeda's phone calls to America. We're tapping the phones of anyone who fits a hazy and seldom accurate profile that NSA finds vaguely suspicious, a profile that inevitably includes plenty of calls in which one end is a U.S. citizen. But the new FISA bill doesn't require NSA to get a warrant for any of these individuals or groups, it only requires a FISA judge to approve the broad contours of the profiling software. This raises lots of obvious concerns:

Read the Rest

A helpful commenter points out that that a 2007 article confirmed that illegal data mining was going on BEFORE 9/11

House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers is asking the Justice Department and the head of national intelligence to answer startling allegations that the National Security Agency's still-unconfirmed call records data mining program started 7 months before the terrorist attacks of 9/11 and that the government retaliated against a telecom for saying it thought a request to participate was illegal. As first reported here on THREAT LEVEL and then followed up on (sans credit) by the Washington Post and the New York Times, court documents unveiled last week show that former Qwest CEO Joseph Nacchio tried, unsuccessfully, to raise allegations in court that he refused an NSA request for help from his telecom in February 27, 2001, nearly 7 months prior to 9/11.
Though the specific program is redacted in the documents, Nacchio's lawyer confirmed in 2006 that Qwest had repeatedly turned down requests from the NSA for its customer call records. AT&T and MCI (now owned by Verizon) complied with the request, according to the USA Today.

There are other links in that article that add even more to the story.


SO, WHAT DO WE DO?



Glenn Greenwald links to an Action Diary on Daily Kos:

It's our job to try to stop them, and to convince our leaders that it's the right thing to do and they'll have our support in doing so. Here's how, again courtesy Glenn:

As the extremely pro-Obama MoveOn.org notes today, Obama's spokesman, Bill Burton, back in in September, vowed that Obama would "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies." MoveOn believes Obama should be held to his word and is thus conducting a campaign urging Obama to do what he promised -- support a filibuster to stop the enactment of telecom amnesty. You can email Burton here to demand that Obama comply with his commitment not just to vote against, but to filibuster, telecom amnesty:

bburton@barackobama.com

Incidentally, Chris Dodd made an identical promise when he was running for President, prompting the support of hundreds of thousands of new contributors, and he ought to be held to his promise as well.

In addition to Obama, contact Harry Reid (Phone: (202) 224-3542, Fax: (202) 224-7327), Russ Feingold (Phone: (202) 224-5323, Fax: (202) 224-2725) and Chris Dodd (Phone: (202) 224-2823, Fax: (202) 224-1083). Ask them to do what they can to derail this train.

Chances are this train is too far from the station to put a stop to. But our job as the left flank of this party, the activist wing, is not to throw up our hands in despair and accept this as a done deal with our bitter acquiescence.

Our job also isn't go off sulking in a fit of pique because our leaders let us down. Blustering, whining, refusing to play anymore is the least helpful and productive of avenues. I keep coming back to Howard Dean and his admonition to us at Yearly Kos in Chicago that we are working on a long term project here to take our party back. Making this party ours again is going to take a lot of work and a long time. We do that by staying engaged. We do that by telling our representatives, including our presidential candidate (who is STILL head and shoulders better than the alternative) what we expect of them and by making their decisions matter.

As long as there is a fight to be had, we're the ones to fight it and to help our allies in Congress fight it. It's our job. If we don't do it, if we don't stand up for progressive values, who will?

And yet more phone numbers Go harass the Congress, people! Franklin Roosevelt once said:"OK, you've convinced me. Now go out and make me do it!" Well, we need to both convince them AND make them do it. Call, call, CALL!

Comments

[fengi.livejournal.com]

Excellent. On a different note, I really want your take on this.