So Bush Can Do Whatever he Wants To

[mylanta]

NSA Stymies Justice Dept. Spying Probe

[Munched]



By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: May 11, 2006
Filed at 6:59 a.m. ET
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government has abruptly ended an inquiry into the warrantless eavesdropping program because the National Security Agency refused to grant Justice Department lawyers the necessary security clearance to probe the matter.
The Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility, or OPR, sent a fax to Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-N.Y., on Wednesday saying they were closing their inquiry because without clearance their lawyers cannot examine Justice lawyers' role in the program.
''We have been unable to make any meaningful progress in our investigation because OPR has been denied security clearances for access to information about the NSA program,'' OPR counsel H. Marshall Jarrett wrote to Hinchey. Hinchey's office shared the letter with The Associated Press.
Jarrett wrote that beginning in January, his office has made a series of requests for the necessary clearances. Those requests were denied Tuesday.
''Without these clearances, we cannot investigate this matter and therefore have closed our investigation,'' wrote Jarrett.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said the terrorist surveillance program ''has been subject to extensive oversight both in the executive branch and in Congress from the time of its inception.''
Roehrkasse noted the OPR's mission is not to investigate possible wrongdoing in other agencies, but to determine if Justice Department lawyers violated any ethical rules. He declined to comment when asked if the end of the inquiry meant the agency believed its lawyers had handled the wiretapping matter ethically.
Hinchey is one of many House Democrats who have been highly critical of the domestic eavesdropping program first revealed in December. He said lawmakers would push to find out who at the NSA denied the Justice Department lawyers security clearance.
''This administration thinks they can just violate any law they want, and they've created a culture of fear to try to get away with that. It's up to us to stand up to them,'' said Hinchey.
In February, the OPR announced it would examine the conduct of its own agency's lawyers in the program, though they were not authorized to investigate NSA activities.
Bush's decision to authorize the largest U.S. spy agency to monitor people inside the United States, without warrants, generated a host of questions about the program's legal justification.
The administration has vehemently defended the eavesdropping, saying the NSA's activities were narrowly targeted to intercept international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the U.S. with suspected ties to the al-Qaida terror network.
Separately, the Justice Department sought last month to dismiss a federal lawsuit accusing the telephone company AT&T of colluding with the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program.
The lawsuit, brought by an Internet privacy group, does not name the government as a defendant, but the Department of Justice has sought to quash the lawsuit, saying it threatens to expose government and military secrets.
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On the Net:
Justice's Office of Professional Responsibility: http://www.usdoj.gov/opr/index.html
National Security Agency: http://www.nsa.gov/home--html.cfm
More Articles in National » (http://www.nytimes.com/pages/national/index.html)

[RAK]

Does this answer your question?
http://www.danfingerman.com/images/bush/Finger.jpg


RAK

NEW SENIOR MEMBER!:peace:

Just goes to show: Age doesn't equal wisdom :doh:

[RAK]

Well, now that I got that out of the, here's a followup; It seems that the Enemy is US!

May 11, 2006
Bush Says U.S. Spying Is Not Widespread
By JOHN O'NEIL

President Bush today denied that the government is "mining or trolling through the personal lives of innocent Americans," as Democrats expressed outrage over a news report describing a National Security Agency program that has collected vast amounts of telephone records.

The article, in USA Today, said that the agency did not listen to the calls, but secretly obtained information on numbers dialed by "tens of millions of Americans" and used " it for "data mining— computer analysis of large amounts of information for clues or patterns to terrorist activity.

Making a hastily scheduled appearance in the White House, Mr. Bush did not directly address the collection of phone records, except to say that "new claims" had been raised about surveillance. He said all intelligence work was conducted "within the law" and that domestic conversations were not listened to without a court warrant.

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," he said. "Our efforts are focused on Al Qaeda and their known associates."

In the Senate, Democrats denounced the program, citing it as evidence that Congress had failed to carry out its duty to make sure that the intelligence activities did not violate civil rights.

And Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he would call executives of AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon "to see if we can learn some of the underlying facts."

He said he would question them about "what we can't find out from the Department of Justice or other administration officials."

The article named those three companies as cooperating with the security agency's request; it said that Qwest had refused to provide the information. AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon all issued statements declaring that they have always acted within the law.

"BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information without proper legal authority," said a company spokesman, Jeff Battcher.

"AT&T has a long history of vigorously protecting customer privacy," said a spokesman, Selim Bingol. "If and when AT&T is asked to help, we do so strictly within the law and under the most stringent conditions."

