Glenn Greenwald does an impressive job detailing the implications of the latest administration leak. The leak went out to Scott Shane and David Johnston at the New York Times and to Dan Eggen and Joby Warrick at the Washington Post. So, what’s the leak? The leak is that data mining was at the heart of the Gonzales/Card visit to Ashcroft’s hospital bed. Never mind that, in January 2006, then NSA director Michael Hayden denied data mining had anything to do with it, this new leak should not surprise us. When Risen and Lichtblau first broke this story they made it clear that there was more going on than just some phone or email wiretaps.
In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.
The expanding chain soon led to a giant wild goose chase that chewed up impossible amounts of FBI man-hours.
But we need to keep our eye on the ball. The reason this program’s existence leaked was because many people (at the NSA, in the DOJ, in Congress, and one of the FISA court judges) felt the program was illegal. It really doesn’t matter what aspect of the program they found illicit. When the Bush administration crafted their defense they emphasized, again and again, that the program was strictly for monitoring al-Qaeda and that it did not involve data mining. Now they say that it did involve data mining. How is this exculpatory?
