I don't think that holding hearings amounts to much.
I don't think that what Bush SAYS amounts to much. He is sounding like a well rehearsed PR person, and does what he pleases, regardless of what he says, or what Congress dictates that he should do or not do.
Has everyone given up, thinking that doing anything is futile?
Is it time for something more radical?
There is a lot of bi-partisan criticism of this program. Those who claim that this is a Liberal-Conservative issue are full of it. Just ask Joe Scarborough:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12756832/
Joe is right that the Dem leaders should have complained out loud earlier. I am sure that many feared for their jobs, and feared that the American public wouldn't agree with them, so they said nothing. Cowardly for sure, but nowhere near the same ballpark as those who initated said programs.
Cycloptichorn
GO, JOE!!!!
Whooda thunk he would say anything negative about the current administration?
Here's some interesting info on the possible scope
of the NSA phone database.
We've been asking what they need all that data for...
Quote:May 27, 1999
Lawmakers Raise Questions About International Spy Network
By NIALL McKAY
An international surveillance network established by the National Security Agency and British intelligence services has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, as lawmakers in the United States question whether the network, known as Echelon, could be used to monitor American citizens.
Last week, the House Committee on Intelligence requested that the National Security Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency provide a detailed report to Congress explaining what legal standards they use to monitor the conversations, transmissions and activities of American citizens.
The request is part of an amendment to the annual intelligence budget bill, the Intelligence Reauthorization Act. It was proposed by Bob Barr, a Georgia Republican and was supported by the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, Porter Goss, a Florida Republican. The amendment was passed by the House on May 13 and will now go before the Senate.
Barr, a former CIA analyst, is part of a growing contingent in the United States, Europe and Australia alarmed by the existence of Echelon, a computer system that monitors millions of e-mail, fax, telex and phone messages sent over satellite-based communications systems as well as terrestrial-based data communications. The system was established under what is known as the "UKUSA Agreement" after World War II and includes the security agencies of the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Although Echelon was originally set up as an international spy network, lawmakers are concerned that it could be used to eavesdrop on American citizens.
"I am concerned there are not sufficient legal mechanisms in place to protect our private information from unauthorized government eavesdropping through such mechanisms as Project Echelon," Barr said in an interview on Tuesday.
The finished report will outline the legal bases and other criteria used by United States intelligence agencies when assessing potential wiretap targets. It will be submitted to the House and made available to the public.
"If the agencies feel unable to provide a full account to the public, then a second classified report will be provided to the House Committee on Intelligence," Barr said. "This is to stop the agencies hiding behind a cloak of secrecy."
Judith Emmel, chief of public affairs for the NSA, declined to comment about the UKUSA Agreement but said the agency was committed to responding to all information requests covered by Barr's amendment. "The NSA's Office of General Counsel works hard to ensure that all Agency activities are conducted in accordance with the highest constitutional, legal and ethical standards," she said.
Until last Sunday, no government or intelligence agency from the member states had openly admitted to the existence of the UKUSA Agreement or Echelon. However, on a television program broadcast on Sunday in Australia, the director of Australia's Defence Signals Directorate acknowledged the existence of the agreement. The official, Martin Brady, declined to be interviewed for the "Sunday Program," but provided a statement for its special on Echelon. "DSD does cooperate with counterpart signals intelligence organizations overseas under the UKUSA relationship," the statement said.
Related Articles
European Parliament Debates Wiretap Proposal
(May 7, 1999)
Dutch Law Goes Beyond Enabling Wiretapping to Make It a Requirement
(April 14, 1998)
European Study Paints a Chilling Portrait of Technology's Uses
(February 24, 1998)
Meanwhile, European Parliament officials have also expressed concern about the use of Echelon to gather economic intelligence for participating nations. Last October, the spying system came to the attention of the Parliament during a debate on Europe's intelligence relationship with the United States. At that time, the Parliament decided it needed more information about Echelon and asked its Science and Technology Options Assessment Panel to commission a report.
