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:  Read more 

Slate magazine runs a podcast called Gabfest, featuring Emily Bazelon, John Dickerson, and David Plotz. This week’s episode also aired on the POTUS election channel on XM Radio.

At about 22:14 into the program, the discussion turns to FISA and telecom immunity. And the “point” was repeatedly made that the topic is unbearably dull, even to listeners of a quasi-alternative political show.

I couldn’t always be sure which was John and which was David, so I’m supplying my best guesses.  Read more 

Searing.  Read more 

 Read more 

Fresh from subjecting the body politic to cruel and unusual punishment by inflicting pro-torture Judge Mukasey on us at Justice, DiFi wrestles the Constitution to the ground and gratuitously kicks the carcass by attempting to destroy the rule of law entirely.

Yes—and I know this will surprise you—DiFi’s supporting retroactive immunity for the telcos.

With Democrats like this, who needs Republicans?

San Francisco Chronicle:  Read more 

[Welcome, InfoWorld readers. Note to Bob®: I am absolutely Pammy’s biggest fan!]

[UPDATE: Comedy gold! Pravda on the Potomac’s weak-chinned Fred Hiatt buries the story on D01.]

[UPDATE: SJC puts off granting the telcos immunity, because the Republicans demanded more time to consider the 26 amendments. At least they didn’t go with Spector’s bogus Compromise, where the Federal government—that is, you and me as taxpayers—would have assumed the liability the telcos are on the hook for. Modified rapture.]  Read more 

Let’s start with the bio:

John Ashcroft was the United States attorney general from 2001 to 2005. He now heads a consulting firm that has telecommunications companies as clients.

Hey, I wonder if Ashcroft’s firm funnelled any money to Rockefeller? That would be too, too funny, wouldn’t it?

And now the nut graf from Crisco Johnny’s at-this-point entirely predictable Op-Ed from the Times:

If the attorney general of the United States says that an intelligence-gathering operation has been determined to be lawful…

Note the very revealing use of the passive voice. Determined by whom? Some Federalist Society operative chained up in Cheney’s dungeon under the Naval Observatory?

We know that Bush bypassed the “sole means” for determining legality, the FISA Court, until 2006, when Democrats got elected to Congress. So, when the telcos were briefed that Bush’s program of warrantless surveillance was legal, did they ask “Who made the determination and why?” If they did, I want to know the answer, and so should Congress. If they did not, they were negligent, and should be held to account.

… a company should be able to rely on that determination.

Isn’t it pretty to think so.

“Should,” indeed, except in the unlikely event that the government has been taken over by a gang of criminals.

Like now.  Read more 

Harry, Nance, nice work on that leader thing. I’m proud of you. WaPo:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government’s domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers. [Shystee’s Process Dodge]

Unbelievable? All too believable.  Read more 

Here’s the trad press follow-up on McConnell’s long interview yesterday in The El Paso Times.

A regional paper (the Globe) and the PST Los Angeles Times. Nothing today from either Pravda on the Potomac or Izvestia on the Hudson. But then, what did we expect?
Yesterday, the very well paid, insured, and seemingly credulous Eric Lichtblau repeated McConnell’s line that the warrantless surveillance program was “surgical”:  Read more 

[Welcome to the French, C&L readers, Blog Report readers, and devotees of the girl in the grey flannel bra.]

[More surprises: Today’s uncritical coverage mindlesly repeats McConnell’s “surgical” obfuscation.]

Surprise!

Honestly, reading the McConnell interview in the El Paso Times, of all places, is like having your head pushed through mush. The guy is just an obfuscatory master of the filibuster. And has anyone ever noticed how much he sounds like Bush the First? (“Don’t want to go there. Just think, lots”; “Just let me leave it, not too much detail.” Na ga happen…)

There’s plenty of Inside Baseball stuff, and McConnell develops his own timeline for the Democrats FISA betrayal, but this exchange leaped out at me, because our hair has been on fire about this for years:

[MCCONNELL] Now there’s a sense that we’re doing massive data mining. In fact, what we’re doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that’s, we’ve got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we’re doing things we’re not doing.

The warrantless surveillance program targets both voice and data. Ever since Bill Keller allowed James Risen to break this story after Bush was safely elected, when the administration and its enablers wish to conceal the scope of the program, they focus on voice, and don’t mention data at all (see here at “diversionary tactic”). McConnell does that here, and the interviewer—-surprise!—falls for it again.

