Spying on Terrorists is a Great Idea
but spying on everybody is not so great.
It is amazing to me that the people who seem to be most outraged by "domestic spying" are the same
people who want the government to keep getting bigger and more powerful every year.
It is naïve to expect complete privacy when talking on the phone. The chances are pretty
good that your phone conversations are just between you and the person you called, but there are no
guarantees. When you use a cordless phone or a cell phone, you are talking on a two-way
radio, and your expectations should be appropriately lower.
But a list of the phone numbers you have called is a long way from a wiretap. Long-distance
phone carriers have been keeping lists like that for years. And if it will help catch and convict
dangerous criminals, why not let the three-letter agencies sift through the records? And the
answer is simple: When the feds have put away all the mass-murderers and terrorists, they'll
keep looking for smaller and smaller fish in the sea of phone records, especially with people like
Hillary Clinton and Janet Reno at the highest levels of the government. For example, if your
brother-in-law is arrested for selling marijuana, and then the police discover that you have called
his house about a hundred times (for various reasons), you could have a big problem.
Incidentally, if you are really concerned about "domestic spying", you should think twice about putting
a toll road access tag
on your car.
The latest...
Domestic
spying far outpaces terrorism prosecutions. The number of Americans being secretly wiretapped or
having their financial and other records reviewed by the government has continued to increase as officials
aggressively use powers approved after the Sept. 11 attacks. But the number of terrorism prosecutions
ending up in court — one measure of the effectiveness of such sleuthing — has continued
to decline, in some cases precipitously.
Surveillance Showdown:
Would any sane country purposefully limit its ability to spy on enemy communications in time of war? That
is the question Congress must answer as it takes up reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Privacy activists, civil libertarians and congressional Democrats argue that both foreign and domestic
eavesdropping must be subject to judicial scrutiny and oversight, even if this means drastically reducing the
amount of foreign intelligence information available to the government, without ever acknowledging the costs
involved. It is time the American people had an open and honest debate on the relative importance of
privacy and security.
Bush
Asks Congress to Extend NSA Program. President Bush today [9/19/2007] called on Congress to make permanent
a law that gives the government broad authority to eavesdrop without warrants on phone calls, e-mail and other
communication between people in the United States and suspected terrorists abroad. The president wants
Congress to extend the law, set to expire in February, that allows spy agencies to intercept the
communications of suspected terrorists that pass through U.S. switching facilities.
Phone Companies
Refuse to Provide Data on Spy Program. Three of the largest U.S. telephone companies declined
to answer lawmakers' questions about Bush administration efforts to spy on Americans' phone calls and e-mails,
saying the government forbade them from doing so.
NSA Style
Eavesdropping Thwarts 9/11 Anniversary Terror Attack. It appears that the very methods of phone
call monitoring the Democrats have made their life's mission to impede have once again saved the day. …
Unfortunately, there's no reason to believe that Democrat leaders the likes of Senate Judiciary Committee
Chairman Pat Leahy will be any less likely to rebuke the use of "secret" (is there any other effective
kind?) wiretaps now than before. Even at the cost of American lives.
Listening In:
When the German government announced arrests this week in a terrorist plot against American and German
targets inside Germany, one telling detail got little notice: Two of the suspects were identified,
in part, based on telephone conversations intercepted by American intelligence.
House
approves foreign wiretap bill. The House handed President Bush a victory
Saturday, voting to expand the government's abilities to eavesdrop without warrants on
foreign suspects whose communications pass through the United States.
Victory for Bush Administration in Spying Case.
A federal appeals court ordered the dismissal Friday [7/6/2007] of a lawsuit challenging President Bush's
domestic spying program, saying the plaintiffs had no standing to sue. The 2-1 ruling by the 6th Federal
Circuit Court of Appeals panel vacated a 2006 order by a federal judge in Detroit, who found that the
post-Sept. 11 warrantless surveillance aimed at uncovering terrorist activity violated constitutional
rights to privacy and free speech and the separation of powers.
The Editor is quick to point out...
The word "privacy" is not in the Constitution.
Wiretap Tales.
Democrats and former Deputy Attorney General James Comey put on quite a Senate show Tuesday [5/15/2007] over
the National Security Agency's wiretapping program. With New York's Chuck Schumer directing, the players
staged a full length docudrama to create the impression that the Bush Administration broke the law in
reauthorizing the program to eavesdrop on al Qaeda. … News stories have suggested a pattern of White
House misdeeds to accomplish an ultimately illegal end. The transcript tells a different story.
