MM,
You aren't going to bring up that ALLEGED spying again are you? There is ZERO evidence that it occurred. None. NADA... No admission on the record by anyone. You destroy every argument you have made in defense of Bush by bringing it up.
In the case of Bush's NSA program. Bush has admitted it is happening. We don't know to what extent but it IS HAPPENING.
How can one possibly make a reasonable defense against unreasoned attacks?
Quote:The president has claimed and usurped unlimited power to do whatever he wants and to do so without any checks or balances--the laws be damned. And then he has the audacity to assert that questioning him on this power grab will harm our country.
This catastrophic power grab threatens to destroy the very foundation of our nation consisting of the rule of law and separation of powers. With Bush in office, the Constitution and the laws made by Congress are no longer the supreme law of the land, but mere suggestions that the president unilaterally determines whether he will follow or ignore.
This is horeshit at it's finest. I shouldn't need to prove that it is horeshit, you should be able to smell it from where you sit.
Republican Who Oversees N.S.A. Calls for Wiretap Inquiry
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2006
. . . A growing number of Republicans have called in recent days for Congress to consider amending federal wiretap law to address the constitutional issues raised by the N.S.A. operation.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for one, said he considered some of the administration's legal justifications for the program "dangerous" in their implications, and he told Mr. Gonzales that he wanted to work on new legislation that would help those tracking terrorism "know what they can and can't do."
But the administration has said repeatedly since the program was disclosed in December that it considers further legislation unnecessary, believing that the president already has the legal authority to authorize the operation.
Vice President Dick Cheney reasserted that position Tuesday in an interview on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."
Members of Congress "have the right and the responsibility to suggest whatever they want to suggest" about changing wiretap law, Mr. Cheney said. But "we have all the legal authority we need" already, he said, and a public debate over changes in the law could alert Al Qaeda to tactics used by American intelligence officials. . . .
The president has claimed and usurped unlimited power to do whatever he wants and to do so without any checks or balances--the laws be damned. And then he has the audacity to assert that questioning him on this power grab will harm our country.
This catastrophic power grab threatens to destroy the very foundation of our nation consisting of the rule of law and separation of powers. With Bush in office, the Constitution and the laws made by Congress are no longer the supreme law of the land, but mere suggestions that the president unilaterally determines whether he will follow or ignore.
Debra Law wrote:The only possible conclusion is that NSA agents are conducting broadly-based fishing expeditions of all our communications---no individualized suspicion is involved at all.
You can't smell that?
There you go MM.. That is EXACTLY what I knew you would bring up. You have brought it up before. It is so much crap it is hilarious.
Where is your evidence? I don't see any evidence of US citizens being spied upon unless you are claiming the Saudi Shiek is a US citizen.
I see lots of Newsmax crap that is unsubstantiated with no sources on the record. Isn't that your entire argument about the attacks on Bush? No sources? What source on the record has admitted to spying on US citizens under Clinton's orders?
Yeah, underage prostitutes but the Seattle police turned a blind eye.. Sure.. I almost believe that one. Oh. and huge cash payments to FBI agents. Yeah.. Sure.. no evidence of it though.
You do realize that foreign delegations aren't US citizens. Don't you?
I see nothing to support your claims MM. Innuendo about innuendo.
Anon,
the intelligent people on here dont laugh at American deaths,nor do they actively root for that to happen.
You have done both,and the proof was posted.
May I suggest you go away!!
My comments are based on the actual statements made by high-ranking officials in the Bush administration. Why don't you review those statements--you know--the statements that you chose to omit when you quoted my post:
Quote:Republican Who Oversees N.S.A. Calls for Wiretap Inquiry
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
WASHINGTON, Feb. 7, 2006
. . . A growing number of Republicans have called in recent days for Congress to consider amending federal wiretap law to address the constitutional issues raised by the N.S.A. operation.
Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, for one, said he considered some of the administration's legal justifications for the program "dangerous" in their implications, and he told Mr. Gonzales that he wanted to work on new legislation that would help those tracking terrorism "know what they can and can't do."
But the administration has said repeatedly since the program was disclosed in December that it considers further legislation unnecessary, believing that the president already has the legal authority to authorize the operation.
Vice President Dick Cheney reasserted that position Tuesday in an interview on "The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer."
Members of Congress "have the right and the responsibility to suggest whatever they want to suggest" about changing wiretap law, Mr. Cheney said. But "we have all the legal authority we need" already, he said, and a public debate over changes in the law could alert Al Qaeda to tactics used by American intelligence officials. . . .
