Yes Virginia, Spying Really is Good for You

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, who used to by quite gainfully employed by Booz Allen Hamilton,'a "huge" supplier of intelligence contracting' that had multi-million dollar Pentagon contracts, is thinking now would be a great time to expand the government's spying powers - because the Bush administration and its 14+ intel agencies obviously haven't quite yet been able to legally install cameras in your bathroom to find out what kind of toothpaste you use. That may just help them win the so-called "war on terrorism", you know.

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell has circulated a draft bill that would expand the government's powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, liberalizing how that law can be used.

The word "liberalizing" used in that instance is not a Good Thing™.

The changes McConnell is seeking mostly affect a cloak-and-dagger category of warrants used to investigate suspected spies, terrorists and other national security threats. The court-approved surveillance could include planting listening devices and hidden cameras, searching luggage and breaking into homes to make copies of computer hard drives.

See? I told you they'd be checking out your toothpaste soon.

They can copy my hard drive if they want to. I have several to-die-for pics of Brad Pitt that would keep them entertained for a while.

And here are a few of the other things McConnell wants to do. (He really doesn't like foreigners much...)

_Give the NSA the power to monitor foreigners without seeking FISA court approval, even if the surveillance is conducted by tapping phones and e-mail accounts in the United States.

"Determinations about whether a court order is required should be based on considerations about the target of the surveillance, rather than the particular means of communication or the location from which the surveillance is being conducted," NSA Director Keith Alexander told the Senate last year.

_Clarify the standards the FBI and NSA must use to get court orders for basic information about calls and e-mails — such as the number dialed, e-mail address, or time and date of the communications. Civil liberties advocates contend the change will make it too easy for the government to access this information.

_Triple the life span of a FISA warrant for a non-U.S. citizen from 120 days to one year, allowing the government to monitor much longer without checking back in with a judge.

_Give telecommunications companies immunity from civil liability for their cooperation with Bush's terrorist surveillance program. Pending lawsuits against companies including Verizon and AT&T allege they violated privacy laws by giving phone records to the NSA for the program.

_Extend from 72 hours to one week the amount of time the government can conduct surveillance without a court order in emergencies.

Nothing to see here. Move along folks. Sure some "foreigners" might disappear, telecom companies might walk away scott-free and the US government will have way too much information about you but, hey, as long as Osama's still on the run I'm sure nobody will mind. Osama who, you ask? You know - that bearded guy who might just be hiding in that old suitcase of yours in the closet and who pops out when you're not home to use your computer to e-mail his al Qaeda buddies oversees. Yeah. That guy. So really, who cares if government agents break into your house? I'm sure they'll take their shoes off.

Related: Via PogoWasRight

Apr. 11th 2:30 pm: Senate Committee on Judiciary Constitution Subcommittee hearings to examine the Inspector General's findings of improper use of National Security Letters by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Apr. 12th 10:00 am: Senate Committee on Judiciary hearings to examine S. 236, to require reports to Congress on Federal agency use of data mining, H.R. 740, to amend title 18, United States Code, to prevent caller ID spoofing, and other bills and matters.

Valerie Plame Testifies; FBI Issues Terrorism Alert

Nightly news anchor: Outed CIA agent Valerie Plame testified today that her cover was carelessly and recklessly revealed by the White House ...oh ...wait just a minute here ...we've just received a bulletin from the FBI that, and I quote, "suspected members of extremist groups have signed up as school bus drivers in the United States, counterterror officials said Friday, in a cautionary bulletin to police".

Oh my! Well, it seems they've also concluded that "parents and children have nothing to fear" and "there are no threats, no plots and no history leading us to believe there is any reason for concern," although law enforcement agencies around the country were asked to watch out for kids' safety", according to the news release.

You know, two of my little darlings ride what my daughter likes to call the "cheesewagons" every single day. I guess we all need to be just a bit more careful these days when it comes to taking a second look at who's driving our children to school and back just in case there might be any "suspicious activity" going on.

My, that's frightening!

Coming up, as soon as we return from our short commercial break, we'll let you know what to expect for your weekend weather.

Flashback to 2005:

WASHINGTON — The Bush administration periodically put the USA on high alert for terrorist attacks even though then-Homeland Security chief Tom Ridge argued there was only flimsy evidence to justify raising the threat level, Ridge now says.

Ridge, who resigned Feb. 1, said Tuesday that he often disagreed with administration officials who wanted to elevate the threat level to orange, or "high" risk of terrorist attack, but was overruled.

His comments at a Washington forum describe spirited debates over terrorist intelligence and provide rare insight into the inner workings of the nation's homeland security apparatus.

