America... Spying on Americans II

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?

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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:

Quote:

Now, whatever you consider yourself, friends, you should be afraid. You should be very afraid. With over 200 million Americans targeted, this domestic spying program is so widespread, it is so random, it is so far removed from focusing on al Qaeda suspects that the president was talking about today, that it?'s hard to imagine any intelligence program in U.S. history being so susceptible to abuse.

You know, I served on the Judiciary Committee and the Armed Service Committee in Congress for four years, and no program I studied while using security clearances ever came close to the scope of this massive spy program. It is dangerous, it breaks FCC laws, and it endangers all Americans?' right to privacy.

But you know what? The villains in this spy program are pretty easy to target, almost as easy as your phone records. First you have the president, who?'s shown that he will break laws if they get in his way of spying. Second, Democratic leaders?-they complain now, but where were they? They reviewed the program. Why no protest? Don?'t hold your press conferences now, Nancy Pelosi. Tell us about it when you learn about it!

And finally, the phone companies, who actually profited from the government reading all of your phone bills. They should be sued and their CEOs fired.

Hey, memo to the president and congressional leaders who signed up on this lousy program; We don?'t trust you anymore. We don?'t trust you with our phone bills. We don?'t trust you with our bank records. We don?'t trust you with our medical histories. From now on, if you want to look at Americans?' private records, get a damn search warrant!

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

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GO, JOE!!!!

Whooda thunk he would say anything negative about the current administration?

Here's some interesting info on the possible scopeof the NSA phone database.

We've been asking what they need all that data for...

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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

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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 .....

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And more:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060513/ap_on_go_ca_st_pe/spies_eyes

Spy Agency Watching Americans From Space

By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 48 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - A little-known spy agency that analyzes imagery taken from the skies has been spending significantly more time watching U.S. soil.

In an era when other intelligence agencies try to hide those operations, the director of the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, retired Air Force Lt. Gen. James Clapper, is proud of that domestic mission.

He said the work the agency did after hurricanes Rita and Katrina was the best he'd seen an intelligence agency do in his 42 years in the spy business.

"This was kind of a direct payback to the taxpayers for the investment made in this agency over the years, even though in its original design it was intended for foreign intelligence purposes," Clapper said in a Thursday interview with The Associated Press.

Geospatial intelligence is the science of combining imagery, such as satellite pictures, to physically depict features or activities happening anywhere on the planet. A part of the Defense Department, the NGA usually operates unnoticed to provide information on nuclear sites, terror camps, troop movements or natural disasters.

After last year's hurricanes, the agency had an unusually public face. It set up mobile command centers that sprung out of the backs of Humvees and provided imagery for rescuers and hurricane victims who wanted to know the condition of their homes. Victims would provide their street address and the NGA would provide a satellite photo of their property. In one way or another, some 900 agency officials were involved.

Spy agencies historically avoided domestic operations out of concern for Pentagon regulations and Reagan-era executive order, known as 12333, that restricted intelligence collection on American citizens and companies. Its budget, like all intelligence agencies, is classified.

On Clapper's watch of the last five years, his agency has found ways to expand its mission to help prepare security at Super Bowls and political conventions or deal with natural disasters, such as hurricanes and forest fires.

With help, the agency can also zoom in. Its officials cooperate with private groups, such as hotel security, to get access to footage of a lobby or ballroom. That video can then be linked with mapping and graphical data to help secure events or take action, if a hostage situation or other catastrophe happens.

Privacy advocates wonder how much the agency picks up ?- and stores. Many are increasingly skeptical of intelligence agencies with recent revelations about the Bush administration's surveillance on phone calls and e-mails.

Among the government's most closely guarded secrets, the quality of pictures NGA receives from classified satellites is believed to far exceed the one-meter resolution available commercially. That means they can take a satellite "snapshot" from high above the atmosphere that is crisply detailed down to one meter level, which is 3.3 feet.

Clapper says his agency only does big pictures, so concerns about using the NGA's foreign intelligence apparatus at home doesn't apply.

"We are not trying to examine an individual dwelling, for example, because what our mission is normally going to be is looking at large areas," he said. "It doesn't really affect or threaten anyone's privacy or civil liberties when you are looking at a large collective area."