Wiretap Debacle:
The U.S. homeland hasn't been struck by terrorists since September 11, and one reason may be more aggressive
intelligence policies. So Americans should be alarmed that one of the best intelligence
tools — warrantless wiretapping of al Qaeda suspects — has recently become far less
effective and is in danger of being neutered by Congressional Democrats.
The Editor says...
I disagree insofar as the notion that no terrorist attacks have taken place in America
since 9/11/2001 is easily disproven.
Networks Distort Terrorist Surveillance
Into 'Domestic Spying'. The announcement Wednesday from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, that
the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) would now approve of surveillance actions under the
"Terrorist Surveillance Program," prompted a return to the bad network habit of describing as "domestic
spying" and "domestic eavesdropping" the effort to monitor communication between people inside the United
States and suspected terrorists abroad.
Let's Have a
FISA Fight. Here's something I never thought I'd say: Three cheers for Chris Dodd!
With his bid for the Democrats' presidential nomination canceled for lack of interest, Connecticut's senior
senator is back to doing what he does best: making the United States vulnerable to foreign threats.
The editors of the Wall Street Journal report that Dodd is blocking a deal to overhaul the dangerously
obsolete Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).
Supreme Court rejects ACLU domestic spying lawsuit.
The Supreme Court dealt a setback Tuesday [2/19/2008] to civil rights and privacy advocates who oppose the Bush
administration's warrantless wiretapping program. The justices, without comment, turned down an appeal
from the American Civil Liberties Union to let it pursue a lawsuit against the program that began shortly
after the Sept. 11 terror attacks.
FBI turns to broad new wiretap method.
Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be
assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current
and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or
keywords. … "What they're doing is even worse than Carnivore," said Kevin Bankston, a staff attorney at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation who attended the Stanford event. "What they're doing is intercepting
everyone and then choosing their targets."
Did
someone mention Carnivore?
What kind of words and phrases could
the FBI be hoping to find?
Did the Clinton
Administration Engage in "Domestic Spying" Against Princess Diana? The first thing to remember
in trying to evaluate reports that U.S. intelligence services wiretapped Princess Diana is that British press
accounts can be notoriously unreliable. … But if the reports out now are accurate, the Diana case could
raise questions for veterans of the Clinton administration similar to those facing the Bush administration today.
Gonzales attacks
ruling against domestic spying. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales contended Saturday that some
critics of the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program were defining freedom in a way that
presents a "grave threat" to U.S. security. Gonzales was the second administration official in two days
to attack a federal judge's ruling last August that the program was unconstitutional. Vice President Dick
Cheney on Friday [11/17/2006] called the decision "an indefensible act of judicial overreaching."
Court
says eavesdropping program can continue. The government can continue to use its warrantless
domestic wiretap program pending the Justice Department's appeal of a federal judge's ruling outlawing the
program, an Appeals Court in Cincinnati ruled on Wednesday [10/04/2006]. The ruling overturned District
Judge Anna Diggs Taylor's decision last week to deny a lengthy stay in the case, which is expected to end up
with the Supreme Court.
A Perverse and Dangerous
Ruling. By striking down the Terrorists Surveillance Program (TSP) Judge Anna Diggs Taylor has
hopefully opened the eyes of the American public to the Leftist political insurgency that is undermining the
United States' ability to defend itself against future terrorist attacks.
Senate Panel Rejects Democrat's Attempt to Rein In Wiretapping
Program. Senate Republicans blocked Democratic attempts to rein in President Bush's domestic
wiretapping program Wednesday [9/13/2006], endorsing a White House-supported bill that would give the
controversial surveillance legal status.
A terror plot is exposed by
the policies many American liberals oppose. British antiterrorism chief Peter Clarke said at
a news conference that the plot was foiled because "a large number of people" had been under surveillance,
with police monitoring "spending, travel and communications." Let's emphasize that again: The
plot was foiled because a large number of people were under surveillance concerning their spending,
travel and communications. Which leads us to wonder if Scotland Yard would have succeeded if the
ACLU or the New York Times had first learned the details of such surveillance programs.