Ridge said he wanted to "debunk the myth" that his agency was responsible for repeatedly raising the alert under a color-coded system he unveiled in 2002.

"More often than not we were the least inclined to raise it," Ridge told reporters. "Sometimes we disagreed with the intelligence assessment. Sometimes we thought even if the intelligence was good, you don't necessarily put the country on (alert). ... There were times when some people were really aggressive about raising it, and we said, 'For that?' "

(That confession just never gets old...)
 

The FBI is Breaking the Rules, Again

You know, it's sad these days that the Bush administration and the powers that be have so trampled on people's rights that the public outrage meter is actually broken from extreme overuse.

Take the latest revelation about the FBI's abuse of those dreaded national security letters.

...[Justice Department Inspector General] Fine found that FBI agents used national security letters without citing an authorized investigation, claimed "exigent" circumstances that did not exist in demanding information and did not have adequate documentation to justify the issuance of letters.

In at least two cases, the officials said, Fine found that the FBI obtained full credit reports using a national security letter that could lawfully be employed to obtain only summary information. In an unknown number of other cases, third parties such as telephone companies, banks and Internet providers responded to national security letters with detailed personal information about customers that the letters do not permit to be released. The FBI "sequestered" that information, a law enforcement official said last night, but did not destroy it.

You can only bang your head against the wall so many times before you end up with brain damage over it all.

9/11 changed everything alright. It opened the door to the most corrupt, secretive, intrusive, destructive and downright fascist forms or powermongering that ordinary citizens just don't have much of a defence against anymore. Your mail is read. Your phones are tapped. Your phone records are seized. You're on camera whenever you step outside.

Those things have already been going on for a long time as everybody knows, but when government sanctions even more invasive methods of picking through every single detail of your mundane life, what do you have left? And beyond that, when agencies like the FBI already have far more legal powers than they ought to in what's supposed to be a free and democratic society and they take it upon themselves to go even further by trying to stetch the law when it's convenient for them, then what?

Oh, the Democrats will try to fix things that are so obviously wrong with the Patriot Act but, as with everything they'll try to reform or change, Bush will pull out his handy veto pen and basically flip them the bird with it. The courts aren't of much help either. Any controversial rulings that actually threaten Bush's unitary executive (kingly) power will be appealed by government attorneys and will eventually, way down the road, be taken up by the Supreme Court - a long and tedious process.

In the meantime, life ticks on and more people will have their rights and privacy violated while good old smirking attorney general Alberto Gonzales stares into the cameras and tells people not to worry - he's on top of things. And Bush will give even more speeches about the war on terror to scare people into compliance while their brains turn to nodding bubbles of mush. So it will go.

After all, if you're not one of the bad guys, why worry? Right? Now there's an attitude that's killing everything America is supposedly supposed to stand for, although it really hasn't stood for those ideals for a very, very long time if, in fact, those ideals were ever more than just comforting illusions that people had about their great country whose history of corruption goes back centuries to its very founding.

It's no wonder then that the energy to keep fighting those in the no longer hallowed halls of the White House is so hard to come by these days. So few take up the cause on behalf of so many and citizens hope that's enough. It isn't, of course, especially when that fight consists of continual below the belt punches from the opposing side. They don't play by the rules and that's how they win, something that those who want to set things right seem to have to do in order to get anywhere, but won't. It's a a painfully uneven match.

Maybe when those who get tired of watching it from the sidelines decide to join in with a willingness to start a massive proverbial rumble, things will change. Then again, the government will probably just send in the riot squads like they always do. But if no one takes that chance, how we will they ever know?
 

About that 'must-do' list...

Sunday's New York Times editorial board has produced a must-do list, encouraging the Democrats to fight back against the assaults on human rights and civil liberties perpetrated by the Bush administration.

Here's what that list consists of:

1. Restore habeus corpus
2. Stop illegal spying
3. Ban Torture, really
4. Close the C.I.A. prisons
5. Account for "Ghost Prisoners"
6. Ban extraordinary rendition
7. Tighten the definition of combatant
8. Screen prisoners fairly and effectively
9. Ban tainted evidence
10. Ban secret evidence
11. Better define "classified" evidence
12. Respect the right to counsel

As the editors point out, many of these policies were written into law last fall via the passage of the Military Commissions Act which was developed after the Bush administration was rebuked by the Supreme Court.

Even if the Democrats could use their majority status to overturn that act however, long ingrained American traditions would remain.

There's no doubt that Bush has used his unitary executive power to override and sidestep congress every step of the way since he kicked off his so-called war on terrorism, but it's also important to examine how America reached the point where that type of unchecked power could actually come to exist.