When asked what additional powers he'd ask Congress for, he said, "I wouldn't."

His agency also handles its historic mission: regional threats, such as Iran and North Korea; terrorist hideouts; and tracking drug trade. "Everything and everybody has to be some place," he said.

He considers his brand of intelligence a chess match. "There are sophisticated nation states that have a good understanding of our surveillance capabilities," including Iran, he said. "What we have to do is counter that" by taking advantage of anomalies or sending spy planes and satellites over more frequently.

Adversaries who hide their most important facilities underground is a trend the agency has to work at, he said.

NGA was once a stepchild of the intelligence community. But Clapper said it has come into its own and become an equal partner with the other spy agencies, such as the CIA.

Experience-wise, the agency is among the youngest of the spy agencies. About 40 percent of the agency's analyst have been hired in the last five years.

"They are very inexperienced, and that's just fine. They don't have any baggage," said Clapper, who retires next month as the longest serving agency director. "The people that we are getting now are bright, computer literate. ... That is not something I lie awake and worry about."

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Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping
May 14, 2006
Cheney Pushed U.S. to Widen Eavesdropping
By SCOTT SHANE and ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times

In the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, Vice President Dick Cheney and his top legal adviser argued that the National Security Agency should intercept purely domestic telephone calls and e-mail messages without warrants in the hunt for terrorists, according to two senior intelligence officials.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear.

As the program's overseer and chief salesman, General Hayden is certain to face questions about his role when he appears at a Senate hearing next week on his nomination as director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Criticism of the surveillance program, which some lawmakers say is illegal, flared again this week with the disclosure that the N.S.A. had collected the phone records of millions of Americans in an effort to track terrorism suspects.

By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.

As in other areas of intelligence collection, including interrogation methods for terrorism suspects, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington took an aggressive view of what was permissible under the Constitution, the two intelligence officials said.

If people suspected of links to Al Qaeda made calls inside the United States, the vice president and Mr. Addington thought eavesdropping without warrants "could be done and should be done," one of them said.

He added: "That's not what the N.S.A. lawyers think."

The other official said there was "a very healthy debate" over the issue. The vice president's staff was "pushing and pushing, and it was up to the N.S.A. lawyers to draw a line and say absolutely not."

Both officials said they were speaking about the internal discussions because of the significant national security and civil liberty issues involved and because they thought it was important for citizens to understand the interplay between Mr. Cheney's office and the N.S.A. Both spoke favorably of General Hayden; one expressed no view on his nomination for the C.I.A. job, and the other was interviewed by The New York Times weeks before President Bush selected the general.

Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, declined to discuss the deliberations about the classified program. "As the administration, including the vice president, has said, this is terrorist surveillance, not domestic surveillance," she said. "The vice president has explained this wartime measure is limited in scope and conducted in a lawful way that safeguards our civil liberties."

Representatives for the N.S.A. and for the general declined to comment.

Even with the N.S.A. lawyers' reported success in limiting its scope, the program represents a fundamental expansion of the agency's practices, one that critics say is illegal. For the first time since 1978, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed and began requiring court approval for all eavesdropping on United States soil, the N.S.A. is intentionally listening in on Americans' calls without warrants.

The spying that would become such a divisive issue for the White House and for General Hayden grew out of a meeting days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush gathered his senior intelligence aides to brainstorm about ways to head off another attack.

"Is there anything more we could be doing, given the current laws?" the president later recalled asking.

General Hayden stepped forward. "There is," he said, according to Mr. Bush's recounting of the conversation in March during a town-hall-style meeting in Cleveland.

By all accounts, General Hayden was the principal architect of the plan. He saw the opportunity to use the N.S.A.'s enormous technological capabilities by loosening restrictions on the agency's operations inside the United States.

For his part, Mr. Cheney helped justify the program with an expansive theory of presidential power, which he explained to traveling reporters a few days after The Times first reported on the program last December.

Mr. Cheney traced his views to his service as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford in the 1970's, when post-Watergate changes, which included the FISA law, "served to erode the authority I think the president needs to be effective, especially in a national security area."

Senior intelligence officials outside the N.S.A. who discussed the matter in late 2001 with General Hayden said he accepted the White House and Justice Department argument that the president, as commander in chief, had the authority to approve such eavesdropping on international calls.