And Robert Verettoni, a Verizon spokesman, said, "We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers' privacy."

The New York Times reported last December that the agency had gathered data from phone and e-mail traffic with the cooperation of several major telecommunications companies.

But Democrats reacted angrily to the USA Today article and its description of the program's vast size, including an assertion by one unnamed source that its goal was the creation of a database of every phone call ever made within the United States' borders.

"Are you telling me that tens of millions of Americans are involved with Al Qaeda?" Senator Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, the committee's ranking minority member, asked angrily.

Like Mr. Specter, Mr. Leahy made a link between the new charge and the administration's refusal to answer the many of the committee's questions about the security agency's warrantless wiretaps of calls between the United States and overseas in which one person is suspected of terrorist ties.

"It's our government, our government!" he said, turning red in the face and waving a copy of USA Today. "It's not one party's government, it's America's government!"

Other Democrats demanded that the administration officials, including Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez and former Attorney General John Ashcroft, be subpoenaed to testify under oath about both programs.

And they made clear that they thought the new surveillance issue would complicate the nomination of Gen. Michael V. Hayden, a former head of the security agency, to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency.

"I want to ask General Hayden about these programs before we move forward with his nomination, which I was inclined to be supportive of, if he showed the requisite independence," said Senator Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat and member of the Judiciary Committee.

Republicans urged caution before drawing any conclusions based on the article, and noted that it described the program as collecting information only about phone numbers, not about the contents of conversations.

"It's not a wiretapping program, it's simply a compilation, according to the report here, of numbers that phone companies maintain," said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who is also on the judiciary panel.

He compared it to "mail covers" and "pen registers," techniques long used by law-enforcement authorities to record the addresses on letters or calls made by individuals under investigation. No warrant is needed for such efforts, but the government must certify with a court that the information likely to be obtained is relevant to an ongoing investigation.

But at least one prominent Republican expressed reservations. "I am concerned about what I read with regard to N.S.A. databases of phone calls," Representative John A. Boehner of Ohio, the House majority leader, told The Associated Press.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the California Democrat who is a member of the Intelligence Committee as well as the Judiciary Committee, appeared to confirm at least the gist of the article, while stressing that what was under discussion was not wiretapping. "It's fair to say that what is in the news this morning is not content collection," she said.

Even so, she warned, "I happen to believe that we are on our way to a major Constitutional confrontation on the Fourth Amendment guarantees over unreasonable search and seizure."

Senator Russell D. Feingold, a Wisconsin Democrat who is also on both the judiciary and intelligence panels, expressed dismay over what he termed the administration's "arrogance and abuse of power." He said the United States can fight terrorism and still protect privacy, "but only if we have a president who believes in these principles."

The Times article disclosing the data mining program last December quoted officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program as saying the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

In the USA Today article, the White House defended its overall eavesdropping program and said no domestic surveillance is conducted without court approval.

"The intelligence activities undertaken by the United States government are lawful, necessary and required to protect Americans from terrorist attacks," said Dana Perino, the deputy White House press secretary, who added that appropriate members of Congress have been briefed on intelligence activities.

The anger among committee members carried over to a number of other related developments. Senator Specter said he was sending a letter to the Justice Department in response to a news report that an investigation by the Justice Department's ethics office into the lawyers who gave approval to the domestic surveillance program was abandoned because the investigators were refused the necessary security clearances.

"It's sort of incomprehensible that that was done," Senator Specter said, adding that he was asking that the clearances be granted so the review could continue.

Senator Richard J. Durbin, an Illinois Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, called the decision "clear evidence of a cover-up within this administration."

Mr. Specter also said that he "had some indication" that Mr. Ashcroft and James Comey, a former deputy Attorney General, had some knowledge about the domestic surveillance program, but said he didn't think it would be "fruitful" to subpoena them to testify.

And Mr. Specter said that he believed he had the agreement of all 10 Republicans on the committee for a bill he has proposed that would ask the special court that handles requests for warrants on foreign intelligence to rule on the Constitutionality of the domestic surveillance program.

But several Democrats indicated that they were not likely to support the bill in the absence of more information about the surveillance the government is conducting in general.

"How can we approve this without knowing much more?" asked Mr. Durbin.

David Stout contributed reporting from Washington for this article.

[Dan18960]

You know since Verizon answers to the PA PUC, I am thinking of calling them tomorrow just to complain about my privacy being invaded by Verizon giving private information on my phone usage without due process of a warrant.

Even if there is nothing that the State can do - it is going to cost Verizon for getting a PUC complaint.