As the Christian Science Monitor wrote back in 2006:

The US government [outlaw Bush regime] is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.

A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or “dataveillance,” as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together.

What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records.

This is “surgical”?  Read more 

[Welcome, Crooks and Liars readers. Remember that the hearing is happening today, so let’s be on the alert to see how—or, it’s be optimistic, if—our Constitution is further shredded by Bush’s monarchical pretensions.]

Prove me wrong. Please.

WaPo’s Dan Eggen writes of the lawsuit:

In 2003, Room 641A of a large telecommunications building in downtown San Francisco was filled with powerful data-mining equipment for a “special job” by the National Security Agency, according to a former AT&T technician.

The secret 24-by-48-foot room described by [whistleblower Mark] Klein was on the sixth floor of a building at 611 Folsom St. in San Francisco. Klein said the NSA “special project” was well known to the small community of company technicians, and he has provided internal documents to the court describing the “cuts” that were required to split Internet traffic and route a signal to the servers and other equipment in the room.

“I conclude that AT&T has constructed an extensive — and expensive — collection of infrastructure that collectively has all the capability necessary to conduct large-scale covert gathering of [Internet protocol]-based communications information, not only for communications to overseas locations, but for purely domestic communications as well,” said [J. Scott] Marcus, a veteran computer network executive who worked at GTE, Genuity and other companies before joining the FCC.

That’s the context, about which our hair has been on fire for quite some time now. What we have left of our hair.

And now, a simple matter of timing:

Tomorrow [that is, today], a three-judge panel will hear arguments on whether the case, which may provide the clearest indication yet of how the spying program has worked, can go forward. So far, evidence in the case suggests a massive effort by the NSA to tap into the backbone of the Internet to retrieve millions of e-mails and other communications, which the government could sift and analyze for suspicious patterns or other signs of terrorist activity, according to court records, plaintiffs’ attorneys and technology experts.

Now, the Republicans would have dearly loved to retroactively legalize all this lawbreaking.

But they couldn’t manage it.

However, Harry and Nancy, when they gutted FISA at midnight before scuttling back to the district, managed to do what the Republicans couldn’t:  Read more 

My candidate for most bizarre, or not, lead of the year:

A federal intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush administration’s wiretapping efforts illegal, according to a lawmaker and government sources, providing a previously unstated rationale for fevered efforts by congressional lawmakers this week to expand the president’s spying powers.

Call me crazy, but shouldn’t “fevered efforts” be devoted to prosecuting criminals rather than rewritng the laws to protect them and then issue them Get out of jail free cards? Rule of law? Constitutional government? Nancy? Harry? Patrick? Kos? Anyone?  Read more 

Please, Dems. Don’t capitulate on this one, too! WaPo:

“[Bush’s proposed rewrite of FISA is] the president’s surveillance program on steroids,” said Jim Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Dempsey said that under the new law the government would no longer have to allege that one party to the call was a member of al-Qaeda or another terrorist group. An unstated facet of the program is that anyone the foreigner is calling inside the United States, as long as that person is not the primary target, would also be wiretapped.

“They’re hiding the ball here,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office. “What the administration is really going after is the Americans. Even if the primary target is overseas, they want to be able to wiretap Americans without a warrant.”

Of… course…. they … do….

Will the zombie-like Beltway Dems march over the cliff toward which Bush is directing them? James Risen (who broke the warrantless surveillance program after the Times suppressed it until Bush was safely elected:  Read more 

Those who have ears to hear, let them hear (Mark 4:9).

Typically, “semantic” is contractor-ese for “deeply bogus shit dreamed up by Marketing,” and the multibillion sale from the black budget is closed by contractors from Shirlington Limo, but with enough budget, smart, conscience-free people, and concern…  Read more 

I mean, come on:

President Bush used his weekly radio address Saturday to urge Congress to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 so the law can better keep pace with the latest technology used by terrorists. [T]he Bush administration says its latest request is narrowly drawn and urgently needed to stymie terrorist threats.

“Narrowly drawn,” eh? By who? John Yoo? David Addington? Some elf in Shooter’s dank basement? Or maybe they dug up some memo from the ’80s when Roberts or Scalito were gnawing away at the foundations of the Republic at Justice?

“The proposal would make clear that court orders are not necessary to effectively collect foreign intelligence about foreign targets overseas,” the national intelligence director, Mike McConnell, wrote congressional leaders Friday.