More FISA
Fear-Mongering: The New York Times strikes again. In Times parlance, such
monitoring of international enemy contacts, routinely carried out by every wartime president in history,
somehow becomes "domestic spying" when George W. Bush employs it against an enemy that has managed to
attack the United States — and, according to the intelligence community's latest assessment, is
working feverishly to do it again.
White House invokes secrets
privilege in eavesdropping cases. The Bush administration has asked federal judges in New York
and Michigan to dismiss a pair of lawsuits filed over the National Security Agency's domestic eavesdropping
program, saying litigating them would jeopardize state secrets.
The ACLU v. National Security. The
fundamental defect of the case of ACLU v. NSA is that it is wholly contrived. Faked from beginning to
end. The claim of standing is for conduct that simply does not exist.
To connect the dots, you have to
see the dots. The jihadists are not "primitives". They're part of a sophisticated
network: They travel the world, see interesting places, meet interesting people — and
kill them. They're as globalized as McDonald's — but, on the whole, they fill
in less paperwork.
Information
Please. It's not 1942. It's 2006, and these three phone giants are about to be
excoriated for cooperating with the war on terror. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen
Specter has demanded that ATT, Verizon, and BellSouth testify under oath about their assistance to
the National Security Agency's counterterrorism programs; 50 House Democrats are demanding a criminal
investigation by special counsel.
Excellent!
Terrorist Surveillance and the
Constitution: While the totality of the executive powers and actions is meant to be checked and
balanced by the other two branches, the notion that every single executive activity, particularly in the
national security area, has to be checked either by Congress or by the judiciary, is absurd.
Dialing and the Democrats: No sooner had the
man who ran the National Security Agency for years been nominated to head the CIA than USA Today rushed out
details of our efforts to use technical means to find terrorists using the phones. And no sooner had
USA Today disclosed details of an apparent attempt by the National Security Agency to defend Americans
from terrorists than the Democratic Party and its leading politicians and interest groups went on the
attack. Not against the terrorists but against President Bush.
TV Jumps on Stale NSA Database Story. Like the TV
coverage, USA Today's story insinuated that the existence of the database was a major violation of Americans'
privacy rights and evidence that the President was lying last December when he described the NSA's eavesdropping
on suspected terrorist communications as limited and targeted.
The Editor says...
Just for reference, here is the USA Today article:
NSA has massive database of
Americans' phone calls. The three telecommunications companies are working under contract
with the NSA, which launched the program in 2001 shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the
sources said. The program is aimed at identifying and tracking suspected terrorists, they said. The
sources would talk only under a guarantee of anonymity because the NSA program is secret.
A Smelly NSA "Scoop" at USA Today. It
appears the basic flaw in the story, as suggested by the entire Verizon statement, is the assumption that
phone companies passed along records of local calls to the NSA when the company says such records may not
even exist in most cases.
The database double
standard. Here is the most insincere question a liberal TV news star can ask: How can
President Bush turn around his poll numbers? … The media's crocodile tears are not even laughable,
just nauseating. Pushing down the president's approval rating seems to be their daily task.
Media Crank Call: Ever since USA
Today broke a story on May 11 about the National Security Agency's secret review of millions of phone
records, the media and civil libertarians alike have gotten their knickers in a twist. But here's the
problem: the story isn't news, it isn't accurate, and it isn't (or shouldn't be) troubling.
Update -- USA Today backpedals.
USA Today: Call Database Not So
Broad. USA Today acknowledged in a "note to our readers" Friday [6/30/2006] that it could not
establish that BellSouth or Verizon contracted with the National Security Agency to provide it with customer
calling records, as it previously reported.
On the other hand...
Is the NSA's
phone call database legal because the President says so? As USA Today pointed out when
it revealed the existence of this program, phone numbers can readily be linked to names and addresses
using publicly available information. The claim that there's really nothing personal or private
about the phone call records — which tell the NSA who calls whom, when, and for how
long — is therefore a tenuous basis for defending the legality of data collection that
ordinarily requires a court order or the customer's consent.
Secret Mistakes. It's no
secret: Critics of the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terror have grown increasingly
livid with each leaked report of alleged civil liberties abuses. Less known, but no less true, is that
the latest round of criticism has relied on discredited data.
