http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/020606J.shtml
On Eve of Hearing, Split on Spying
By Charlie Savage
The Boston Globe
Sunday 05 February 2006
Some prominent conservatives break with Bush.
Washington - As hearings begin tomorrow on President Bush's domestic
spying program, increasing numbers of prominent conservatives are breaking
with the administration to say the program is probably illegal and to
sharply criticize Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales's legal theory that a
wartime president can override a law.
The skeptics include leaders of conservative activist groups, well-known
law professors, veterans of Republican administrations, former GOP members
of Congress, and think tank analysts. The conservatives said they are
speaking out because they object to the White House's attempt to portray
criticism of the program as partisan attacks.
"My criteria for judging this stuff is what would a President Hillary do
with these same powers," said Paul M. Weyrich, the influential writer and
leader of the Free Congress Foundation, a think tank. "And if I'm troubled
by what she would do, then I have to be troubled by what Bush could do, even
though I have more trust in Bush than I do in Hillary."
Shortly after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Bush secretly
authorized the military to wiretap American's international phone calls and
e-mails without obtaining court permission, as a law requires. After the
program's existence was disclosed in December, Bush contended that his
wartime powers give him the authority to override the law requiring
warrants.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to open a hearing into the
legality of the program tomorrow, with Gonzales scheduled to testify all
day. In advance of his testimony, White House spokeswoman Dana Perino
defended the program against its conservative critics.
Bush, she said, "has received strong support for the program from many
different people. And while some may disagree, despite the extensive legal
analysis provided by the Department of Justice, the president is strongly
committed to this lawful program."
But the Bush administration's legal analysis has been met with contempt
from an increasingly vocal segment of the conservative movement.
Some of the conservative critics, such as Grover Norquist of Americans
for Tax Reform, contend that Bush should simply comply with the law
requiring the government to obtain a court order when it wants to wiretap an
American. Bush's aides have asserted that warrants take too long to obtain,
but Norquist said the law allows investigators to plant a wiretap first and
seek permission up to three days later.
"There is no excuse for violating the rule of law," Norquist said. "You
can listen to [suspects] and get the warrant afterward. Not to do that
appears to be an expression of contempt for the idea of warrants."
Larry Pratt, executive director of Gun Owners of America, said that if
investigators need more time to fill out the warrant application, Congress
should change the law to extend the deadline. But, he said, court orders
ought to remain part of the process to ensure that government surveillance
power is never used against the political enemies of whomever is in power.
"Some liberals think of gun owners as terrorists," he said.
Other conservative critics, such as David Keene, the chairman of the
American Conservative Union - which calls itself the largest grass-roots
conservative organization in the country - say the president should simply
get the House and Senate to approve the program, rather than assert a right
to bypass Congress in times of war.
"Their argument is extremely dangerous in the long term because it can
be used to justify all kinds of things that I'm sure neither the president
nor the attorney general has thought about," Keene said. A president "could
just do whatever [he] wants to do. . . . The American system was set up on
the assumption that you can't rely on the good will of people with power."
Bruce Fein, a former Justice Department official under President Reagan,
said that under Bush's theory a president could authorize internment camps
for groups of US citizens he deems suspicious. Congress outlawed such camps
after President Franklin D. Roosevelt interned Japanese-Americans in World
War II. But under Bush's theory, the president could invoke his wartime
powers to override the law in the name of protecting national security, Fein
said.
"It's Bush's defenders who are embracing the most liberal and utopian
view of human nature with their 'trust me' argument, a view that would cause
the Founding Fathers to weep," Fein said. "The real conservatives are the
ones who treasure the original understanding of the Constitution, and
clearly this is inconsistent with the separation of powers."
Some conservatives defend the legality of the surveillance program.
Among the most prominent has been David Rivkin, a former associate White
House counsel in the administration of George H.W. Bush, who has recently
found himself debating a series of conservatives who used to be his allies.
Rivkin said his fellow conservatives who call the surveillance program
illegal are mostly libertarians and other believers in small government. The
critics, he said, do not believe that the war on terrorism is a real war and
that the nature of terrorism requires treating the home front like a
battlefield.
"Most of the critics don't really agree that this is war, or if they do,
they haven't thought through the implications," Rivkin said. "The rules in
war are harsh rules, because the stakes are so high."
Rivkin also rejected Fein's contention that if Bush's legal theory is
correct, a president also could authorize internment camps. He said the
president can do things that are normal parts of war, including conducting
military surveillance. But it would still be illegal to detain citizens who
aren't enemy combatants, he said.