Take the actions of the CIA, for example. Since its formation, it has acted virtually unimpeded through its use of covert operations worldwide in order to do everything from causing coups d'etats to carrying out assassinations. The investigations done by the Church Committee in the 70s were supposed to ensure more oversight - a fact that some people claim actually hamstrung the agency and led to the 9/11 intelligence failures.

While the old CIA may have been noted for the “cowboy” swagger of its personnel, the new CIA is, in the words of one critic, composed of “cautious bureaucrats who avoid the risks that come with taking action, who fill out every form in triplicate” and put “the emphasis on audit rather than action.” Congressional meddling is primarily responsible for this new CIA ethos, transforming it from an agency willing to take risks, and act at times in a Machiavellian manner, into just another sclerotic Washington bureaucracy.

The agency obviously didn't stop taking those risks, as we all know now.

That 2001 article by Stephen F. Knott led to this conclusion, the effects of which we are all now witnessing:

The response to the disaster of September 11th starkly reveals that members of Congress are quite adept at invoking “plausible deniability.” They are often the first to criticize, and the last to accept responsibility, for failed U. S. policies and practices. Oddly enough, a restoration of executive control of intelligence could increase the potential that the president, or his immediate deputies, would be held responsible for the successes and failures of the intelligence community. But this is a secondary consideration, for only by restoring the executive branch’s power to move with “secrecy and dispatch,” and to control the “business of intelligence,” as Alexander Hamilton and John Jay put it in The Federalist, will the nation be able to deter and defeat its enemies.

I wonder how professor Knott feels about endorsing that position today.

Regardless of all of the revelations over the decades of the "work" the CIA is doing in America's name, the mythology of the sexy spy with the nifty gagdets whose death-defeating tactics are pushed by Hollywood and applauded by millions won't end any time soon. Who would dare accuse CIA agents of being treasonous (besides people like Cheney and his henchmen who choose to out them when it's politically convenient rather than protecting them, as they're bound to do)?

While it's the job of the Democrats to try to wrestle power back from the Bush adminitration for those items detailed in the NYT's "must-do" list, the public also needs to remember that their party has used covert methods and actions when they thought it would be expedient as well.

As Scott Ritter notes*:

I personally witnessed the Director of the CIA under Bill Clinton, James Woolsey, fabricate a case for the continued existence of Iraqi ballistic missiles in November 1993 after I had provided a detailed briefing which articulated the UN inspector's findings that Iraq's missile program had been fundamentally disarmed. I led the UN inspector's investigation into the defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamal, in August 1995, and saw how the Clinton administration twisted his words to make a case for the continued existence of a nuclear program the weapons inspectors knew to be nothing more than scrap and old paper. I was in Baghdad at the head of an inspection team in the summer of 1996 as the Clinton administration used the inspection process as a vehicle for a covert action program run by the CIA intending to assassinate Saddam Hussein.

I twice traveled to the White House to brief the National Security Council in the confines of the White House Situation Room on the plans of the inspectors to pursue the possibility of concealed Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, only to have the Clinton national security team betray the inspectors by failing to deliver the promised support, and when the inspections failed to deliver any evidence of Iraqi wrong-doing, attempt to blame the inspectors while denying any wrong doing on their part.

Obviously, this culture of covert corruption has a very long history that runs through the administrations of both of the big two parties, yet we're now expecting the current crop of Democrats (including many longstanding members who have been complicit in these affairs) to turn around and bring everything to light in order to end these types of activities? Isn't that rather like the fox guarding the hen house, as the old cliche says?

This Democratic congress may hold hearings, may investigate the Bush administration's horrendous abuses, may even impeach the president (although Nancy Pelosi has made it clear that impeachment is "off the table"), but do they have the power or the willingness to end the disastrous policies of the CIA? Will they stand up to an administration full of ex-CIA officials who now run the White House? And where does the American public stand on these issues?

It's clear the majority are outraged over the Bush administration's abuses, and so they should be. Are they willing, however, to give up the power exercised on their behalf as members of the so-called "greatest country in the world" by CIA agents and those in the numerous other intelligence agencies that are a part of the US government in order to keep them "safe"? My guess would be that only a small minority would actually demand full accountability and transparency and, even if they did, they wouldn't get it from the Republicans or the Democrats who are so entrenched in the use of those powers that they'd be loathe to surrender many of them in the end.

That's the dilemma the American people face, as do those worldwide who've been affected by these covert actions. It's doubtful they'll find much justice any time soon and time is already running out for the Democrats to deal with all of what Bush has wrought prior to the end of his term. Perhaps they should be spending less time speechifying and fundraising on the '08 campaign trail and more time actually working on the business of the country. As for the CIA, the more it changes, the more it stays the same.

* h/t Madman in the Marketplace whose work you can find at Liberal Street Fighter.