I *Hate* the Way This Administration Makes Me into a Nutbar Conspiracy Theorist

Dan Eggen of the Washington Post writes:

Bush Authorized Domestic Spying: President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying.... The super-secretive NSA... has monitored the e-mail, telephone calls and other communications of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people under the program.... Authorities, including a former NSA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, were worried that vital information could be lost in the time it took to secure a warrant from a special surveillance court, sources said....

The Patriot Act granted the FBI new powers to conduct secret searches and surveillance... overseen by a secret court that meets at Justice Department headquarters and must approve applications for wiretaps, searches and other operations. The NSA's operation is outside that court's purview... The law governing clandestine surveillance in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, prohibits conducting electronic surveillance not authorized by statute. A government agent can try to avoid prosecution if he can show he was "engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction," according to the law.... The NSA activities were justified by a classified Justice Department legal opinion authored by John C. Yoo, a former deputy in the Office of Legal Counsel who argued that congressional approval of the war on al Qaeda gave broad authority to the president...

I am assured that the "time it took to secure a warrant" reason is pure bs--that FISA allows for special actions in emergencies. I am also assured that every warrant asked for under FISA has been granted.

So what's the purpose of violating the law if the FISA court approves of everything you ask? Either total stupidity on the part of the Bush administration (a likely possibility), or the Bush administration was looking forward into a future in which they would want wiretaps of which the FISA secret court would not approve. I wonder what those wiretaps are.

Comments

[Howard]

I understand that the NY Times had this story for roughly a year and sat on it (for reasons i don't fully understand). I wonder how long the WaPo had it?

And if they had it for more than the 24 hours that the public has had it, i wonder how john harris approached this story from his editorial perch?

[JRossi]

Nutbar is a great term and should be used more often. Keep up the good work. Nutjob as a noun is also good.

[Chuck Dupree]

Thing is, its hard to imagine wiretaps of which the FISA secret court would not approve.

My impression is that the FISA secret court approves pretty every request it gets

[Charles]

To be fair, Brad, the NSA has been engaged in massive illegal wiretapping for 23 years. That's when James Bamford revealed the practice in his first book, The Puzzle Palace.

What us Kremlinologists are supposed to understand that whatever Bushco is doing is *so* outrageous that the New York Times has to let us in on a lit bit of it.

It's the same way with the Pentagon monitoring of dissent. William Arkin revealed 1500 incidents of illegal monitoring, and that the Pentagon itself deemed fewer than 1% to have any credible connection to investigation of terrorism. He says that from the records, he can tell that what he has exposed is merely the tip of a much larger iceberg:

"We know that there are dozens of these databases, Cornerstone, TALON, [inaudible], the Coast Guard ICC database, the F.B.I. Guardian database, the F.B.I. TRRS database, the Joint Intelligence Task Force Counterterrorism Homeland Defense database, the SSOMB database, the BTS summary, the C.I.A. TD database, the NSA traffic database called Criss-Cross. I mean, we know that these databases are out there and that they all deal with domestic issues.

What is particularly worrisome right now is that the National Counterterrorism Center, which was set up as part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, is now working to conglomerate all of these databases and that the Counterintelligence Field Activities, CIFA of the Department of Defense, is working to ensure that the military gains access to all of these databases, as well." (www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=05/12/15/155219)

Figure that the few hundred illegal wiretaps the NYT reports represents tens or hundreds of thousands, and that the 1500 incidents of illegal, politically-motivated surveillance represents millions of dissidents under watch.

That's why these leaks are appearing. It has become so obviously criminal that good people inside of the intel establishment are leaking.

[MG]

Brad,

Did we read the same article?

I understood that the Patriot Act jurisdiction secret court doesn't have jurisdication over NSA or FISA: - "The NSA's operation is outside that court's purview..."

I'm surprised that you didn't focus any attention on the following:

"It has also involved teams of Defense Intelligence Agency personnel stationed in major U.S. cities conducting the type of surveillance typically performed by the FBI: monitoring the movements and activities -- through high-tech equipment -- of individuals and vehicles, the official said."

"The involvement of military personnel in such tasks was provoked by grave anxiety among senior intelligence officials after the 2001 suicide attacks that additional terrorist cells were present within U.S. borders and could only be discovered with the military's help, said the official, who had direct knowledge of the events."

I'm not surprised or alarmed over any of this "new" info. We've been living under a modified Martial Law body of legal and executive level decisions since September 2001.

You may not like it, but what did you expect? Life as usual? Not in a GWOT environment, supported by a few executive orders.

We may not take GWOT as seriously outside the Beltway, but they are running the show. And they do take GWOT seriously when it comes to public arena communications.

Use some of the key alert tag words in your next land line telephone call. Somewhere out there, a computer system will lock on and record your conversation. Period. Happens every day.

[Neil']

I notice that a lot of righties are using the "President's powers as Commander in Chief" as an excuse for this spying and etc. How do they get this point any play at all - being CIC only means final authority over our military forces, does it not?

PS - There is a sobering piece by "Hilzoy" on WaMo and Atrios that is "going all over the Internet" - It calls for impeachment of GWB for breaking laws, the essential issue with Nixon (or which may have only been the coverup...)

[Neil']

Well, "Hilzoy" is indeed Hilary Bok as quoted in thread directly below - that's the one. Well, I flit so lightly...

