-Caveat Lector-
Begin forwarded message:
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: July 27, 2007 8:56:32 PM PDT
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Subject: Why Bush Is Protecting Gonzales No Matter What
What Was the Original Surveillance Program?
By Ryan Singel July 27, 2007 | 7:53:02 PM
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2007/07/what-was-the-or.html
The key question in the growing fracas over Attorney General
Alberto Gonzales role and testimony about the Intensive Care
Showdown isn't whether Gonzales committed perjury or misled
Congress in his linguistic dividing up of the warrantless
surveillance into two programs, one pre-showdown and one post-
showdown.
For those who don't know, Gonzales uses the term "Terrorist
Surveillance Program" to refer to an admitted eavesdropping program
the Administration says targets Americans' phone and email
conversations that cross that border and involve one person
suspected of links to terrorism.
Gonzales tried to defuse a press report that internal critics had
balked at the warrantless spy program by referring only to this
program, which was what was left of a larger program after changes
were made following the Intensive Care Showdown.
The real question is: what was this program doing when the entire
upper echelon at the Justice Department and FBI Director Robert
Mueller were prepared to resign over it?
All the clues and prior reporting point to a widespread data mining
program that seems to have involved:
real-time computer analysis of the content of phone and internet
traffic
massive data-mining of the domestic and overseas phone records of
nearly every American
NSA operators listening in, without warrants, to purely domestic
phone calls, using the data-mining and computer sifting to figure
out which calls seem suspicious
a continual stream of mostly useless leads being fed to FBI counter-
terrorism agents
Some combination of these were probably enough to make civil
liberties advocates out of then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI
Director Robert Mueller and a small cadre of Republican Justice
Department lawyers. Marty Lederman has a guess too [see below].
Certainly a few people in Washington know what surveillance
architecture was being built and how effective it was. That group
may include Democrats Jay Rockefeller, Jane Harman, Nancy Pelosi
and Tom Daschle. Perhaps Congress should call them to testify as
well.
--------------
http://balkin.blogspot.com/2007/05/what-was-program-before-
goldsmith-and.html
What Was "The Program" Before Goldsmith and Comey?
Marty Lederman
"We're doing what?"
That's a quotation from the original Risen & Lichtblau New York
Times article that broke the unlawful wiretapping story.,
attributed to "a senior government official [who] recalled that he
was taken aback when he first learned of the operation."
What, indeed, was the nature of the "program" before Goldsmith,
Comey and Ashcroft -- those notorious civil libertarian extremists
-- called a halt to it, and threatened to resign if the President
continued to break the law? And what was the nature and breadth of
its legal justification?
I am hardly alone in realizing that these are the most important
questions arising from the recent Comey testimony. It's the
question of the night, all over the Web. (When will the mainstream
press catch on? And more importantly, as I asked in my last post --
When will the Congress insist on comprehensive and public hearings,
both on this and on the legal support for the Administration's
torture practices?)
Was it a full-bore data-mining program of some sort, akin to the
TIA program that Congress had de-funded? (John Yoo suggests as much
in his new book.) Something involving the FBI as well as the NSA
(hence the central role of the FBI Director in the Comey
narrative)? A program in which once a U.S. person was suspected of
receiving a call from a suspected Al Qaeda individual, that U.S.
person's calls were all monitored thereafter? These are among the
theories receiving a good deal of speculation this evening.
There's a lot of great stuff to read -- this is just the tip of the
iceberg:
Glenn Greenwald.
Laura Rozen.
Orin Kerr.
Hilzoy.
Shayana Kadidal.
Paul Kiel, doing so much fine work over at the now-indispensible
TPM Muckraker, including the publication of one reader's speculation.
