[From the diaries by susanhu. Soj is on top of this story, per usual.]
There are so many developments on the administration’s secret spying program today that I’ve got to give you a long list of links.They call it the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” (TSP), while I call it Domestic Spying Program One (DSP1). As I’ve written before, there are many other DSP’s and Gonzales’ testimony and the DSP most people are familiar with (phone call with one end int’l and the other end American) is DSP1.
We’ll start with the techies over at CNet, who have a great article describing how they think the NSA actually gets access to all those phone calls, emails and other internet traffic.
Continued below:
The red lines are all the fiber optic cables around the world, which is the main method by which telephones and data networks are connected. There are some purely satellite systems, mainly in Africa and remote spots around the world, but just about everything is done via physical cables. Those across the ocean are underwater of course.
You’ll note that nearly all of those cables are either connected to the United States directly or else via very strong American allies such as Britain, Australia or Japan. We already know thanks to this excellent article that American telcoms are working hand-in-glove with the NSA, allowing them to tap into those systems in America.
In other news, the White House has come out swinging to defend DSP1. The LA Times reports that Michael Hayden and Abu Gonzales met with the entire House and Senate Intelligence Committees and gave them a full briefing on the nature of the program, behind closed doors:
“This is a very positive development,” said Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), a key member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, who had pressed the matter in repeated discussions with White House officials. “Serious questioning, sharing of information and reviewing of this program began this afternoon.”
Wilson, a former Air Force officer who served on the National Security Council in the administration of Bush’s father, heads the subcommittee that oversees the National Security Agency, which conducted the surveillance.
She said her concerns about the National Security Agency program grew after Monday’s Senate Judiciary Committee hearing, in which she said Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales offered a “weak” legal rationale for the program.
Rep. Jane Harman of Venice, the top Democrat on the House committee, said the briefing lasted more than three hours and was spent mostly in a description of how the program operated. It was given by Gonzales and Air Force Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence and a former National Security Agency director.
Neither Wilson nor Harman would discuss details of the program, though Wilson described the briefing as “very forthcoming and very helpful.”
“This is a welcome thaw,” Harman said. “After Monday’s hearing, it became clear that there was strong and serious bipartisan concern, and the drumbeat wasn’t going to get softer — it got louder.”
That line about bipartisan drumbeat is key, because it is getting louder. RAW STORY is reporting that Republican chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, James Sensenbrenner sent a letter of 51 questions to Alberto Gonzales on the DSP1:
Combined with a move by the chairman of a House subcommittee on intelligence, and hearings in the Senate, the move may signal that Republicans are not going to swallow the President’s justification for the surveillance, and may be a precursor to hearings in the House.
So Wilson was demanding answers, Sensenbrenner is demanding answers. And now a Libertarian group called the Liberty Coalition is calling for hearings:
In an open letter obtained from The Liberty Coalition, to be released publicly tomorrow, the group — which features such noted true conservatives as former Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) and the Republican Liberty Caucus — is calling on Congress to hold comprehensive hearings into the warrantless NSA domestic wiretapping program. As well, the group calls on the Dept. of Justice to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate the matter and stresses the need for Whistleblower protections to allow employees of national security agencies to come forward to testify to Congress about criminal behavior in their respective agencies.
The letter says Bush’s program threatens the ability of America to prosecute terrorists due to “tainted evidence obtained in possible violation of federal law.” As well, it asks “what limit is there on any future president to secretly re-write our civil and criminal laws at will” if constitutional transgressions, such as those admitted to by the Bush Administration, continue to go unaddressed.
That letter is signed by a number of groups, including EPIC, the National Lawyers Guild and the Republican Liberty Caucus amongst others.
Yesterday in the Wall Street Journal, two former Department of Justice employees, David Rivkin Jr. and Lee Casey, were stumping for the administration:
In an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, attorneys David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey defended President Bush’s warrantless domestic surveillance program by repeating the claim that the program monitors only the communications of “Al Qaeda operatives” either out of or into the United States and that its “domestic footprint” was “minimized.”
Of course we know that’s not even close to true. But it’s part of the damage control slash propaganda effort. And today Bush himself is now trumpeting about a foiled terrorist attack:
President Bush said the U.S.-led global war on terror has “weakened and fractured” al Qaeda and allied groups, outlining as proof new details about the multinational cooperation that foiled purported terrorist plans to fly a commercial airplane into the tallest skyscraper on the West Coast.