"Hayden was no cowboy on this," said another former intelligence official who was granted anonymity because it was the only way he would talk about a program that remains classified. "He was a stickler for staying within the framework laid out and making sure it was legal, and I think he believed that it was."

The official said General Hayden appeared particularly concerned about ensuring that one end of each conversation was outside the United States. For his employees at the N.S.A., whose mission is foreign intelligence, avoiding purely domestic eavesdropping appears to have been crucial.

But critics of the program say the law does not allow spying on a caller in the United States without a warrant, period ?- no matter whether the call is domestic or international.

"Both would violate FISA," said Nancy Libin, staff counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a civil liberties group.

Ms. Libin said limiting the intercepts without warrants to international calls "may have been a political calculation, because it sounds more reassuring."

One indication that the restriction to international communications was dictated by more than legal considerations came at a House hearing last month. Asked whether the president had the authority to order eavesdropping without a warrant on purely domestic communications, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales replied, "I'm not going to rule it out."

Despite the decision to focus on only international calls and e-mail messages, some domestic traffic was inadvertently picked up because of difficulties posed by cellphone and e-mail technology in determining whether a person was on American soil, as The Times reported last year.

And one government official, who had access to intelligence from the intercepts that he said he would discuss only if granted anonymity, believes that some of the purely domestic eavesdropping in the program's early phase was intentional. No other officials have made that claim.

A White House spokeswoman, Dana Perino, said Saturday, "N.S.A. has not intentionally listened in on domestic-to-domestic calls without a court order."

President Bush and other officials have denied that the program monitors domestic calls. They have, however, generally stated their comments in the present tense, leaving open the question of whether domestic calls may have been captured before the program's rules were fully established.

After the program started, General Hayden was the one who briefed members of Congress on it and who later tried to dissuade The Times from reporting its existence.

When the newspaper published its first article on the program in December, the general found himself on the defensive. He had often insisted in interviews and public testimony that the N.S.A. always followed laws protecting Americans' privacy. As the program's disclosure provoked an outcry, he had to square those assurances with the fact that the program sidestepped the FISA statute.

Nonetheless, General Hayden took on a prominent role in explaining and defending the program. He appeared at the White House alongside Mr. Gonzales, spoke on television and gave an impassioned speech at the National Press Club in January.

Some of the program's critics have found his visibility in defending a controversial presidential policy inappropriate for an intelligence professional. "There's some unhappiness at N.S.A. with Hayden taking such an upfront role," said Matthew M. Aid, an intelligence historian and former N.S.A. analyst who keeps in touch with some employees. "If the White House got them into this, why is Hayden the one taking the flak?"

But General Hayden seems determined to stand up for the agency's conduct ?- and his own. In the press club speech, General Hayden recounted remarks he made to N.S.A. employees two days after the Sept. 11 attacks: "We are going to keep America free by making Americans feel safe again."

He said that the standards for what represented a "reasonable" intrusion into Americans' privacy had changed "as smoke billowed from two American cities and a Pennsylvania farm field."

"We acted accordingly," he said.

In the speech, General Hayden hinted at the internal discussion of the proper limits of the N.S.A. program. Although he did not mention Mr. Cheney or his staff, he said the decision to limit the eavesdropping to international phone calls and e-mail messages was "one of the decisions that had been made collectively."

"Certainly, I personally support it," General Hayden said.

President Defends Pick

WASHINGTON, May 13 (Bloomberg News) ?- In his weekly radio address on Saturday, President Bush defended the qualifications of General Hayden to be C.I.A. director and sought to ease concern about the domestic eavesdropping program that the general helped create.

In General Hayden, "the men and women of the C.I.A. will have a strong leader who will support them as they work to disrupt terrorist attacks, penetrate closed societies and gain information that is vital to protecting our nation," Mr. Bush said.

He urged the Senate to confirm the general "promptly."

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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...

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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

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Quote:

Poll: Most Americans Support NSA's Efforts

By Richard Morin
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, May 12, 2006; 7:00 AM

A majority of Americans initially support a controversial National Security Agency program to collect information on telephone calls made in the United States in an effort to identify and investigate potential terrorist threats, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.