The statements from Bush and his admininistration cohorts amply demonstrate that they view the rule of law as mere suggestions that Bush may unilaterally decide to follow or not follow.
Administration officials attempt to silence those who question their power grab with their fear propaganda--propaganda that people like McGentrix love to lick off their ****-covered boots.
What I have said is absolutely true:
Debra Law wrote:The president has claimed and usurped unlimited power to do whatever he wants and to do so without any checks or balances--the laws be damned. And then he has the audacity to assert that questioning him on this power grab will harm our country.
This catastrophic power grab threatens to destroy the very foundation of our nation consisting of the rule of law and separation of powers. With Bush in office, the Constitution and the laws made by Congress are no longer the supreme law of the land, but mere suggestions that the president unilaterally determines whether he will follow or ignore.
McGentrix wrote:Debra Law wrote:The only possible conclusion is that NSA agents are conducting broadly-based fishing expeditions of all our communications---no individualized suspicion is involved at all.
You can't smell that?
Again, you omitted the basis upon which that statement was made. It doesn't take a genious to figure out that your olfactory powers are skewed by the taste left in your mouth following all your boot licking.
The Bush administration's surveillance policy has failed to make a dent in the war against al Qaeda.
U.S. law enforcement sources said that more than four years of surveillance by the National Security Agency has failed to capture any high-level al Qaeda operative in the United States. They said al Qaeda insurgents have long stopped using the phones and even computers to relay messages. Instead, they employ couriers.
"They have been way ahead of us in communications security," a law enforcement source said. "At most, we have caught some riff-raff. But the heavies remain free and we believe some of them are in the United States."
The operations are already underway. No further gains can be made with this particular program by further legislation. The president and his legal team have found a way around FISA when it comes to monitoring terrorists.
I had attempted to keep the game impersonnal until you decided not to.
This is horeshit at it's finest. I shouldn't need to prove that it is horeshit, you should be able to smell it from where you sit.
McGentrix wrote:I had attempted to keep the game impersonnal until you decided not to.
I understood that you didn't mean to get personal when you repeated attacked my intelligence and said my posts smell like ****:
McGentrix wrote:This is horeshit at it's finest. I shouldn't need to prove that it is horeshit, you should be able to smell it from where you sit.
Therefore, it surprises me that you would take it personal when I suggested that the smell that offends you most likely comes from the stuff you've been licking off their boots.
Anon,
the intelligent people on here dont laugh at American deaths
mysteryman wrote:Anon,
the intelligent people on here dont laugh at American deaths
For once I agree, the intelligent Dems and progressives don"t laugh at American deaths. Leave that to the right-wing morons.
The Christian Science Monitor - csmonitor.com
from the February 09, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0209/p01s02-uspo.html
US plans massive data sweep
Little-known data-collection system could troll news, blogs, even e-mails. Will it go too far?
By Mark Clayton | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor
The US government is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.
The system - parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development - is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government's latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens' privacy.
"We don't realize that, as we live our lives and make little choices, like buying groceries, buying on Amazon, Googling, we're leaving traces everywhere," says Lee Tien, a staff attorney with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. "We have an attitude that no one will connect all those dots. But these programs are about connecting those dots - analyzing and aggregating them - in a way that we haven't thought about. It's one of the underlying fundamental issues we have yet to come to grips with."
The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old "Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment" portfolio. The TVTA received nearly $50 million in federal funding this year.
DHS officials are circumspect when talking about ADVISE. "I've heard of it," says Peter Sand, director of privacy technology. "I don't know the actual status right now. But if it's a system that's been discussed, then it's something we're involved in at some level."
Data-mining is a key technology
A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together. To prevent fraud, credit-card issuers use data-mining to look for patterns of suspicious activity.
What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records. The system would then store it as "entities" - linked data about people, places, things, organizations, and events, according to a report summarizing a 2004 DHS conference in Alexandria, Va. The storage requirements alone are huge - enough to retain information about 1 quadrillion entities, the report estimated. If each entity were a penny, they would collectively form a cube a half-mile high - roughly double the height of the Empire State Building.
But ADVISE and related DHS technologies aim to do much more, according to Joseph Kielman, manager of the TVTA portfolio. The key is not merely to identify terrorists, or sift for key words, but to identify critical patterns in data that illumine their motives and intentions, he wrote in a presentation at a November conference in Richland, Wash.
For example: Is a burst of Internet traffic between a few people the plotting of terrorists, or just bloggers arguing? ADVISE algorithms would try to determine that before flagging the data pattern for a human analyst's review.