Data-mining
is the President's Duty. The latest outbreak of controversy over Bush administration efforts
to protect our nation from terrorist attack starkly demonstrates that the left and civil liberties extremists
are determined to alter the system the Framers bequeathed us in fundamental and dangerous ways.
Connecting dots:
NSA needs phone records. Despite the nonsense that the politically motivated
mainstream media and the left have been spouting on the NSA program, this critical
counterterrorism effort isn't intrusive, illegal — or unnecessary.
Loose
lips sink ships. Intentional, or even unintentional, leaks dry up productive
intelligence-gathering techniques; Americans are placed at risk. … Have we as a nation forgotten
the basics of the art of war? Are we so misguided as to believe that the ACLU will protect us
better than the NSA in this era of terrorism?
The Truth About
Secrets: Virtually every aspect of the war on terror has been met with a lawsuit. Recently
the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the ACLU sued the federal government over the NSA's surveillance
of international phone calls involving persons inside the United States. They seek court orders ceasing
and disclosing the surveillance.
Hysteria at the
ACLU. You would never know from all this heavy breathing that the data supplied to the NSA
consisted of phone numbers only, stripped of any identifying names or addresses. Or that the calls
themselves weren't actually monitored — no one was wiretapping any conversations. Or that the
Supreme Court has ruled that the government doesn't need a warrant to collect phone records, since information
voluntarily disclosed to a third party (such as the phone company) isn't protected by the Fourth Amendment.
Did someone mention
the ACLU?
Point of no
return: There is a large and gleeful audience in the Arab world for these gross brutalities,
just as there was glee and cheering among the Palestinians when the televised destruction of the World Trade
center was broadcast in the Middle East. Yet what are we preoccupied with or outraged about? Whether
the American government should intercept the phone calls of these cutthroats to people in the United States.
Telephoning the Enemy: By its own court
filings, the Council on American-Islamic Relations conclusively established its multiple communications with
persons suspected of connections with terrorists.
FISA judges say Bush is
within the law. A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday
[3/28/2006] told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when
he created by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).
House panel blocks probe of NSA
cost. The House Intelligence Committee on Thursday [3/30/2006] rejected a proposal to withhold
money from the National Security Agency if the White House did not reveal information about the cost of the
agency's warrantless surveillance program.
Point of no
return. The way the question is posed by many in the media and in politics, you would
think our intelligence agencies were listening in on you talking on the phone to your aunt Mabel.
Be serious! There are more than a quarter of a billion people in the United States. Intelligence
agencies have neither the manpower, the time, the money, nor the interest to listen in on you and
your aunt Mabel.
Censure Feingold. Unlike
Sen. Russell Feingold, the Wisconsin Democrat seeking to censure President Bush for ordering the
interception of communications in and out of the U.S. involving persons with suspected links to
al Qaeda, Democratic President Franklin Roosevelt had no qualms about warrantless eavesdropping
to protect the U.S. against attack. Neither did Harry Truman. There is a difference,
however, between the eavesdropping Roosevelt and Truman authorized and the eavesdropping Bush is
doing. Roosevelt and Truman did it in peacetime without congressional authorization. Bush
is doing it during a war that Sen. Feingold voted on Sept. 14, 2001 to authorize.
Feingold Calls Warrantless Wiretaps an
Impeachable Offense. "I think it is right in the strike zone of what the Founding Fathers
talked about when they talked about high crimes and misdemeanors," said Feingold, who introduced a
resolution on Monday [3/13/2006] to censure the president for his authorizing the National Security
Agency's electronic terrorist surveillance program.
[Where was Mr. Feingold's great concern about high crimes and misdemeanors seven or eight years ago?]
Do the Democrats know we're at
war? Many that oppose President Bush are claiming that he has authorized illegal wiretapping
and should be impeached. These actions have been wrongly termed "domestic spying" or "domestic
surveillance." From my view, these terms are purposefully wrong. The use of the wrong terms
is directly tied to the media and unhinged Democrats.
You're under
surveillance. In the midst of all the hypocritical and self-righteous talk about the fact
that the National Security Agency actually listens to calls from known or suspected terrorists talking
to someone in the United States or vice versa, is the fact that every single American is under surveillance
these days. It begins with the Social Security number that is issued to newborn infants!