But Robert Levy of the libertarian Cato Institute said conducting
surveillance on US soil without a warrant is one of the things that Bush
cannot do, even in wartime, because Congress passed a law making it a
criminal offense to wiretap Americans without a warrant, even in national
security circumstances.
"If we had silence by Congress on warrants, then the administration's
position would be more powerful," Levy said. "But the president is acting
contrary to the expressed will of Congress. That is what renders this
program most legally suspect."
Richard Epstein, a prominent conservative law professor at the
University of Chicago, said Rivkin and the other defenders of the
president's legal theory are misreading the Constitution. The president has
broad powers to take immediate steps to counter an invasion, he said, but
has little authority to defy the will of Congress after an initial emergency
has receded.
Bob Barr, a onetime Republican representative from Georgia and a former
prosecutor, said the issue is whether the president can violate a law, not
whether this particular program makes sense from a policy perspective in the
war on terrorism.
Said Barr, "If the American people see the conservative movement rolling
over and playing dead and buying into these specious arguments by the
administration - that it's OK to violate the law as long as you do it for
the right reasons and because we might have a president that we like - then
the credibility of the conservative movement on other issues will suffer
greatly."
***
PeaceActionLake · PeaceActionLakeCounty
From: Rebecca Cummings
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Sun Feb 5, 2006 1:00 pm
Subject: Spying phoenixashwolf
A cute title, but seriously scary information.
Don't let the title off-put you -- read this. Then, lend me your
phone.......
Becky
Jean-Paul Sartre (French Existentialist philosopher):
"If a victory is told in detail, one can no longer distinguish it from a
defeat."
How I Stalked My Girlfriend
Ben Goldacre
Wednesday February 1, 2006
The Guardian
For the past week I've been tracking my girlfriend through her mobile
phone. I can see exactly where she is, at any time of day or night,
within 150 yards, as long as her phone is on. It has been very
interesting to find out about her day. Now I'm going to tell you how I
did it.
First, though, I ought to point out, that my girlfriend is a
journalist, that I had her permission ("in principle ...") and that
this was all in the name of science, bagging a Pulitzer and paying the
school fees. You have nothing to worry about, or at least not from me.
But back to business. First I had to get hold of her phone. It wasn't
difficult. We live together and she has no reason not to trust me, so
she often leaves it lying around. And, after all, I only needed it for
five minutes.
I unplugged her phone and took it upstairs to register it on a website
I had been told about. It looks as if the service is mainly for
tracking stock and staff movements: the Guardian, rather sensibly,
doesn't want me to tell you any more than that. I ticked the website's
terms and conditions without reading them, put in my debit card
details, and bought 25 GSM Credits for £5 plus vat.
Almost immediately, my girlfriend's phone vibrated with a new text
message. "Ben Goldacre has requested to add you to their Buddy List! To
accept, simply reply to this message with 'LOCATE'". I sent the
requested reply. The phone vibrated again. A second text arrived:
"WARNING: [this service] allows other people to know where you are. For
your own safety make sure that you know who is locating you." I deleted
both these text messages.
On the website, I see the familiar number in my list of "GSM devices"
and I click "locate". A map appears of the area in which we live, with
a person-shaped blob in the middle, roughly 100 yards from our home.
The phone doesn't go off at all. There is no trace of what I'm doing on
her phone. I can't quite believe my eyes: I knew that the police could
do this, and telecommunications companies, but not any old random
person with five minutes access to someone else's phone. I can't find
anything in her mobile that could possibly let her know that I'm
checking her location. As devious systems go, it's foolproof. I set up
the website to track her at regular intervals, take a snapshot of her
whereabouts automatically, every half hour, and plot her path on the
map, so that I can view it at my leisure. It felt, I have to say,
exceedingly wrong.
By the time my better half got home, I was so childishly over-excited
that I managed to keep all of this secret for precisely 30 seconds. And
to my disappointment, she wasn't even slightly freaked out. I don't
know if that says good or bad things about our relationship and I
wouldn't want you to come away thinking it's all a bit "Mr & Mrs Smith"
around here. Having said that, we came up with at least five new uses
for this technology between us in a few minutes, all far more sinister
than anything I had managed to concoct on my own.
And that, for me, was the clincher. Your mobile phone company could
make money from selling information about your location to the
companies that offer this service. If you have any reason to suspect
that your phone might have been out of your sight, even for five
minutes, and there is anyone who might want to track you: call your
phone company and ask it to find out if there is a trace on your phone.
Anybody could be watching you. It could be me.
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