Bush has referred to the 2002 plot before. In an address last October, he said the United States and its allies had foiled at least 10 serious plots by the al Qaeda terror network in the last four years, including plans for September 11-like attacks on both U.S. coasts. The White House initially would not give details of the plots but later released a fact sheet with a brief, and vague, description of each.
The president filled in details on Thursday.
He said that Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of the September 11 attacks who was captured in 2003, had already begun planning the West Coast operation in October, just after the September 11, 2001, attacks. One of Mohammed’s key planners was Hambali, the alleged operations chief of the al Qaeda related terrorist group Jemaah Islamiyah. Instead of recruiting Arab hijackers, Hambali found Southeast Asian men who would be less likely to arouse suspicion and who were sent to meet with Osama bin Laden, Bush said.
Under the plot, the hijackers were to use shoe bombs to blow open the cockpit door of a commercial jetliner, take control of the plane and crash it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, since renamed the US Bank Tower, Bush said.
He didn’t go right out there and say the NSA helped crack this case, but it sure is implied. After all, what’s the point of giving the president royal powers if he’s not catching terrorists?
Bush said that “subsequent debriefings” led to the unraveling of this dastardly “plot”. Except that we know Khalid Shaikh Mohammed has never been found by the Red Cross in Guantanamo Bay or other declared American prisons. Where he’s even being held is completely secret, and you better believe he’s been tortured. I wouldn’t give two cents for any “intelligence” he might provide. It’s also a little too convenient that these guys wanted to A) use shoe bombs and B) fly a plane into another building. It just plays right into the fears people already have and doesn’t really do anything new for the terrorists at all.
I’m guessing most of the “intel” on this came from Indonesia, which has a notoriously bad habit of unapologetic use of torture.
I’m not the only one wondering just how effective all of the DSP’s are in stopping terrorism. Newsweek‘s Michael Hirsh has a blistering article on just what the NSA isn’t doing:
The legal controversy over the NSA surveillance program has obscured an intelligence issue that is at least as important to the nation’s future: sheer competence. Do we have any idea what we’re doing? One reason the NSA is listening in on so many domestic conversations fruitlessly–few of the thousands of tips panned out, according to The Washington Post–is that the agency barely has a clue as to who, or what, it is supposed to be monitoring.
As our esteemed senators fret over whether the NSA has violated their outdated 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they are not paying enough attention to the competence issue. And no one seems to recall that the same Senate intelligence committee report from 2002 also criticized the “NSA’s cautious approach to any collection of intelligence relating to activities in the United States,” and its “failure to address modern communications technology aggressively.” In recent years the agency tried to do so, but failed.
Indeed, as the Washington Post reports, even FISA judges have been upset with the government:
Twice in the past four years, a top Justice Department lawyer warned the presiding judge of a secret surveillance court that information overheard in President Bush’s eavesdropping program may have been improperly used to obtain wiretap warrants in the court, according to two sources with knowledge of those events.
The revelations infuriated U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly — who, like her predecessor, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, had expressed serious doubts about whether the warrantless monitoring of phone calls and e-mails ordered by Bush was legal. Both judges had insisted that no information obtained this way be used to gain warrants from their court, according to government sources, and both had been assured by administration officials it would never happen.
The two heads of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court were the only judges in the country briefed by the administration on Bush’s program. The president’s secret order, issued sometime after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, allows the National Security Agency to monitor telephone calls and e-mails between people in the United States and contacts overseas.
James Baker, the counsel for intelligence policy in the Justice Department’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review, discovered in 2004 that the government’s failure to share information about its spying program had rendered useless a federal screening system that the judges had insisted upon to shield the court from tainted information. He alerted Kollar-Kotelly, who complained to Justice, prompting a temporary suspension of the NSA spying program, the sources said.
What the WaPo doesn’t tell you is that James Baker is the same James Baker who in 2002, when giving professional advice on Senator DeWine’s proposal to reduce the FISA standard from “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion”, stated that there were serious constitutional issues in doing so. Sounds like we’ve got a real hero working in the DOJ, as this is twice he’s stood up for the right thing.
What the WaPo does get right however is that FISA judges were quite pissed off when they learned they weren’t “fast enough” to catch terrorists. As I reported in my earlier story, Gonzales confirmed during his Senate hearings that FISA is always used to monitor domestic-to-domestic phone calls. Not only that, but on September 12, the FISA court made some (legal) modifications to streamline paperwork. The suggestion that DSP1 had to be created because of some inherent flaw in FISA is complete bunk. It was done to expand the president’s powers and that’s it.