If al Qaeda phones,
tell them we can't take the call. The issues at the center of this dispute are in fact
intellectually interesting, having to do with separation of powers, legal rules versus legal discretion,
and competing interpretations of the Fourth Amendment and Article II of the Constitution. But
let us here consider something that tends to fall outside legal considerations — effective
management.
Springtime for
Nixon. Liberals in the 1970s began suggesting that virtually all American spying is
unconstitutional. Soviet and Chinese spies were to be expected, but we shouldn't "be like
them." A similar double standard exists today in much of the big media and among certain liberal
politicians of both parties. The enemy does what it wants without restraint. We put shackles
on ourselves and are shocked when those without any attack us. Then we ask, "What went wrong?"
Security
choices: Democrats ought to be concerned by polls that show most Americans want the
government to intercept al Qaeda communications, even — perhaps especially — those
involving persons living here, as were all of the 9/11 attackers before they flew airplanes into our
buildings.
Leaks Damage U.S.
Intelligence Efforts. In the most recent case addressing this issue, the 1980 Truong case,
the Court upheld the Executive Branch's warrant-less electronic surveillance in the United States for
foreign intelligence purposes. The Court explicitly recognized a foreign intelligence exception
to the warrant requirement based on the President's constitutional authority and responsibility to
protect national security. Incidentally, the President under whose authority that warrant-less
search, or eavesdropping, was conducted was Jimmy Carter.
Has the New York Times
Violated the Espionage Act? The President, for his part, has not only stood firm, insisting
on both the legality and the absolute necessity of his actions, but has condemned the disclosure of
the NSA surveillance program as a "shameful act." In doing so, he has implicitly raised a question that
the Times and the President's foes have conspicuously sought to ignore — namely, what is,
and what should be, the relationship of news-gathering media to government secrets in the life-and-death
area of national security. Under the protections provided by the First Amendment of the Constitution,
do journalists have the right to publish whatever they can ferret out?
Jimmy Carter allowed surveillance
in 1977. In 1977, Mr. Carter and his attorney general, Griffin B. Bell, authorized warrantless
electronic surveillance used in the conviction of two men for spying on behalf of Vietnam. The men,
Truong Dinh Hung and Ronald Louis Humphrey, challenged their espionage convictions to the U.S. Court of
Appeals for the 4th Circuit, which unanimously ruled that the warrantless searches did not violate
the men's rights. In its opinion, the court said the executive branch has the "inherent authority" to
wiretap enemies such as terror plotters and is excused from obtaining warrants when surveillance
is "conducted 'primarily' for foreign intelligence reasons."
The opposite
of intelligence: If anyone can show me that the National Security Agency, under order from
President Bush or top aides, eavesdropped on Hillary Clinton or Ted Kennedy or some prominent partisan
critic, I'll change my tune and see what this administration is doing as a threat to civil liberties.
Amnesiac
America: Not that the president and commander-in-chief needed congressional permission
to defend the country, thanks to the foresight of those who wrote the Constitution. But in a joint
resolution passed three days after the September 11th attacks, Congress made the point explicitly,
recognizing that "the President has authority under the Constitution to take action to deter and
prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States."
'Domestic'
abuse: I hereby expressly consent to the NSA eavesdropping on any telephonic, Internet
or other electronic forms of communications I may have — whether I initiate or am on the
receiving end of the communication — with any person or persons the government has
reasonable basis to conclude is a member of al Qaeda, affiliated with al Qaeda or a member of an
organization affiliated with al Qaeda.
NYT Still Struggles to Understand NSA Program; Ignores
History. What is so hard to grasp here? Terrorism is a clandestine business. Should
we be calling the terrorists we're monitoring to let them know they are being monitored? Have there
been any wrongful deaths, convictions or violations in connection with the NSA program? No. Do the
American people support it? Yes.
Civil
liberties v. al Qaida nukes: Despite their best efforts to turn President George
Bush's authorization of the NSA program into a criminal case, it turns out that no laws were
broken, and most Americans actually want their government to track communications between
domestic Islamist groups and al Qaida principals around the world — not to mention
capturing or killing the latter.
The President
is honoring his oath. Are critics of President Bush's electronic-surveillance practices
concerned with the Constitution? Or are they just using any excuse they can find to accuse
him of abusing his power? If they are concerned with constitutional issues, why didn't they
object to President Clinton's advocacy of warrantless searches — even for physical searches as
opposed to electronic surveillance — for national security reasons?