Trust the Washington press corps to lunge for the process story,
and ignore the substance. When the warrantless wiretap surveillance
program came up for review in March of 2004, it had been running
for two and a half years. We still don't know precisely what form
the program took in that period, although some details have been
leaked. But we now know, courtesy of Comey, that the program was so
odious, so thoroughly at odds with any conception of constitutional
liberties, that not a single senior official in the Bush
administration's own Department of Justice was willing to sign off
on it. In fact, Comey reveals, the entire top echelon of the
Justice Department was prepared to resign rather than see the
program reauthorized, even if its approval wasn't required. They
just didn't want to be part of an administration that was running
such a program. This wasn't an emergency program; more than two
years had elapsed, ample time to correct any initial deficiencies.
It wasn’t a last minute crisis; Ashcroft and Comey had both been
saying, for weeks, that they would withhold approval. But at the
eleventh hour, the President made one final push, dispatching his
most senior aides to try to secure approval for a continuation of
the program, unaltered.
Continued:
I think it’s safe to assume that whatever they were fighting over,
it was a matter of substance. When John Ashcroft is prepared to
resign, and risk bringing down a Republican administration in the
process, he’s not doing it for kicks. Similarly, when the President
sends his aides to coerce a signature out of a desperately ill man,
and only backs down when the senior leadership of a cabinet
department threatens to depart en masse, he’s not just being
stubborn. It’s time that the Democrats in Congress blew the lid off
of the NSA’s surveillance program. Whatever form it took for those
years was blatantly illegal; so egregious that by 2004, not even
the administration’s most partisan members could stomach it any
longer. We have a right to know what went on then. We publicize the
rules under which the government can obtain physical search
warrants, and don’t consider revealing those rules to endanger
security; there’s no reason we can’t do the same for electronic
searches. The late-night drama makes for an interesting news story,
but it’s really beside the point. The punchline here is that the
President of the United States engaged in a prolonged and willful
effort to violate the law, until senior members of his own
administration forced him to stop. That’s the Congressional
investigation that we ought to be having.
Anonymous Liberal.
In that last post, A.L. wisely goes back to the Risen & Lichtblau
story that started it all, which contains some important potential
clues. Important excerpts from that December 2005 article:
Several senior government officials say that when the special
operation began, there were few controls on it and little formal
oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its
eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from
Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some
agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently
fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior
Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the
official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might
come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if
Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.
In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national
security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the
Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.
For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A.
program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the
Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist
to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start
monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.
* * * *
The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and
personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the
program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those
numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said. In
addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail
messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring
others linked to them, creating an expanding chain.
As A.L. astutely notes, it is fair to assume that "there was no
real guidance as to how far out to expand this 'chain.' As a
result, a number of people were likely ensnared in this web who had
nothing to do with al Qaeda and nothing even approaching reasonable
grounds to be searched."
-------------
I think that it's fairly obvious what "the program" was before the
confrontation. It was completely open wiretapping within the United
States, of any person, without warrants; and, more to the point, it
was the elimination of barriers which would prevent the information
from being used for political purposes. I can't imagine that in
2004 the Bush Administration was really afraid of the resignation
of Ashcroft et al, or of what they might say, so long as they could
be painted as "soft on terror" by the people who remained in power;
but if there was a chance that they would start saying things which
would lead to public awareness that the intelligence and justice
systems were once again being used for partisan political gain by a
Republican President, that would have been a different story.
Additionally, I speculate that we will ultimately find out that it
was not the President who sent Card and Gonzales to Ashcroft's ICU
bed, but Karl Rove.
# posted by Peter : 7:04 PM
A couple of years back I got word that postal inspectors were
complaining about a massive number of orders to hold all mail for
certain people to be delivered to federal authorities. That mail
was then returned to the post office a day or few later for final
delivery to the subject.
Those are all the details I have. The source is trusted by me. I
don't know if this was done with or without warrants. But if it
wasn't, perhaps this is another piece of the warrantless
surveillance program.
# posted by Jason : 8:11 PM
Get a sneak peek of the all-new AOL.com.
www.ctrl.org
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