No Associated Press content was harmed in the writing of this post

Missing media critique not so missing anymore. From, yes, the AP (looked for other sources, to no avail):

WASHINGTON — Despite a pledge to open government, the Obama administration has endorsed a Bush-era decision to keep secret key details of an FBI computer database that allows agents and analysts to search a billion documents with a wealth of personal information about Americans and foreigners.

President Barack Obama's Justice Department quietly told a federal court in Washington last week that it would not second-guess the previous administration's decisions to withhold some information about the bureau's Investigative Data Warehouse.

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Speaker Pelosi gives an interview. Nice get for Maddow.  Read more…

Influential Democrat asks Obama to keep spy chiefs

The comments in Wednesday's Congress Daily by U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, a Texas Democrat, run counter to the views of his likely Senate counterpart, who has called for a new team.

Reyes said he had recommended to Obama's transition team that CIA Director Michael Hayden and Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell be kept in place for at least six months.

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Obama vows to cut wasteful spending, doesn't rule out tax cuts or new programs

CHICAGO -- Facing a first-year deficit that could approach a staggering $2 trillion, President-elect Barack Obama vowed Tuesday to cut out wasteful spending wherever he finds it but insisted that the scope of the economic crisis demands an extraordinary - and expensive - response.

I will just repeat something I have said before, FISA abuse costs us 8 BILLION dollars a year. We could save a lot of money if we would just honor the constitution.

Via Boztopia:Group hopes to shape nation's privacy policy

AT&T is funding a group run by some of the nation's top privacy experts that aims to influence policy in the Obama administration and develop best practices on privacy for businesses.

Called Future of Privacy, the organization will be announced Wednesday. Its Web site, www.futureofprivacy.org, is set to go live Monday.

One of the group's co-founders, Jules Polonetsky, said he left his job as chief privacy officer at AOL to run Future of Privacy. He also had worked at DoubleClick, which was acquired by Google last year.

At&T? Doubleclick?

All this talk about how Obama will have to give up doing anything for ordinary people because of the budget crisis got me to thinking, what should we cut? Then I remembered this old post:

And if they do, I'm sure the Democrats would never grant them retroactive immunity for them anyhow. Sure, Bush, Reid, Pelosi, and Obama did just that for the telcos with FISA [cough] reform, but the two situations are completely different. For some reason. But isn't technology swell? The great Walter Pincus:

[S]ome insights into the capabilities of the Predator and other aircraft can be drawn from a DARPA paper that describes the tasks of a contractor that will develop a method of indexing and rapidly finding video from archived aerial surveillance tapes collected over past years.

"The U.S. military and intelligence communities have an ever increasing need to monitor live video feeds and search large volumes of archived video data for activities of interest due to the rapid growth in development and fielding of motion video systems," according to the DARPA paper, which was written in March but released last month.

During the Cold War, satellites and aircraft took still pictures that intelligence analysts reviewed one frame at a time to identify the locations of missile silos, airplane hangars, submarine pens and factories, said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, an expert in space and intelligence matters.

"Now with new full-motion video intelligence techniques, we are looking at people and their behavior in public," he said.

Systems also exist that allow tracking, moving-target detection of objects under forest or other cover and determination of exact geographic location. Development is underway of systems that allow recognition of faces and gait -- in other words, human identification.

Of course, the volume of data is so great that it's hard to analyze -- hence the contract for working out how to index it.

Just 'cause, although he couldn't stop the FISA fiasco single-handedly, he at least did get the thing delayed.
The whole article's helpful, but the money quote's in the bottom graf here:
brief overview: we learned after September 11, 2001 that giant telecom companies worked with this administration to compile Americans' private, domestic communications records into a database of enormous scale and scope. The Bush administration appears to have convinced those corporations to spy on Americans for five years, in secret and without a warrant.

"Trust me" -- a message that comes straight from the mouth of President Bush. I would never take "trust me" for an answer, not even in the best of times. Not even from a president on Mount Rushmore.

I wouldn't take "Trust Me" from Dr. Henry Jones Junior (aka Indiana), let alone a President. And Bush?

FISA: A Time To Sit In At Obama's Campaign Offices?

Many activists involved with the struggle to preserve our 4th Amendment rights and oppose the latest revisions to FISA were deeply disappointed by the substance of Obama's response, which contained a whole series of misleading arguments, as Glenn Greenwald documented here.

While some were ecstatic that Obama listened at all, others had a higher standard, and found the disingenuous arguments to be insulting to their intelligence, particularly given how fundamental the issues are, and how clearly Senator Obama had previously stated his intention to filibuster if telco immunity was part of the deal.

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(via)

Withering.

There's a lot to say about this, including the theme that will make our Paul happy -- questioning the notion that we must support Obama no matter what, and also the beyond-dubious premise (by way of Greg Sargent) that "Obama's 'candidacy has long seemed to embody a conviction that Democrats can win arguments with Republicans about national security -- that if Dems stick to a set of core principles, and forcefully argue for them without blinking, they can and will persuade people that, simply put, they are right and Republicans are wrong.'"

However, I must sign off, but I wanted to share this link with you ASAP and to see what y'all make of it.

Greetings, Class of June, 2008!