Stuck
in the '70s. The press and partisan attacks on NSA surveillance of suspected terrorists'
calls to the United States has not convinced most Americans that their rights are in peril.
Bush hits foes who
say spying broke the law. President Bush yesterday [1/23/2006] took direct aim at
Democratic critics on Capitol Hill who charge that a secret spy program he ordered in 2002 is
illegal, saying, "If I wanted to break the law, why was I briefing Congress?"
Live and let
spy. If we must engage in a national debate on half-measures: After 9-11, any president
who was not spying on people calling phone numbers associated with terrorists should be impeached for
being an inept commander in chief.
And so what
if you are? Here's what happened. After 9/11, authorities found a bunch of e-mail
addresses and phone numbers in the phones and computers of confirmed terrorists. They tracked
down those leads. Most of the people the NSA started eavesdropping on — about 7,000 — lived
overseas, and their phone calls were to other foreigners living abroad.
Spying on Americans Seems to be OK if
Democrats Do It. The New York Times, which is currently scourging the
Bush Administration over concerns it's "abusing" surveillance powers, blythely ignored
evidence of greater "abuse" of such powers by the Clinton Administration.
Under Clinton, the NY Times
called surveillance "a necessity". The controversy following revelations that U.S.
intelligence agencies have monitored suspected terrorist related communications since 9/11 reflects
a severe case of selective amnesia by the New York Times and other media opponents of President
Bush. They certainly didn't show the same outrage when a much more invasive and indiscriminate
domestic surveillance program came to light during the Clinton administration in the 1990's.
Nut-shelling
Privacy Issues. Some good friends on the Right and many nutcases on the Left are raising
issues about our privacy in the wake of reports that the feds are listening in on cell phones and reviewing
emails in the war on terrorism. … We don't have to join forces with the ACLU to stand up for
individual liberty. Clearly they don't care about the concept of "rights" unless it serves
their decidedly hard-left agenda.
Are you scared
of Alito? In the matter at hand, there isn't a substantial public outcry, measured as
squeals or yells from citizens imposed upon. This is so because not enough citizens are subject
to surveillance to bring on anything like a national alarm. To begin with, those who are subject
to special surveillance are overwhelmingly non-citizens. A second reason for the general
tranquility is that there is not much of a record of abuse.
Gonzales to back
wiretapping in Senate testimony. Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales will testify next month
before a Senate committee on the legal justifications behind a domestic eavesdropping program approved by
President Bush.
Editor's Note:
While the word "wiretap" is used by the dumbed-down news media for the benefit of the poorly
educated masses, the interception of
telephone calls by the feds is done without making
connections to actual wires. This issue is about eavesdropping on international phone calls, and
almost all international calls are carried by microwave and satellite links which are easy to listen
in on.
Why We Don't Trust
Democrats With National Security. The Democratic Party has decided to express indignation at
the idea that an American citizen who happens to be a member of al Qaeda is not allowed to have a private
conversation with Osama bin Laden. If they run on that in 2008, it could be the first time in history
a Republican president takes even the District of Columbia.
'Warrantless' searches
are not unprecedented. Previous administrations, as well as the court that oversees
national security cases, agreed with President Bush's position that a president legally may authorize
searches without warrants in pursuit of foreign intelligence.
It's not that hard to
grasp, folks: 'Spying' saves lives. The argument for allowing the
National Security Agency to spy on Americans is simple: It works.
Spies
like us. Try as I might, I can't muster outrage over what appears to be a reasonable
action in the wake of 9/11. As a rule, I'm as averse as anyone to having people "spying" on
me. I'm also as devoted to protecting civil liberties as any other American. But the
privilege of debating our constitutional rights requires first that we be alive. If federal
agents want to listen in on suspected terrorists as they plot their next mass murder, please allow
me to turn up the volume.
Liberal
judge: Federal District Judge James Robertson, who resigned from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance (FISA) court in protest over secret wiretaps ordered by President Bush, is regarded in
Washington legal circles as one of President Bill Clinton's most liberal and partisan judicial
appointments.
The
Left's privacy hypocrites. The hindsight hypocrisy of the civil-liberties absolutists never
ceases to amaze. And their selective outrage over privacy violations never ceases to
aggravate. … The left believes the government should do whatever it takes to fight
terrorists — but only when the terrorists look like Timothy McVeigh. If
you're on the MCI Friends and Family plan of Osama bin Laden and Abu Zubaydah, you're
home free.