The report, entitled "Development of Surveillance Technology and Risk of Abuse of Economic Information", was published on May 10 and provides a detailed account of Echelon and other intelligence monitoring systems.
According to the report, Echelon is just one of the many code names for the monitoring system, which consists of satellite interception stations in participating countries. The stations collectively monitor millions of voice and data messages each day. These messages are then scanned and checked against certain key criteria held in a computer system called the "Dictionary." In the case of voice communications, the criteria could include a suspected criminal's telephone number; with respect to data communications, the messages might be scanned for certain keywords, like "bomb" or "drugs." The report also alleges that Echelon is capable of monitoring terrestrial Internet traffic through interception nodes placed on deep-sea communications cables.
While few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers and terrorists, many are concerned that the system could be abused to collect economic and political information.
"The recent revelations about China's spying activities in the U.S. demonstrates that there is a clear need for electronic monitoring capabilities," said Patrick Poole, a lecturer in government and economics at Bannock Burn College in Franklin, Tenn., who compiled a report on Echelon for the Free Congress Foundation. "But those capabilities can be abused for political or economic purposes so we need to ensure that there is some sort of legislative control over these systems."
On the "Sunday Program" special on Echelon, Mike Frost, a former employee of Canada's Communications Security Establishment, said that Britain's intelligence agency requested that the CSE monitor the communications of British government officials in the late 1980s. Under British law, the intelligence agency is prohibited from monitoring its own government. Frost also said that since the cold war is over, the "the focus now is towards economic intelligence."
Still, Echelon has been shrouded in such secrecy that its very existence has been difficult to prove. Barr's amendment aims to change that.
"If this report reveals that information about American citizens is being collected without legal authorization, the intelligence community will have some serious explaining to do," Barr said.
Related Sites
These sites are not part of The New York Times on the Web, and The Times has no control over their content or availability.
Copyright 1999 The New York Times Company
Are we being duped by the illusion of motion?
Check out the date of this article .... sounds a bit like todays wouldn't you say?
Source
Good digging, Gelisgesti.
This Time, It Really Is Orwellian
Quote:By Robert Parry
May 12, 2006
Given George W. Bush's history of outright lying, especially on national security matters, it may seem silly to dissect his words about the new disclosure that his administration has collected phone records of some 200 million Americans.
But Bush made two parse-able points in reacting to USA Today's story about the National Security Agency building a vast database of domestic phone calls. "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," Bush said, adding "the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities."
In his brief remarks, however, Bush didn't define what he meant by "ordinary Americans" nor whether the data-mining might cover, say, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, just not "millions."
For instance, would a journalist covering national security be regarded as an "ordinary American"? What about a political opponent or an anti-war activist who has criticized administration policies in the Middle East? Such "unordinary" people might number in the tens of thousands, but perhaps not into the millions.
Also, isn't it reasonable to suspect that the Bush administration would be tempted to tap into its huge database to, say, check on who might have been calling reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker - or now USA Today - where significant national security stories have been published?
Or during Campaign 2004, wouldn't the White House political apparatchiks have been eager to know whether, say, Sen. John Kerry had been in touch with foreign officials who might have confided that they were worried about Bush gaining a second term?
Or what about calls to and from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald while he investigates a White House leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer married to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an Iraq War critic?
What if one of these "unordinary" Americans had placed a lot of calls to an illicit lover or a psychiatrist? Wouldn't Bush's aggressive political operatives know just how to make the most of such information?
Paranoia?
While such concerns might seem paranoid to some observers, Bush has blurred his political fortunes with the national interest before, such as his authorization to Vice President Dick Cheney's staff in mid-2003 to put out classified material on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to undercut Ambassador Wilson.
Though Plame was an undercover CIA .....
ABC News: Federal official says US tracking calls made by ABC News, New York Times, Washington Post
RAW STORY
Published: Monday May 15, 2006
ABC News' press office just sent out this release to news organizations, RAW STORY has learned. The story has been posted at the ABC NEWS blog (Read here).