Er, no, they aren’t, I agree. They are necessary to prevent the administration from pursuing its Master Plan, which goes by the name of Doing Whatever The Fuck We Want Whenever We Want To Do it.

But really, how black can the farce get?  Read more 

[The story of Bush’s odd bike ride near NSA headquarters is at the end. As Josh points out, “the intensity of the covering up doesn’t match the alleged secret.” However, if Bush was personally involved in handling any of the warrantless surveillance data, that would definitely account for the intensity. Foily? Who but the foiliest, back even after 9/11, could have imagined this story would even be happening?]

The Times, today:

A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.

Well, well. As we wrote over a year ago, after combining careful examination of how Republicans parse their statements with network engineering knowledge available through open sources:

Long story short: (1) Internet surveillance is Bush’s goal, not voice calls; (2) the Republican “wiretap” talking point is a diversion, to voice, away from from Internet surveillance; (3) Bush’s domestic surveillance system would pose no engineering challenges whatever to NSA. No rocket science—or tinfoil hats—required.

Can we please stop talking about “wiretaps” now? It’s not your voice communications Bush wants. It’s your mail.

I don’t have time tonight, alas, to summarize all our work on warrantless surveillance (go read).

So I’ll summarize some key points as I see them. Don your foil:  Read more 

Josh Marshall went and talked to Jerry Nadler, and that’s what Nadler says. He’s right. Every time Bush reauthorized the warrantless surveillance program, he broke the law (FISA), which is a felony punishable by five years in jail, as Judge Jackson noted in her decision in Bush v. NSA.

And that’s the program we know about. Nadler wants to find out about the programs we don’t know about—The programs Gonzales carefully parsed his testimony to avoid mentioning.

More choice Nadler quotes:  Read more 

WaPo stenographer Dan Eggen’s front page “story” on Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program—Bush agrees to obey the law! Film at 11!—is the most appalling insult to what remains of the good name of American journalism since The Newspaper of Record (not!) suppressed its own scoop on the program to help Bush win the 2004 election.

And since Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program is at the dark heart of the Republican project to replace Constitutional government with authoritarian rule—both in the fact of surveilling everyone including Aunt Molly and the theory of the “inherent authority” that purports to justify it—Eggen’s distortions and omissions have the effect of preventing the resolution of the Constitutional crisis provoked by Bush’s tyrannical seizure of power (Federalist 47).

The key facts to remember—all of which Stenographer Eggen distorts or omits—are these: Judge Anna Diggs Taylor, in ACLU vs. NSA, ruled that Bush committed over thirty felonies in the course of his illegal and unconstitutional warrantless surveillance program. Under FISA, Bush should have gotten a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which very, very rarely turned requests. Instead, Bush, using sweeping claims for the power of the executive (that’s the unconstitutional part) ignored FISA and didn’t get warrants from the court (that’s the illegal part). This from the party that chanted “rule of law” in unison while impeaching Clinton over a blowjob. Beyond disgusting.

OK, now let’s look at the narrative that WaPo’s stenographer, Dan Eggen, constructed.

Secret Court to Govern Wiretapping Plan

Wrong. The Secret Court always governed the plan. That’s what Judge Taylor’s ruling—and the plain language of the law—both say. “To govern” implies the opposite—and rewrites history to omit the key fact: Bush’s lawbreaking.

But that’s only the beginning:  Read more 

Yeah. More like this please:

WASHINGTON - Legislation aimed at President Bush’s once-secret program for wiretapping U.S.-foreign phone calls and computer traffic of suspected terrorists without warrants shows all the signs of not moving ahead, notwithstanding President Bush’s request this week that a lame-duck Congress give it to him.
Senate Democrats, emboldened by Election Day wins that put them in control of Congress as of January, say they would rather wait until next year to look at the issue. “I can’t say that we won’t do it, but there’s no guarantee that we’re going spend a lot of time on controversial measures,” Democratic Whip Richard Durbin of Illinois said Thursday.

In Senate parlance, that means no.  Read more 

The good news: Congress may fail to retroactively “legalize” Bush’s warrantless surveillance. House Leader Boner and Bill “Hello Kitty” Frist got themselves wrapped around the legislative axle once again:

House and Senate versions of the legislation differ too much to bridge the gap by week’s end, when Congress recesses until after the Nov. 7 elections, according to two GOP leadership aides who demanded anonymity because the decision had not yet been announced.

The bad news: Because they haven’t, dictatorship is the new normal:  Read more