Maybe if we all have our friends, neighbors, and relatives call the PUC in PA, Verizon may feel it in their pocket books!

Remember EVERY call to the PUC is charged to the utility company your are complaining about. It doesn't matter if it is justified or not. So if we all complained - Verizon would have to pay the PUC for EVERY complaint.:director:

[RAK]

NSA Sweep "Waste of Time," Analyst Says

It'd be one thing if the NSA's massive sweep of our phone records was actually helping catch terrorists. But what if it's not working at all? A leading practitioner of the kind of analysis the NSA is supposedly performing in this surveillance program says that "it's a waste of time, a waste of resources. And it lets the real terrorists run free."

Re-reading the USA Today piece, one paragraph jumped out:

This kind of data collection from phone companies is not uncommon; it's been done before, though never on this large a scale, the official said. The data are used for 'social network analysis,' the official said, meaning to study how terrorist networks contact each other and how they are tied together.

So I called Valdis Krebs, who's considered by many to be the leading authority on social network analysis -- the art and science of finding the important connections in a seemingly-impenetrable mass of data. His analysis of the social network surrounding the 9/11 hijackers is a classic in the field.

step_2.gifHere's what Krebs had to say about the newly-revealed NSA program that aims to track "every call ever made": "If you're looking for a needle, making the haystack bigger is counterintuitive. It just doesn't make sense."

"Certain people are more suspicious than others," he adds. They make frequent trips back-and-forth to Afghanistan, for instance. "So you start with them. And you work two steps out. If none of those people are connected, you don't have a cell. Because if one was there, you'd find some clustering. You don't have to collect all the data in the world to do that."

The right thing to do is to look for the best haystack, not the biggest haystack. We knew exactly which haystack to look at in the year 2000 . We just didn't do it...

The worst part -- the thing that's most disappointing to me -- is that this is not the right way to do this. It's a waste of time, a waste of resources. And it lets the real terrorists run free.

http://www.defensetech.org/archives/002399.html

Here's another interesting snippet from the same page:

UPDATE 2:30 PM: Shane Harris broke this story, in broad strokes, back in March, Patrick reminds us. Harris also offers a possible explanation for some of the NSA program's massive size:

To find meaningful patterns in transactional data, analysts need a lot of it. They must set baselines about what constitutes "normal" behavior versus "suspicious" activity. Administration officials have said that the NSA doesn't intercept the contents of a communication unless officials have a [B]"reasonable" basis to conclude that at least one party is linked to a terrorist organization.

To make any reasonable determination like that, the agency needs hundreds of thousands, or even millions, of call records, preferably as soon as they are created, said a senior person in the defense industry who is familiar with the NSA program and is an expert in the analytical tools used to find patterns and connections. Asked if this means that the NSA program is much broader and less targeted than administration officials have described, the expert replied, "I think that's correct."

Remember General Hayden's interpretation of the Fourth Amendment?
Landay: "The legal standard is probable cause, General -- "

Gen. Hayden [indignant]: "Just to be very clear ... mmkay... and believe me, if there's any Amendment to the Constitution that employees of the National Security Agency are familiar with, it's the Fourth. Alright? And it is a reasonableness standard in the Fourth Amendment. The constitutional standard is 'reasonable'"
It wasn't a misinterpretation at all; He just let the cat out of the bag that this administration has REWRITTEN IT without the permission of the American people. The new law of the land appears to be "Presumption of Guilt".Scary times ahead........

RAK

[RAK]

Tin-Foil Hat Warning!:tinfoil3:
http://www.pensitoreview.com/2006/05/12/cheney-and-rumsfeld-shielded-telecoms-from-domestic-spying-charges-in-the-1970s/



Cheney and Rumsfeld Shielded Telecoms from Domestic Spying Charges in the 1970s
Posted by Jon Ponder | May. 12, 2006, 4:34 am

President Bush’s illegal domestic spying program is not the first government program for spying on American citizens. To understand how the present controversy will play out, we need look no farther back in history than the Ford Administration to see how it will play out:

After World War II, the NSA’s predecessor, the Army Signal Security Agency, sent representatives to the major telegraph companies and asked for cooperation in getting access to all telegraph traffic entering or leaving the United States. The companies complied, over the objections of their lawyers. When these practices came to light as part of a 1976 investigation into intelligence abuses, President Gerald R. Ford extended executive privilege, which shielded those involved from testifying publicly, to the telecommunications companies on the recommendation of then chief-of-staff Dick Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, according to the Project on Government Oversight.