I’ll offer a guess here as to the reason for the warrantless domestic spying and see what you think, especially those of you who may be a little more ‘inside’ than I.
The admin keeps saying they had a time problem in getting warrants and indeed they did. And that is because by the time they realized they needed a warrant, the spying had already taken place, at least IMHO. That is the nature of universal computerized electronic eavesdropping. It records and monitors everything everywhere, and reacts to specific keywords, like “bomb.” To work effectively, though, this system has to monitor everything. Easvesdropping must become universal and pervasive. And it is the NSA which most likely has this electronic capacity. That is the summary of my hunch anyway.
The project to do this began under Adm. Poindextrer and was written about at the time until the project went black about a year ago. Here is an AP article which specifically discusses the nature of the project,its purpose and its clandestine status.
http://www.fas.org/irp/news/2004/02/ap022304.html
Associated Press
February 23, 2004
Here are some tidbits
Despite an outcry over privacy implications, the government is pressing ahead with research to create ultrapowerful tools to mine millions of public and private records for information about terrorists …….
“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.”….
ARDA, the research and development office, sponsors corporate and university research on information technology for U.S. intelligence agencies. It is developing computer software that can extract information from databases as well as text, voices, other audio, video, graphs, images, maps, equations and chemical formulas. It calls its effort “Novel Intelligence from Massive Data.”
So, to recap, they couldn’t get a warrant because the spying had already taken place by their electronic means. IT giveth and IT taketh away.
Cheers
Jim