One of the ironist's bitter pleasures during these past several years has been watching the rats jump from Bush's stinking ship at precisely the most expedient times (that is, after some great and irrevocable damage has been wrought upon our nation).

With the shocking news (brace yourselves, folks) that Barack Obama is not at all a New-Politics Progressive Savior, we're seeing some fellow Dems in the throes of buyer's remorse.

Reading this DailyKos thread, I don't know precisely how to feel.

Yet another attempt is being made to pass a FISA revision bill that will provide immunity for the telecoms against lawsuits for their part in illegal spying on American citizens. The cabal planning this maneuver expects to take their plot to both the House and Senate next week, where coalitions of Republicans and BlueDog Democrats could provide enough votes for passage.

********

Update 3: NYT article and a blogger talks to Hoyer’s office

Update: More on the new FISA deal from The Hill and Glenn Greenwald. Text is down at the bottom.

Update 2: Congressional contact information list

Spy Bill 'Compromise' Still Gives Amnesty to Telcoms, But Adds Trappings of Justice

House and Senate leaders are still bargaining over how far to expand the government's domestic spying powers and whether to grant retroactive legal amnesty to companies that violated federal privacy laws by helping the government spy on Americans.

But if a proposal from the top Republican from the Senate Intelligence committee is any indicator, telecom amnesty would be all but assured in any final bill.

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I was thinking about that article in The Hill, Dems hedge on healthcare:

“We all know there is not enough money to do all this stuff,” said Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.), a Finance Committee member and an Obama supporter, referring to the presidential candidates’ healthcare plans. “What they are doing is … laying out their ambitions.” ...

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Congress Daily:

House and Senate leaders will attempt to negotiate a final deal to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act this week, but their success is far from guaranteed.

For weeks, House Majority Leader Hoyer has said he hoped to strike a compromise on FISA legislation before the recess. But he has faced major obstacles in bridging a divide in his Caucus.

Liberal lawmakers want greater controls on how the government conducts electronic surveillance and they do not support giving blanket retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that helped the Bush administration conduct electronic surveillance of U.S. citizens without warrants.

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ACLU of WV at West VA Blue

After boldly standing up to The Bush administrations' fear mongering in February, word comes that House leadership may now be working with Senator Jay Rockefeller to possibly rush a pro-telecom amnesty bill through Congress in the next few days.

Civil libertarians in the Mountain State, say no to back room deals.

The FireDogLake community is trying to do something about this.

I don’t like Steny Hoyer. There’s just no way around it. Now he’s conspiring with Jay Rockefeller to force retroactive telecom immunity through Congress, so George Bush and his criminal conspiracy won’t have to answer any questions about violating the Constitution by spying on American citizens without warrants.

Again.

Did I mention I don’t like Steny Hoyer?

The House, to its great credit, passed a FISA reform bill that doesn't eviscerate the rule of law by granting the telcos retroactive immunity, and doesn't completely gut the Fourth Amendment*. That's good news, and if we get lucky, the whole abomination might just get deep-sixed, at which point we would return to the status quo ante legally, while much strengthened politically. Kudos, I freely grant, to Nancy Pelosi** and the rest of the House leadership, including -- lambert blushes modestly for calling this one, against all odds -- Steny Hoyer. That said, let's do the classic blogospheric media critique thing on WaPo's not totally fucked coverage. Jonathan Weisman reports:

Via TPM, this from the Online WSJ:

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach. Among them, current and former intelligence officials say, is a longstanding Treasury Department program to collect individual financial data including wire transfers and credit-card transactions.

What could go wrong?

So what do local bloggers think of the FISA sellouts?

Excellent work by Stoller, getting this statement from the Foster campaign:

[FOSTER] Nobody is above the law and telecom companies who engaged in illegal surveillance should be held accountable, not given retroactive immunity. I flatly oppose giving these companies an out for cooperating with Alberto Gonzalez on short-circuiting the FISA courts and the rule of law."

Bill Foster, Democratic Candidate in IL-14 March 8th Special Election

So, when you make your calls to the Blue Dog traitors on FISA, be sure you stress that point.

South Texas Chisme cries shame. PrairiePundit says that Reyes Sivestro Reyes insults our intelligence on intelligence.

Check out the local bloggers in your area.

If you are unhappy with the Democrats, you can email your concerns to info [at] dccc [dot] org
note - it is necessary to be polite - no flames

Remember how Bush's illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program was originally about wiretaps? And then morphed into being about foreign-to-foreign communication? Well, that was all disinformation. Turns out it's all about email. Your "papers," as the Fourth Amendment has it. WaPo:

At the breakfast yesterday [Kenneth Weinstein, assistant attorney general for national security] highlighted a different problem with the current FISA law than other administration officials have emphasized. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, for example, has repeatedly said FISA should be changed so no warrant is needed to tap a communication that took place entirely outside the United States but happened to pass through the United States.

But in response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, Wainstein said FISA's current strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications, even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is primarily e-mail, because "essentially you don't know where the recipient is going to be" and so you would not know in advance whether the communication is entirely outside the United States.

Just as we said from the very beginning.

10-to-1, 100-to-1, these fascist weasels decided to suck up all email, just to get some of it right away. And the odds are that they archived it all, on the chance that some of it would be useful later (especially if privatized).