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Here are a few clues which suggest that there is more to the domestic intelligence issue than presently meets the eye:
(1) Bush's authorization of the NSA to pursue "domestic surveillance" dates from late 2003 (Ashcroft wasn't consulted until March 2004, when --out of character for him-- he objected to it) -- yet the NSA states it first began doing domestic intel, with Bush's approval, immediately after 9/11. The program Bush initiated in 2003-2004 was a different domestic intel program -- one still so secret that the Administration is claiming even mentioning it would have disastrous effects on the "War on Terror."
(2) Unlike the communications intercepts and comint the NSA routinely performs as part of its raison d'etre, this program is different in being more complex. NSA staffers are quoted saying this domestic spying program involves "new technology" that "fell out of the sky" (i.e., originated elsewhere, outside the agency).
(3) John Poindexter's infamous "Total Information Awareness" program, which combined domestic surveillance with data-mining, a centralized database of all US citizens, and computerized "risk assessment" programs to continuously evaluate the data being collected on US citizens, was publicly shut down in late 2003 -- following <deja vu> widespread public outcry about its sweeping invasion of privacy, amid concerns that the program could be abused for purely political ends. HOWEVER, Poindexter's Orwellian Master Plan SURVIVED under the Bush Administration, which continued it, in secret. With Congressional approval, the program was simply "outsourced" to subcontractors -- certain private firms (one owned by Poindexter himself) and "unnamed intelligence agencies" (logically including the NSA).
(4) When briefed on the President's secret program in 2003, Sen. Jay Rockefeller immediately thought of Poindexter's TIA (according to his published notes).
(5) As publicly admitted by sources within the NSA, 99.9% of the persons targeted by Bush's "domestic intelligence" program had NO DISCERNIBLE CONNECTION TO AL QAEDA (or, indeed, to "terrorism" in any form). However, quite a few of the identified targets have turned out to be persons and groups unfriendly to the Bush administration, especially anti-war activists and disgruntled environmentalists.
(6) Given its 99.9% FAILURE rate in serving its official purpose (identifying "Al Qaeda terrorists" and those providing "material support" to Al Qaeda), why is the program so "essential" to the Bush Administration's agenda --keeping its details secret is apparently worth risking a Constititional crisis and impeachment of the President-- unless it's designed to serve some other purpose, on a more sinister agenda?
Nixon had his "enemies list." Bush, it seems, has a secret government database full of them -- and he can give orders to any federal agency to act on the information contained therein. And according to a recent ex cathedra pronouncement by Bush [see Newsweek, Feb. 13, 2006 issue], such orders CAN, "LEGALLY," include even the murder of a US citizen at home or abroad -- for "national security" reasons that, like everything else being planned in the Bush White House, "must remain secret" ...
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Specter Criticizes Rationale for Spying
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/politics/3637581.html
WASHINGTON — Attorney General Alberto Gonzales has not adequately justified why the Bush administration failed to seek court approval for domestic surveillance, said the senator in charge of a hearing Monday on the program.
Sen. Arlen Specter said Sunday he believes that President Bush violated a 1978 law specifically calling for [the FISA] court to consider and approve such monitoring. The Pennsylvania Republican branded Gonzales' explanations to date as "strained and unrealistic."
The top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, Vermont Sen. Patrick Leahy, predicted that the committee would have to subpoena the administration to obtain internal documents that lay out the legal basis for the program. Justice Department officials have declined, citing in part the confidential nature of legal communications.
Specter said he would have his committee consider such a step if the attorney general does not go beyond his prior statements and prepared testimony that the spying is legal, necessary and narrowly defined to fight terrorists.
"This issue of the foreign intelligence surveillance court is really big, big, big because the president, the administration, could take this entire program and lay it on the line to that court," Specter told NBC's "Meet the Press."
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 established legal procedures for conducting intelligence-related searches and surveillance inside the United States.
Specter said the FISA court "has really an outstanding record of not leaking, and of being experts. And they would be pre-eminently well-qualified to evaluate this program and either say it's OK or it's not OK."
Leahy charged that Bush misled the public when he said during the presidential campaign in April 2004 that his administration was following the law by getting warrants for wiretapping.
"I think ultimately we're going to have to subpoena them," Leahy said on CBS' "Face the Nation," expressing doubt that lawmakers would get the material otherwise.
Under the National Security Agency program put in place after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government has eavesdropped, without seeking warrants, on international phone calls and e-mails of people within the United States who are deemed to be a terrorism risk.