#
ABC's Brian Ross and Richard Esposito Report:
A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.
"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.
We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.
One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials.
People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.
The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded.
A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators.
DEVELOPING...
A little more. A little more. A little more comes out every couple of days or weeks.
And every time it does, we hear from Conservatives that this is as far as things go, and that we are alarmist for not believing that things go deeper than we have found out.
Spying on reporters. Spying on their own WH and CIA operatives. When will this end? What will it take for Conservatives to believe that the Bush administration is willing to spy on anyone that they wish, in complete violation of the law?
This isn't going to go over well with the media, and the media already doesn't like the Bush administration. Expect things to get a lot worse for the Conservative cause if this is true.
Cycloptichorn
502 adults is a pretty pathetic sample size to extrapolate the entirety of America from, wouldn't you agree, Tico?
I could cite some other polls which disagree with those numbers, but I won't bother. It won't make a difference in the end.
Cycloptichorn
Ba-da-boing boing-boing boing-boing boing-boing. Duelling polls.
Quote:NEWSWEEK Poll: Americans Wary of NSA Spying
According to the NEWSWEEK poll, 73 percent of Democrats and 26 percent of Republicans think the NSA's program is overly intrusive. Details of the surveillance efforts were first reported on Wednesday by USA Today. The newspaper said the NSA has collected tens of millions of customer phone records from AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Bell-South Corp., in an effort to assemble a database of every call made within the United States. While the records include detailed information about when and where phone calls were made, the government isn't listening in to the actual conversations, a U.S. intelligence official familiar with the program told the newspaper. The only big telecommunications company that has refused to participate is Denver-based Qwest, which says it was concerned about the legal implications of turning over customer information to the government without warrants.
Story continues
Ooh goodie. Can't wait for the next irrelevation, that's bound to be doozy.
Federal Source to ABC News: We Know Who You're Calling
Just what was mentioned by Frank Rich in his column this past Sunday.
Looks like the Bush Florida Recount team is back in action from reading the comments that follow..
FBI Source Confirms ABC Report on Monitoring of Reporters' C
I've always thought a major target of Bush's spy operation was to track journalist's calls to identify leakers.---BBB
FBI Source Confirms ABC Report on Monitoring of Reporters' Calls
By E&P Staff
Published: May 15, 2006 11:40 AM ET updated 7:00 PM
Brian Ross and Richard Esposito of ABC News reported on the networks "The Blotter" web site this morning that a senior federal law enforcement official had informed them that "the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources."
This source quipped: "It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick."
Late Monday, the ABC reporters updated their account: "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. He said it wasn't so much that the calls were being "tracked" as "backtracked."
In the earlier report, the two journalists wrote: "We do not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.
"Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation. One former official was asked to sign a document stating he was not a confidential source for New York Times reporter James Risen.
"Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.
"Under Bush Administration guidelines, it is not considered illegal for the government to keep track of numbers dialed by phone customers.
"The official who warned ABC News said there was no indication our phones were being tapped so the content of the conversation could be recorded. A pattern of phone calls from a reporter, however, could provide valuable clues for leak investigators."
The complete Monday evening update from ABC follows.
***
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.
Germany Admits Its Foreign Intel Agency Spied on Journalists
Germany Admits Its Foreign Intel Agency Spied on Journalists
By E&P Staff
Published: May 15, 2006 5:55 PM ET
The German government admitted today that its foreign intelligence service, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), had spied on German journalists, and Chancellor Angela Merkel ordered the agency to stop, according to published reports.
Ulrich Wilhelm, a government spokesman is reported to have said the surveillance appeared to be "isolated past cases" and in future "such operative measures against journalists ... are not to be repeated."
According to media reports, some of the country's most prominent investigative journalists were targeted by the intelligence agency, which reportedly focused its efforts on finding out what the reporters were working on and who their sources were. The BND admitted that it paid some journalists the equivalent of several hundred thousand dollars to write reports about their colleagues.
The program reportedly began in 1993 and continued until only a few months ago.