Well not just to expand the president’s powers. It was also done to provide legal cover for a host of domestic spying programs completely different from DSP1. One of them is the hideous Total Information Awareness (TIA) program.
Back to Hirsh at Newsweek:
Ironically, one of the most hopeful new intelligence surveillance programs is one that is still demonized in the media and on Capitol Hill. This is the Pentagon’s Total Information Awareness (TIA) project, which was canceled after the last big civil-liberties scandal in late 2002. TIA was the creation of Adm. John Poindexter, the Iran-contra figure who was brought in to run the new program but was cashiered after it was uncovered by The New York Times. TIA was an effort to vacuum up as much U.S. transactions information as possible, such as the purchase of plane tickets or, say, large amounts of fertilizer as a way of anticipating terror plots. But the program was dropped after several senators blasted some of Poindexter’s odder suggestions, like creating a “futures market” in which terror experts could bet on likely terror events and thereby add to the government’s knowledge base.
Yet today, very quietly, the core of TIA survives with a new codename of Topsail (minus the futures market), two officials privy to the intelligence tell NEWSWEEK. It is in programs like these that real data mining is going on and–considering the furor over TIA–with fewer intrusions on civil liberties than occur under the NSA surveillance program. “It’s the best thing to come out of American intelligence in decades,” says John Arquilla, an intelligence expert at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. “It is truly Poindexter’s brainchild. Of all the people in the intelligence business, he has the keenest appreciation of using advanced information technology for intelligence gathering.” Poindexter, who lives just outside Washington in Rockville, Md., could not be reached for comment on whether he is still involved with Topsail.
It wasn’t just “cashiered” – there was actual legislation forbidding that it be used, or anything like it. I told you that the DSP1 was not the only Domestic Spying Program going on and this is more proof of it.
The CS Monitor has more:
The US government 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.
The system – parts of which are operational, parts of which are still under development – is already credited with helping to foil some plots. It is the federal government’s latest attempt to use broad data-collection and powerful analysis in the fight against terrorism. But by delving deeply into the digital minutiae of American life, the program is also raising concerns that the government is intruding too deeply into citizens’ privacy.
The core of this effort is a little-known system called Analysis, Dissemination, Visualization, Insight, and Semantic Enhancement (ADVISE). Only a few public documents mention it. ADVISE is a research and development program within the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), part of its three-year-old “Threat and Vulnerability, Testing and Assessment” portfolio. The TVTA received nearly 50 million in federal funding this year.
You’ll remember that TSA is a division of the jolly Department of Homeland Security and TSA is the one who uses its infamous “No Fly List”, based on data collection methods that are classified. The ACLU won a lawsuit recently to get an innocent American citizen off the list, but it still remains insanely difficult to clear yourself. Even members of Congress have been added, including Ted Kennedy, allegedly because a terrorist had an “alias” with the name Kennedy. Not to mention all of the infants and very young children who’ve been blocked from flying because their names were in the database.
The TSA’s program used to be called CAPPS II but is now evolving towards Secure Flight. So the DHS has ADVISE and the TSA has Secure Flight.
What other systems are out there? Well I’ve written extensively about JPEN, which is the military’s “internet-like” database where “raw” information about suspicious people (in America ONLY) is not only circulated nationwide, but it’s also transferred over to federal and local law enforcement.
And the military’s super secret intelligence branch, Counter-Intelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which has no congressional oversight, operates their own little database called Cornerstone, which contains amongst other things, information about peace groups that CIFA has spied on.
The FBI has its own database called Guardian. The State Department has a database known as Security Incident Management and Analysis System. And of course now we know TIA has continued to survive in a form now called TOPSAIL.
Now compare all of these databases to terrorism convictions or even the “plots” that were uncovered or thwarted. You’ll note that not once did any of the data mining programs play any part. The LA plane-into-tower “plot” was a result of intel from “interrogating” a known Al-Qaeda leader. The administration also touts the catching of Ayman Ferous, the wacko who thought he could cut the Brooklyn Bridge in half with a blowtorch. Who else? Nutty Zacarias Moussaouai, who was convicted only when he pled guilty.
