woiyo wrote: Our tactics are on full display which is my real concern. Apparently, our tacits being on display is not a concern to the legislature since they are the mouths roaring in the media.
Look who's whining
now. Actually, `your' spying tactics have been on display for years, as terrorists are not the only ones who dislike being spied upon. The European Union did not like it either, and in 2000, it has published a series of detailed studies on NSA projects like Echelon.
Telepolis, a leading German computer magazine, has a very good technical summary of the Echelon project (
in English even), with links to the rather longish EU studies it summarizes. (Note that some of the links no longer work because the European Union's website "has been redesigned". Evidently the new design had no place for the EU studies on America's spying efforts. You can route around the EU's unfortunate oversight via the web archive at
www.archive.org .)
While the nature of Bush's spying program is unknowable for a private citizen, we can make educated guesses based on the information publicized by the EU. Echelon and friends are capable of recording millions of phonecalls a day, convert the speach into text, filter the text for certain keywords, and forward the conversation to a human if their text matches certain patterns that the filter looks for. I believe that the Bush administration has assigned Echelon and similar projects to the task of looking selectively for phone calls between terrorists. And I believe this for the following reasons.
1) This approach gives the US a fighting chance to intercept the planners of every major terrorist attack.
2) Any more narrowly tailored approach would probably
not give the US this chance, because terrorists can change their phones between conversations, use different names, and employ similar tactics of evasion. Content-based filtering, by contrast, can frustrate these tactics, assuming that the terrorists don't use code words for their communications. (I presume that every terrorist worth intercepting is doing this by now, but there are people I respect who disagree with me on this.)
3) My theory (that the US is using Echelon to filter out conversations with terrorists) explains why the administration is so hostile to any public discussion of the project.
a) Echelon is a multinational project, and if its workings were exposed in a US lawsuit, it may make the other participants reluctant to cooperate with the US. (I might welcome this development as a citizen, but it's embarrasing for the government.)
b) While I am not an expert on the FISA court, I doubt it would issue such broad-based warrants if the president asked for them. (Correct, Debra?)
c) The way Echelon works, a computer can indiscriminately screen thousands of messages before it forwards one suspicious text to a person of flesh and blood. Thus, even
if Congress changed FISA to allow warrantless spying on US persons through Echelon, that would create more constitutional questions than it answers: (Though I'm no expert on the US constitution either. I just like to play one on A2K.)
I. Is it a fourth amendment search when only a computer reads or listenes to a message, but no human ever looks at it? If yes (Debra?), the program dies here, if not, that raises the next question.
II. If a message matches the search pattern of a software filter, is that "probable cause" for a search -- meaning, for a human to look at the message? How does that depend on the pattern being searched for? (Debra?)
It may take years before Congress and the courts sort out messages like this, and the Bush administration is rightfully famous for the shortcuts it takes with the law. So this would explain why they are doing everything to keep it secret.
So, woiyo, while the Bush administration is trying hard to blow smoke about the issue, publically available sources have always been telling us a lot about US spying program. It stands to reason that they would adapt those programs to catch terrorists. Certainly the precise nature of the adaption is unknowable to us mortals. But given what we do know, it seems implausible that to discuss the constitutionality of the domestic spying program, the administration would have to tell us anything about the program that public sources haven't been telling us for a long time. It seems much more plausible that they are trying to spare themselves the inconvenience of having their program slowed down by the courts.