At least a few pieces of ADVISE are already operational. Consider Starlight, which along with other "visualization" software tools can give human analysts a graphical view of data. Viewing data in this way could reveal patterns not obvious in text or number form. Understanding the relationships among people, organizations, places, and things - using social-behavior analysis and other techniques - is essential to going beyond mere data-mining to comprehensive "knowledge discovery in databases," Dr. Kielman wrote in his November report. He declined to be interviewed for this article.
One data program has foiled terrorists
Starlight has already helped foil some terror plots, says Jim Thomas, one of its developers and director of the government's new National Visualization Analytics Center in Richland, Wash. He can't elaborate because the cases are classified, he adds. But "there's no question that the technology we've invented here at the lab has been used to protect our freedoms - and that's pretty cool."
As envisioned, ADVISE and its analytical tools would be used by other agencies to look for terrorists. "All federal, state, local and private-sector security entities will be able to share and collaborate in real time with distributed data warehouses that will provide full support for analysis and action" for the ADVISE system, says the 2004 workshop report.
A program in the shadows
Yet the scope of ADVISE - its stage of development, cost, and most other details - is so obscure that critics say it poses a major privacy challenge.
"We just don't know enough about this technology, how it works, or what it is used for," says Marcia Hofmann of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington. "It matters to a lot of people that these programs and software exist. We don't really know to what extent the government is mining personal data."
Even congressmen with direct oversight of DHS, who favor data mining, say they don't know enough about the program.
"I am not fully briefed on ADVISE," wrote Rep. Curt Weldon (R) of Pennsylvania, vice chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, in an e-mail. "I'll get briefed this week."
Privacy concerns have torpedoed federal data-mining efforts in the past. In 2002, news reports revealed that the Defense Department was working on Total Information Awareness, a project aimed at collecting and sifting vast amounts of personal and government data for clues to terrorism. An uproar caused Congress to cancel the TIA program a year later.
Echoes of a past controversial plan
ADVISE "looks very much like TIA," Mr. Tien of the Electronic Frontier Foundation writes in an e-mail. "There's the same emphasis on broad collection and pattern analysis."
But Mr. Sand, the DHS official, emphasizes that privacy protection would be built-in. "Before a system leaves the department there's been a privacy review.... That's our focus."
Some computer scientists support the concepts behind ADVISE.
"This sort of technology does protect against a real threat," says Jeffrey Ullman, professor emeritus of computer science at Stanford University. "If a computer suspects me of being a terrorist, but just says maybe an analyst should look at it ... well, that's no big deal. This is the type of thing we need to be willing to do, to give up a certain amount of privacy."
Others are less sure.
"It isn't a bad idea, but you have to do it in a way that demonstrates its utility - and with provable privacy protection," says Latanya Sweeney, founder of the Data Privacy Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon University. But since speaking on privacy at the 2004 DHS workshop, she now doubts the department is building privacy into ADVISE. "At this point, ADVISE has no funding for privacy technology."
She cites a recent request for proposal by the Office of Naval Research on behalf of DHS. Although it doesn't mention ADVISE by name, the proposal outlines data-technology research that meshes closely with technology cited in ADVISE documents.
Neither the proposal - nor any other she has seen - provides any funding for provable privacy technology, she adds.
Some in Congress push for more oversight of federal data-mining
Amid the furor over electronic eavesdropping by the National Security Agency, Congress may be poised to expand its scrutiny of government efforts to "mine" public data for hints of terrorist activity.
"One element of the NSA's domestic spying program that has gotten too little attention is the government's reportedly widespread use of data-mining technology to analyze the communications of ordinary Americans," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D) of Wisconsin in a Jan. 23 statement.
Senator Feingold is among a handful of congressmen who have in the past sponsored legislation - unsuccessfully - to require federal agencies to report on data-mining programs and how they maintain privacy.
Without oversight and accountability, critics say, even well-intentioned counterterrorism programs could experience mission creep, having their purview expanded to include non- terrorists - or even political opponents or groups. "The development of this type of data-mining technology has serious implications for the future of personal privacy," says Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists.
Even congressional supporters of the effort want more information about data-mining efforts.
"There has to be more and better congressional oversight," says Rep. Curt Weldon (R) of Pennsylvania and vice chairman of the House committee overseeing the Department of Homeland Security. "But there can't be oversight till Congress understands what data-mining is. There needs to be a broad look at this because they [intelligence agencies] are obviously seeing the value of this."