The administration isn’t catching terrorists or preventing attacks with these programs. What they’re doing is spying on Americans who dare to dissent against the administration. They’re spending untold billions of dollars to eavesdrop, monitor, store data and harass innocent Americans whose sole “crime” is to remain critical of the administration – in a lawful, peaceful way.
The American government is absolutely fixated on technological solutions for everything, from solving domestic dissent to stopping IED’s in Iraq (as I’ve written about before). This may sound incongruous but the same mindset that thinks assembling a massive database on dissenting Americans will solve anything is the same one that leads to justifying torture.
Why do I say that? Because torture is absolutely useless in getting intelligence. There are lots of countries, like our fun-lovin’ allies Egypt and Saudi Arabia, who regularly use torture – and it is a complete failure at stopping radical movements and/or terrorists. What it is good at doing is intimidating and cowing the general populace. You’ll notice that Muslims will riot in the streets against cartoons but why don’t they march in Tashkent or Damascus or Riyadh against their dictatorship government. Why not? Because torture intimidates them and it does a damn good job of it.
All those data-mining programs and collecting information on dissent and harassing authors who try to fly on commercial jets sends a message to anyone even thinking about stepping up to the line – you better not misbehave or we’ll make life a living hell for you. We’ll be monitoring your reading lists, we’ll be making it hard for you to fly, we’ll be recording your phone conversations, we’ll be photographing your demonstrations, we’ll be inserting law enforcement officers undercover in your meetings and we’ll put all your credit card information and emails into a gigantic database so we know everyone you know so we can monitor them.
Have we already forgotten about Operation TIPS, where the government wanted utility workers, letter carriers and ordinary citizens to call into the federal gov’t to report suspicious behavior? I guess so.
I live in Romania, where the intelligence service was called the Securitate. East Germany had the STASI. Poland had the Sluzba Bezpieczenstwa. The Soviets had the feared KGB Second Chief Directorate. All of them had the same function – to make every citizen feel like they were being watched all the time, that every phone call or action was being monitored, that their neighbor might be a gov’t collaborator who would turn them in at the slightest sign of dissent.
As I’ve written about before, there’s a DSP which isn’t technical in nature at all. The NSA routinely picks up information on American citizens. By law, it is supposed to destroy this information unless it has permission to conduct surveillance on that individual. But the NSA, under General Michael Hayden, has been feeding raw reports straight to the administration, in particularly the Vice President’s office:
But after Bush was sworn in as president, the way the NSA normally handled those issues started to change dramatically. Vice President Cheney, as Bob Woodward noted in his book Plan of Attack, was tapped by Bush in the summer of 2001 to be more of a presence at intelligence agencies, including the CIA and NSA.
“Given Cheney’s background on national security going back to the Ford years, his time on the House Intelligence Committee, and as secretary of defense, Bush said at the top of his list of things he wanted Cheney to do was intelligence,” Woodward wrote in his book about the buildup to the Iraq war. “In the first months of the new administration, Cheney made the rounds of the intelligence agencies – the CIA, the National Security Agency, which intercepted communications, and the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency. “
It was then that the NSA started receiving numerous requests from Cheney and other officials in the state and defense departments to reveal the identities of the Americans blacked out or deleted from intelligence reports so administration officials could better understand the context of the intelligence.
But the sources said that on dozens of occasions Cheney would, upon learning the identity of the individual, instruct the NSA to continue monitoring specific Americans caught in the wiretaps if he thought more information would be revealed, which crossed the line into illegal territory.
Cheney advised President Bush of what had turned up in the raw NSA reports, said one former White House official who worked on counterterrorism related issues.
“What’s really disturbing is that some of those people the vice president was curious about were people who worked at the White House or the State Department,” one former counterterrorism official said. “There was a real feeling of paranoia that permeated from the vice president’s office and I don’t think it had anything to do with the threat of terrorism. I can’t say what was contained in those taps that piqued his interest. I just don’t know.”
Well Cheney knows darn well what it is. He worked for Nixon and Ford and he knows that what led to Nixon’s resignation wasn’t any burglary, but that government officials were leaking information to Washington Post and New York Times reporters, starting with Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon Papers) and culminating in Deep Throat. Spying on American officials was his way of making sure that any (non-approved) leakers would be identified from the outset.
It’s time to put pressure on ALL members of Congress to continue to keep the issue of DSP’s in the spotlight. And as much as I hate to say it, I feel I have more liberties here in Romania from the government than I would if I lived in America.
How tragic and ironic is that?
This is cross-posted from Flogging the Simian
Peace