In testimony prepared for Monday's hearing, Gonzales argues that Bush had authority under a 2001 congressional resolution authorizing force in the fight against terrorism and that heeding the 1978 law would be too cumbersome.
"The terrorist surveillance program operated by the NSA requires the maximum in speed and agility, since even a very short delay may make the difference between success and failure in preventing the next attack," Gonzales said in statements obtained by The Associated Press.
Specter was not so sure.
"I believe that contention is very strained and unrealistic," Specter said. If the FISA law was inadequate, he said, Bush should have asked Congress to change it rather than ignore it. "The authorization for the use of force doesn't say anything about electronic surveillance."
Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., was expected to press Gonzales on why, during Gonzales' confirmation hearings last year to be attorney general, he dismissed as "hypothetical" a situation in which the government conducted warrantless eavesdropping. The NSA program was long in place by then, and Gonzales was White House counsel.
Assistant Attorney General William Moschella, in a letter Friday to Feingold, said Gonzales was referring to as "hypothetical" the idea that Bush would allow warrantless monitoring that was illegal.
That statement is accurate, Moschella wrote in a letter obtained by the AP, because the administration's position is that Bush had legal authority under the 2001 congressional resolution.
Gonzales has acknowledged disagreement with former Justice Department officials, including Attorney General John Ashcroft and Deputy Attorney General James Comey, about the legality of the program.
In responses to written questions from Specter, Gonzales challenged media portrayals about the scope of the spy program, saying it is not "a dragnet that sucks in all conversations and uses computer searches to pick out calls of interest."
The Washington Post, citing unnamed sources, reported Sunday that the program involves computers sifting through hundreds of thousands of communications to select for human review. The program has resulted in thousands of conversations in which someone in the U.S. has been at least briefly monitored, the Post said.
The Post report said that nearly all of them were quickly dismissed as insignificant and that perhaps no more than 10 solid leads a year have been pursued with further domestic surveillance, usually with a court warrant.
But Gen. Michael Hayden, the No. 2 intelligence official in the government, said it was "not true" that "we somehow grab the content of communications and then use the content of the communications to determine which of the communications we really want to listen to."
"When NSA goes after the content of a communication under this authorization from the president, the NSA has already established its reasons for being interested in that specific communication," Hayden said on "Fox News Sunday."
In addition to possibly pursuing documents about the program's legal basis, Specter said he might seek testimony from Ashcroft and Comey.
"If we come to it and we need it, I'll be open about it," Specter said, referring to subpoenas. "If the necessity arises, I won't be timid."
Specter also said the administration should tread carefully when it came to using subpoenas against journalists to investigate leaks of classified information. The New York Times in December disclosed the existence of the NSA program, which is classified.
"I think if you move into the area of really serious national security issues, that there may be a justification for it," he said.
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US surveillance found
to yield few suspects
Monitoring is said to show
no real links to a terrorist threat
WASHINGTON -- Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls, under authority from President Bush, have dismissed almost all of them as potential suspects, after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to officials and private-sector sources.
But current and former officials familiar with the program said eavesdroppers first have to determine whether a terrorist plotter is on either end of the call. The answer, they said, is usually no.
Fewer than 10 US citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well.
That step still requires a warrant from a federal judge, for which the government must supply evidence of probable cause.
The Senate Judiciary Committee will open hearings today into the eavesdropping program, and will take testimony from Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.
The committee's chairman, Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania, said on NBC's ''Meet the Press" yesterday that Bush has yet to explain why the program does not violate a 1978 law specifically calling for a secret court to consider and approve such monitoring. He branded Gonzales's explanations to date as ''strained and unrealistic."
Specter said he believes there is no question that the monitoring program is a violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The only debate, he said, is whether the president has the constitutional power to circumvent the act.
The architect of the program, General Michael Hayden of the Air Force, and deputy director of intelligence, defended it yesterday, saying that intercepts target only those who, several analysts say, are ''Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliates." Hayden, on ''Fox News Sunday," said that the program ''is very specific and very targeted" on collection of communications coming in or leaving the United States.
Hayden said that the intercepts are directed only at those who, several intelligence analysts say, are ''Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda affiliates."
The Bush administration refuses to say, in public or in closed session of Congress, how many Americans, in the past four years, have had their conversations recorded or their e-mail messages read by analysts without court authority. Two sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them said about 5,000.
The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mail messages, and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny.
Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening to brief fragments of conversation, ''wash out" most of the leads within days or weeks.
The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the numbers of those who were swept in, sheds light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment.
A search, they said cannot be judged ''reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable.
Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.