Data-mining - the systematic, often automated gleaning of insights from databases - is seen "increasingly as a useful tool" to help detect terrorist threats, the General Accountability Office reported in 2004. Of the nearly 200 federal data-mining efforts the GAO counted, at least 14 were acknowledged to focus on counterterrorism.
While privacy laws do place some restriction on government use of private data - such as medical records - they don't prevent intelligence agencies from buying information from commercial data collectors. Congress has done little so far to regulate the practice or even require basic notification from agencies, privacy experts say.
Indeed, even data that look anonymous aren't necessarily so. For example: With name and Social Security number stripped from their files, 87 percent of Americans can be identified simply by knowing their date of birth, gender, and five-digit Zip code, according to research by Latanya Sweeney, a data-privacy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.
In a separate 2004 report to Congress, the GAO cited eight issues that need to be addressed to provide adequate privacy barriers amid federal data-mining. Top among them was establishing oversight boards for such programs.
Some antiterror efforts die - others just change names
Defense Department
November 2002 - The New York Times identifies a counterterrorism program called Total Information Awareness.
September 2003 - After terminating TIA on privacy grounds, Congress shuts down its successor, Terrorism Information Awareness, for the same reasons.
Department of Homeland Security
February 2003 - The department's Transportation Security Administration (TSA) announces it's replacing its 1990s-era Computer-Assisted Passenger Prescreening System (CAPPS I).
July 2004 - TSA cancels CAPPS II because of privacy concerns.
August 2004 - TSA says it will begin testing a similar system - Secure Flight - with built-in privacy features.
July 2005 - Government auditors charge that Secure Flight is violating privacy laws by holding information on 43,000 people not suspected of terrorism.
Critics hit timing, substance
of Prez's comments on L.A. target
BY JAMES GORDON MEEK and KENNETH R. BAZINET
DAILY NEWS WASHINGTON BUREAU
WASHINGTON - President Bush detailed a terrorist plot yesterday that would have used shoe bombers and a hijacked plane to knock down the tallest building on the West Coast.The plot to strike a Los Angeles skyscraper has been mentioned before, but Bush released additional details yesterday.
The timing of his remarks and the seriousness of the plot were questioned, however, by officials ranging from the mayor of Los Angeles to counter-terrorism experts.
The President's comments come as he is under fire even by members of his own party for his domestic eavesdropping program. Bush didn't contend that the eavesdropping busted up the L.A. plot, but his remarks served as a stark reminder of the menace from terrorists.
"We now know that in October 2001, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed - the mastermind of the Sept. 11 attacks - had already set in motion a plan to have terrorist operatives hijack an airplane using shoe bombs to breach the cockpit door, and fly the plane into the tallest building on the West Coast," Bush said.
"We believe the intended target was [Library] Tower in Los Angeles, Calif. Rather than use Arab hijackers as he had on September the 11th, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed sought out young men from Southeast Asia, whom he believed would not arouse as much suspicion," Bush added.
The attack was foiled, he said, when a plotter was arrested in Asia.
Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, a Democrat, was taken aback by Bush's statements.
"I'm amazed that the President would make this [announcement] on national TV and not inform us of these details through the appropriate channels," the mayor said. "I don't expect a call from the President - but somebody."
"We should have been aware of all the details much before today," Villaraigosa said.
The White House claimed it gave California officials a heads-up about the speech.
Other Democrats, including Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), have claimed Bush is following a strategy of highlighting the terror threat to counter criticism of his eavesdropping program and of the war in Iraq.
A Clinton source yesterday questioned "the timing of the speech."
Several counterterrorism officials were surprised that Bush claimed the "West Coast plot" was "set in motion."
"There was no definitive plot. It never materialized or got past the thought stage," said a senior counterterrorism official, who has worked at the CIA and the FBI.
In June 2004, FBI Deputy Director John Pistole refused to characterize it as an advanced plot.
Bush's top counterterrorism adviser, Frances Townsend, said the critics don't "truly understand what the timeline was."
She said the West Coast plot was "blessed" in October 2001 by Osama Bin Laden, but Townsend admitted little else is known about it.
With Michael McAuliff
Originally published on February 10, 2006
Roxxxanne wrote:mysteryman wrote:Anon,
the intelligent people on here dont laugh at American deaths
For once I agree, the intelligent Dems and progressives don"t laugh at American deaths. Leave that to the right-wing morons.
Have you read the statements by anon?
He called for more deaths,and laughed at Pat Tillmans death.
You may doubt me,but I will send you a link to his quote,if you want.
He gets mad when confronted with his statements.All I have asked is does he still stand by his statements.