The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent said the program was unacceptable, which included 24 percent who strongly objected to it.

A slightly larger majority--66 percent--said they would not be bothered if NSA collected records of personal calls they had made, the poll found.

Underlying those views is the belief that the need to investigate terrorism outweighs privacy concerns. According to the poll, 65 percent of those interviewed said it was more important to investigate potential terrorist threats "even if it intrudes on privacy." Three in 10--31 percent--said it was more important for the federal government not to intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.

Half--51 percent--approved of the way President Bush was handling privacy matters.

The survey results reflect initial public reaction to the NSA program. Those views that could change or deepen as more details about the effort become known over the next few days.

USA Today disclosed in its Thursday editions the existence of the massive domestic intelligence-gathering program. The effort began soon after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. Since then, the agency began collecting call records on tens of millions of personal and business telephone calls made in the United States. Agency personnel reportedly analyze those records to identify suspicious calling patterns but do not listen in on or record individual telephone conversations.

Word of the program sparked immediate criticism on Capitol Hill, where Democrats and Republicans criticized the effort as a threat to privacy and called for congressional inquiries to learn more about the operation. In the survey, big majorities of Republicans and political independents said they found the program to be acceptable while Democrats were split.

President Bush made an unscheduled appearance yesterday before White House reporters to defend his administration's efforts to investigate terrorism and criticize public disclosure of secret intelligence operations. But he did not directly acknowledge the existence of the NSA records-gathering program or answer reporters' questions about it.

By a 56 percent to 42 percent margin, Americans said it was appropriate for the news media to have disclosed the existence of this secret government program.

A total of 502 randomly selected adults were interviewed Thursday night for this survey. Margin of sampling error is five percentage points for the overall results. The practical difficulties of doing a survey in a single night represents another potential source of error.
© 2006 The Washington Post Company

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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

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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

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Cycloptichorn wrote:

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

"Margin of sampling error for overall results is plus or minus four percentage points."

:wink:

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NSA expert: Next relevation will be ISP, cell phone wiretaps http://www.rawstory.com/news/2006/NSA_expert_Next_relevation_will_be_0515.html

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Ooh goodie. Can't wait for the next irrelevation, that's bound to be doozy.

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Quote:

Congress to Scrap NSA, Create ?'Transparent' Spy Agency
by Scott Ott

(2006-05-12) ?- Concerned that the National Security Agency (NSA) may have violated the civil liberties of Americans by analyzing records of millions of phone calls to detect patterns that might indicate terrorist activity, a bipartisan coalition in Congress today will unveil legislation to scrap the NSA and replace it with a more ?'transparent' spy agency.

According to language in the measure, the new intelligence unit, dubbed Open-Source Intelligence (OSI), will "harness the power of the internet to protect the right of the American people to know how their spy dollar is spent."

"There's nothing like sunshine to ensure accountability," said an unnamed Congressional aide who spoke in exchange for a lobster dinner, a fine chianti and a $12 Macanudo cigar. "Just because the enemy is among us, using our telecommunications infrastructure to plot the next major attack, doesn't mean the government can sneak around doing secret stuff simply to save a few thousand, or million, lives. We have rights."

Under the terms of the bill, the OSI website will include a list of all covert agents, with photos, home addresses, email links and IM screennames. As the OSI gathers data, it will be accessible in real-time through the website to "premium subscribers," but even non-members will be able to view the aggregated data, and listen to brief, sample clips of legally intercepted phone calls."

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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..

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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.

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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.

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THE SPIES WHO SHAG US

Quote:

Friday, May 12, 2006
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by Greg Palast

I know you're shocked -- SHOCKED! -- that George Bush is listening in on all your phone calls. Without a warrant. That's nothing. And it's not news.

This is: the snooping into your phone bill is just the snout of the pig of a strange, lucrative link-up between the Administration's Homeland Security spy network and private companies operating beyond the reach of the laws meant to protect us from our government. You can call it the privatization of the FBI -- though it is better described as the creation of a private KGB.

The leader in the field of what is called "data mining," is a company called, "ChoicePoint, Inc," which has sucked up over a billion dollars in national security contracts.