Hayden acknowledged in a news briefing last month that eavesdroppers ''have to go down some blind alleys to find the tips that pay off."
Other officials, almost all of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because they are not permitted to discuss the program, said the number of false leads is pronounced when US citizens or residents are watched. No intelligence agency, they said, believes that ''terrorist ... operatives inside our country," as Bush described the surveillance targets, number anywhere near the thousands who have been subject to eavesdropping.
Vice President Dick Cheney said in December that eavesdropping without warrants ''has saved thousands of lives."
Hayden told senators last week that he ''cannot personally estimate" such a figure but that the program supplied information ''that would not otherwise have been available."
The FBI director, Robert S. Mueller 3d, said at the same hearing last week that the information helped identify ''individuals who were providing material support to terrorists."
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Fed Data-Mining Research Lives On
WASHINGTON, Feb. 23, 2004(CBS/AP) The government is still financing research to create powerful tools that could mine millions of public and private records for information about terrorists despite an uproar last year over fears it might ensnare innocent Americans.
Congress eliminated a Pentagon office developing the terrorist tracking technology because of the outcry over privacy implications. But some of those projects from retired Adm. John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness effort were transferred to U.S. intelligence offices, congressional, federal and research officials told The Associated Press.
In addition, Congress left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity (ARDA) that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter's program.
"The whole congressional action looks like a shell game," said Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. "There may be enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical work is continuing."
Poindexter's goal was to predict terrorist attacks by looking for telltale patterns of activity in passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, car rentals, airline ticket purchases and arrests, as well as credit transactions and education, medical and housing records.
"It entailed surveillance of all kinds of ordinary Americans, not terrorists, and all kinds of ordinary transactions, from credit card purchases to health care transactions," Aftergood told CBS Radio News.
But the research created a political uproar because such reviews of millions of transactions could put innocent Americans under suspicion. One of Poindexter's own researchers, David D. Jensen at the University of Massachusetts, has acknowledged that "high numbers of false positives can result."
Disturbed by the privacy implications, Congress last fall closed Poindexter's office, part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and barred the agency from continuing nearly all his research. Poindexter quit government, claiming his work was misunderstood.
But the work didn't die.
In killing Poindexter's office, Congress agreed to continue paying to develop highly specialized software to gather foreign intelligence on terrorists.
In a classified section summarized publicly, Congress gave money to the "National Foreign Intelligence Program," without openly identifying which intelligence agency would do the work.
It said the research could only be carried out overseas or against non-U.S. citizens in this country, not against Americans on U.S. soil.
Congressional officials declined to say which Poindexter programs were killed and which were transferred, but people with direct knowledge of contracts told AP that the surviving programs included some of 18 data-mining projects known as Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery in Poindexter's research.
Poindexter's office described that research as "technology not only for 'connecting the dots' that enable the U.S. to predict and pre-empt attacks, but also for deciding which dots to connect." It was among the government's most controversial research programs.
Ted Senator, who managed that research for Poindexter, told government contractors that mining data to identify terrorists "is much harder than simply finding needles in a haystack."
"Our task is akin to finding dangerous groups of needles hidden in stacks of needle pieces," he said. "We must track all the needle pieces all of the time."
At the University of Southern California, Professor Craig Knoblauch said he developed software that automatically extracted information from travel Web sites and telephone books and tracked changes over time.
Privacy advocates feared that if such powerful tools were developed without limits from Congress, government agents could use them on any database.
Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who fought to restrict Poindexter's office, is trying to force the executive branch to tell Congress about all its data-mining projects. He recently pleaded with a Pentagon advisory panel to propose rules on reviewing data that Congress could turn into laws.
The Poindexter and ARDA projects are vastly more powerful than other data-mining projects, like the Department of Homeland Security's CAPPS II program to classify air travelers or the six-state, Matrix anti-crime system funded by the Justice Department. They use commercial data-mining technology that Poindexter's office said would "take decades" to build "the new databases we need to combat terrorism."
Aftergood said there is a line in information-gathering between protecting people and invading their privacy.
"In order for us to decided where that line should be drawn, we need to have the public debate. That debate is not advanced by taking the whole issue behind closed doors," he said. "It may well be that this technology does have a useful application to the war on terrorism, but it's essential that it be subjected to oversight including some degree of public oversight."
NOTICE:
Due to Presidential Executive Orders, the National Security Agencymay have read this email without warning, warrant, or notice.They may do this without any judicial or legislative oversight.You have no recourse nor protectionsave to call for the impeachment of the current President
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