[s9]

"Thing is, its hard to imagine wiretaps of which the FISA secret court would not approve."

I'm guessing the FISA would reject a request for a general warrant to wiretap the personal conversations of the sitting members of the FISA court unless the FISA were to see compelling evidence of its own penetration.

[Scorpio]

You ought to cite Teresa Neilsen Hayden, who was the first to deliver the line you use as a title.

[Eli Rabett]

More to the point, why does the faculty at Berkeley allow John Yoo to continue teaching there, and why has no one charged him with malpractice before the CA bar?

Stop whining and do something, and please don't tell me that academic freedom makes any of this impossible.

[Jean-Philippe Stijns]

Please re-read this passage, it is hilarious, in a sad sort of way:

"The Patriot Act granted the FBI new powers to conduct secret searches and surveillance... overseen by a secret court that meets at Justice Department headquarters and must approve applications for wiretaps, searches and other operations. The NSA's operation is outside that [secret] court's purview..."

I have a naive question. Does the US Constitution apply to US Presidents? Or is there a super-secret constitution that commoners like me are not aware of and that US Presidents like Bush are secretly respecting? Because if not, well I am sorry, but silly me do not understand the concept of a constitution not anymore. But then again me very stupid and very liburaaal European.

[otto]

John Yoo is Bush's Carl Schmitt.

[miriamsong]

It's not stupidity -- it's power madness. They are trying to create an aura of presidential omnipotence, in direct opposition to checks and balances.

[bellatrys]

It isn't what they want to do.

It's what they have already done.

Who do you think they've been spying on internally, that they don't want any outsiders to know about, which would happen if they went to a judge to try to get approval?

Over a year ago?

Which had to be kept secret, over a year ago?

There's at least 36 of them.

And they were afraid that it would come out if Kerry were elected president.

Bolton confirmation/NSA transcripts are tied up in it somehow, too.

I'll put money on it that Fitzgerald is one of the 36, myself. But that still leaves 35 - or 34, if you figure that Kerry has to be on there. And given what was said in All The President's Men, and the business with the No Fly List, I'm sure Teddy Kennedy is on it too.

So, 33 others, internal enemies of the state, too embarassing to get legal wiretaps on - who?

[otto]

I think Alito is going to be asked about this.

[Knut Wicksell]

It was on this very site more than two and a half years ago that I think I intimated the 'F'-word with respect to the present administration. Then it was just a feeling. Now it's a moral certainty. We are living in a virtual police state. It's virtual because they haven't got to the point of actually rounding people up yet or hounding them from their jobs (unless they are U.S. government employees). I believe that it had not been for Abu Ghraib and the successful insurgency in Iraq (which IMHO is in an odd way probably protecting our domestic civil liberties by showing how incompetent our so-called 'protectors' are) there would have been a sustained and largely successful attack on the independence of the univerities. This means you, Brad. They have the means at their disposal -- the Federal grants without which no research university can now survive. They were warming up on Middle Eastern Studies programmes when part of the roof caved in.

If it were not for that we would be well on our way out of the virtual and into the real police state. Think how it would be like to have your University monitored by a Kommissar like Bill Kristol or David Frum, because that's exactly what the future was (is?) going to look like.

[Charles]

MG, FISA governs targeting of American persons. Bamford's Body of Secrets contains a section pp. 434ff on Shamrock (intercepting telegrams), FISA (pp. 440ff) and how the legislation and USSID 18 (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB23/07-03.gif). The FBI is the primary client for domestic FISA requests.

Of course that was pre-9/11. Nowadays, Junius Caesar decides all these issues.

[Blissex]

As the article states the administration positioi is that "congressional approval of the war on al Qaeda gave broad authority to the president..." means that the congressional resolution authorising the president to take any "necessary and appropriate" action supersedes any previous law, and authorises the preside to do anything whatsoever, because it does not impose any limitations on what these "necessary and appropriate" actions may be.

When the administration says that they respect the law, that's sincere because it is impossible to violate a law that authorises you to do *absolutely anything* you deem appropriate and necessary:

These powers have nothing to do with the ''commander in chief''; they depend strictly on that
Since the resolution came into force after international treaties, this means that in effect the USA have withdrawn from any and all international treaties that conflict with anything the president does too.

I would like to point out that Roberts voted for this extraordinarily wide interpretation (because ''appropriate and necessary'' is usual code for the use of the armed forces, not the overriding of every existing law and treaty) just before being appointed Chief Justice:

http://www.slate.com/id/2123055/

[Bre]

I've been wondering about (former DOJ counsel and present UC-Berkeley prof) John Yoo actually teaching students about "the Law."

His briefs pave the way for the dismantling of the American experiment. Between allowing the executive unlimited emergency powers for the duration of an indefinite war and disallowing any oversight or checks by the states, legislature, and judiciary, he justifies a Caesar-like tyranny.

What are his classes like?

[vidkun]

So let's just all bcc every email to a random address in .sa and put a few of the current naughty words into headers and answering machines, keep em busy.

[Movie Guy]

Charles,

Appreciate the correction.

Do any provisions apply to the NSA? I would assume not based on your post.

[ahem]

Could I beg a favor from Professor DeLong? If you see John Yoo around Berkeley, take photographs. Follow him around with a tape recorder for a few minutes.

Frankly, I would not want to be associated with an academic institution that pays this man.