Worried about Dick Cheney listening in Sunday on your call to Mom? That ain't nothing. You should be more concerned that they are linking this info to your medical records, your bill purchases and your entire personal profile including, not incidentally, your voting registration. Five years ago, I discovered that ChoicePoint had already gathered 16 billion data files on Americans -- and I know they've expanded their ops at an explosive rate.

They are paid to keep an eye on you -- because the FBI can't. For the government to collect this stuff is against the law unless you're suspected of a crime. (The law in question is the Constitution.) But ChoicePoint can collect it for "commercial" purchases -- and under the Bush Administration's suspect reading of the Patriot Act -- our domestic spying apparatchiks can then BUY the info from ChoicePoint.

Who ARE these guys selling George Bush a piece of you?

ChoicePoint's board has more Republicans than a Palm Beach country club. It was funded, and its board stocked, by such Republican sugar daddies as billionaires Bernie Marcus and Ken Langone -- even after Langone was charged by the Securities Exchange Commission with abuse of inside information.

I first ran across these guys in 2000 in Florida when our Guardian/BBC team discovered the list of 94,000 "felons" that Katherine Harris had ordered removed from Florida's voter rolls before the election. Virtually every voter purged was innocent of any crime except, in most cases, Voting While Black. Who came up with this electoral hit list that gave Bush the White House? ChoicePoint, Inc.

And worse, they KNEW the racially-tainted list of felons was bogus. And when we caught them, they lied about it. While they've since apologized to the NAACP, ChoicePoint's ethnic cleansing of voter rolls has been amply rewarded by the man the company elected.

And now ChoicePoint and George Bush want your blood. Forget your phone bill. ChoicePoint, a sickened executive of the company told us in confidence, "hope[s] to build a database of DNA samples from every person in the United States ...linked to all the other information held by CP [ChoicePoint]" from medical to voting records.

And ChoicePoint lied about that too. The company publicly denied they gave DNA to the Feds -- but then told our investigator, pretending to seek work, that ChoicePoint was "the number one" provider of DNA info to the FBI.

"And that scares the hell out of me," said the executive (who has since left the company), because ChoicePoint gets it WRONG so often. We are not contracting out our Homeland Security to James Bond here. It's more like Austin Powers, Inc. Besides the 97% error rate in finding Florida "felons," Illinois State Police fired the company after discovering ChoicePoint had produced test "results" on rape case evidence ... that didn't exist. And ChoicePoint just got hit with the largest fine in Federal Trade Commission history for letting identity thieves purchase 145,000 credit card records.

But it won't stop, despite Republican senators shedding big crocodile tears about "surveillance" of innocent Americans. That's because FEAR is a lucrative business -- not just for ChoicePoint, but for firms such as Syntech, Sybase and Lockheed-Martin -- each of which has provided lucrative posts or profits to connected Republicans including former Total Information Awareness chief John Poindexter (Syntech), Marvin Bush (Sybase) and Lynn Cheney (Lockheed-Martin).

But how can they get Americans to give up our personal files, our phone logs, our DNA and our rights? Easy. Fear sells better than sex -- and they want you to be afraid. Back to today's New York Times, page 28: "Wider Use of DNA Lists is Urged in Fighting Crime." And who is providing the technology? It comes, says the Times, from the work done on using DNA fragments to identity victims of the September 11 attack. And who did that job (for $12 million, no bid)? ChoicePoint, Inc. Which is NOT mentioned by the Times.

"Genetic surveillance would thus shift from the individual [the alleged criminal] to the family," says the Times -- which will require, of course, a national DNA database of NON-criminals.

It doesn't end there. Turn to the same newspaper, page 23, with a story about a weird new law passed by the state of Georgia to fight illegal immigration. Every single employer and government agency will be required to match citizen or worker data against national databases to affirm citizenship. It won't stop illegal border crossing, but hey, someone's going to make big bucks on selling data. And guess what local boy owns the data mine? ChoicePoint, Inc., of Alpharetta, Georgia.

The knuckleheads at the Times don't put the three stories together because the real players aren't in the press releases their reporters re-write.

But that's the Fear Industry for you. You aren't safer from terrorists or criminals or "felon" voters. But the national wallet is several billion dollars lighter and the Bill of Rights is a couple amendments shorter.

And that's their program. They get the data mine -- and we get the shaft.

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America... Spying on Americans II

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