The
anti-anti-terrorists: The current hysteria over the president's authorization of
some domestic intercepts by the National Security Agency reminds me of similar reaction by liberals to the
Cold War. Instead of recognizing communism as a clear and present danger to freedom and liberty here
and abroad, many liberals decided the real threat to those values came from anti-communism itself.
None Dare Call it
Hypothetical. In Washington, D.C., a local talk-radio host poses a provocative
question: What if international terrorists were plotting a Super 9/11 that would kill
not just 3,000 Americans — mere child's play for these nuts — but might
wipe 30,000, 300,000, or even "a city of 3,000,000 off the face of the planet"? Would
the president then be justified in a few technically illegal wiretaps to detect them in
time? The question practically answers itself.
Secret court
modified wiretap requests. Government records show that the administration was encountering
unprecedented second-guessing by the secret federal surveillance court when President Bush decided to
bypass the panel and order surveillance of U.S.-based terror suspects without the court's
approval. A review of Justice Department reports to Congress shows that the 26-year-old
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court modified more wiretap requests from the Bush administration
than from the four previous presidential administrations combined.
Let Bush, NSA do their
jobs. Like it or not — and you can bet the Defeatist Party does
not — Bush was right on when he insisted in a recent press conference that he
most certainly does have the constitutional authority to order such warrantless surveillance,
an opinion he has based correctly and, in no small part, on the permission slip Congress signed
when lawmakers authorized him to conduct the war on terror.
On the other hand...
One branch of
government is so much more efficient than three. [President] Bush has shown an alarming
tendency to cut the legislative and judicial branches out of decisions about how to prosecute a war on
terrorism that will continue long after he leaves office. This combination of unilateralism with
a perpetual state of emergency is a recipe for tyranny.
Wiretaps fail to make a
dent in terror war; al Qaeda used messengers. The Bush administration's surveillance
policy has failed to make a dent in the war against al Qaeda. U.S. law enforcement sources
said that more than four years of surveillance by the National Security Agency has failed to
capture any high-level al Qaeda operative in the United States. They said al Qaeda
insurgents have long stopped using the phones and even computers to relay messages. Instead,
they employ couriers.
The
Agency That Could Be Big Brother. Thirty years ago, Senator Frank Church, the
Idaho Democrat who was then chairman of the select committee on intelligence, investigated
the [NSA] and came away stunned. "That capability at any time could be turned around
on the American people," he said in 1975, "and no American would have any privacy left, such
is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn't
matter. There would be no place to hide." He added that if a dictator ever took over, the
N.S.A. "could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back."
Clinton
Lawyer Claims Bush Doesn't Have Same Powers He Asserted Clinton Had. There's a new
lexicon that's developed, "domestic spying," which is contemptible. It's not what this is
all about. The press has done an intentionally miserable job at explaining this program
and the law and the history surrounding the program.
MRC Study: Evening News Shows Claim NSA Spies
on "Americans," Not "Terrorists". Over at www.mrc.org, we've just posted a new study
of how ABC, CBS and NBC have covered the NSA surveillance story. It's just as awful as you
expected — most network stories were framed around the idea that the program is
probably illegal and a shocking violation of Americans' civil liberties.
Sometimes
in Polling, It's All in the Question. What does the public think about the Bush
administration's wiretapping program? It depends on how you ask the question. A half
dozen polls on the issue have turned up different conclusions, and a key distinction appears to be
the way pollsters identify the people who might have their emails and phone calls monitored as
part of an effort to fight terrorism. Recent poll questions have referred to "suspected
terrorists," "people in the United States" and "American citizens."
US
sues New Jersey over phone company subpoenas. The U.S. government has sued the New Jersey
Attorney General's office on grounds of security concerns to prevent it from asking telephone companies
if they gave customer call records to the National Security Agency.
Other related information
If you're really concerned about this issue, you should also visit these pages:
Jump to The War With No Name
Jump to Foreign and Domestic Policy Debates
Jump to Privacy Compromised by Big Government
Read about Wiretaps
Read about Other privacy issues
Read about Carnivore, Einstein, Tempest, and Echelon
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