Gonzales Is Challenged on Wiretaps

PT said:
I too don't think it's anything new, nor is it wrong. I don't like the idea of big brother listening to me, but then again, I accept it.
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If it's not wrong then why is against the law.

It's things like this that make it necessary.
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Screw that, why the hell is he making a big fuss over some alleged foiled 2002 plot right now? Perhaps it's a fricken' blatant BS scare tactic to try to get his ass out of hot water for breaking the law?

Bush treats the people like they're all a bunch of brain-dead gullible fools....then a bug chunk of the people act like a bunch of brain-dead gullible fools to confirm his belief.

This wouldn't seem odd for any reason would it....

"The president called it the “Liberty Tower” but the White House later corrected that to the Library Tower, since renamed the US Bank Tower."
uh, which building were we going to say it was again? I can't remember our story if it's going to have all these details. Can't we just keep it real vague ...but still scare them.

Bush said the plot was derailed when a Southeast Asian nation arrested a key al-Qaida operative. Bush did not name the country or the operative.Townsend would not release the names of the four men arrested or which countries arrested them.

Townsend would not say whether the 2002 plot was thwarted as a result of the program, which eavesdrops on the international emails and phone calls of people inside the United States with suspected ties to terrorists."


How does it make wiretapping necessary if it is real? They won't even say if any wiretapping was involved. Let's say it is real and wiretapping helped stop it...that means the president should be able to unlawfully listen to any citizens phone calls without a warrant?

Hey we could probaly foil all sorts of crime if we put cameras in everyones home and cars, bar codes on their ass, and a GPS in their head.

What I find hard to credit is that you're gullible enough to believe that they ever stopped. You probably believe that there aren't people in America who are above the law too, huh? :shrug:
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I don't believe it ever stopped and sure there are people above the law. Is that supposed to justify it? Now we just ignore it?

I'm not gullible enough to believe that people ever stopped robbing banks, date-raping, abusing children, or killing spouses either....does that mean we shouldn't prosecute them?
 
the law...

The first is when the communications are exclusively between or among foreign powers or involve technical intelligence other than spoken communications from a location under the open and exclusive control of a foreign power; there is no substantial risk that the surveillance will acquire the communications to or from a U.S. person; and proposed minimization procedures meet the requirements set forth by the law. Under those conditions, authorization can be granted by the President through the Attorney General for a period up to one year. The second is following a declaration of war by Congress. Then the President, through the Attorney General, can authorize electronic surveillance for foreign intelligence purposes without a court order for up to 15 days.
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flavio said:
Things were cleared up with several bills passed by congress. From what I can see this makes it pretty clear....

#sdfootnote6sym[/size]
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All of which was circumvented by the so-called Patriot Act. Most of the old restrictions we basically tossed right on the garbage heap. Whole sections of the legal code were set ablaze with that crazy sellout of basic freedoms.
 
unclehobart said:
All of which was circumvented by the so-called Patriot Act. Most of the old restrictions we basically tossed right on the garbage heap. Whole sections of the legal code were set ablaze with that crazy sellout of basic freedoms.
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Yeah, we need to get rid of any remnant of that atrocity asap. However, after a admittedly brief googling of the act and it's wiretap changes I don't see anything that makes Bush's unwarranted wiretaps legal.

I agree that it's wrong flavio. What do you propose I do about it.
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I propose people quit being ignorant, apathetic, enabling, gullible or whatever the hell their problem is WAKE THE FUCK UP and start holding our leaders responsible for their actions. Indict. Impeach.

Rove is blackmailing the Senate. Gonzales, the Attoeney General lied under oath, they alter scientific research, appoint unqualified corrupt people to important positions, gift billions of dollars to oil execs and Halliburton, change justification dozens of times for an invasion that has killed tens of thousands, block investigatons of wrong doing.

This is acceptable? Hell no, it's unAmerican and leading the country towards fascism.


Fascism

  1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
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flavio said:
Screw that, why the hell is he making a big fuss over some alleged foiled 2002 plot right now? Perhaps it's a fricken' blatant BS scare tactic to try to get his ass out of hot water for breaking the law?
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And you very well may be right, he may have made it all up. But I don't think you can definitively say that the actions the US government has taken since 9/11 hasn't prevented further terrorist actions against the United States. Non-actions don't usually make the headlines.
 
flavio said:
I don't see anything that makes Bush's unwarranted wiretaps legal.
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http://www.epic.org/privacy/terrorism/hr3162.html : copy of the provisions of the Patriot Act.

It looks like everything from sections 106-219 Give the prez, in a roundabout way, powers to do almost any electronic eavesdropping and monitoring or corporations and individuals at any time, in secret, with a single jursidiction court order, which itself can be kept secret, which can be kept away from Congressional oversight or approval of such actions. All warrants and permissions for tracing and interception in all things, internet and telephone, aka electronic are moot.

Do not pass go. Do not collect $200.
 
unclehobart said:
flavio said:
I don't see anything that makes Bush's unwarranted wiretaps legal.
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Warpowers Act
SEC. 2. AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF UNITED STATES ARMED FORCES.

(a) IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.
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it is made abundantly clear that the President's program information on thousands of completely innocent Americans via secret eavesdropping and uncovers approximately zero actual terrorist activity.

Why ignore FISA
Valuable information remains valuable even if it comes from one in a thousand intercepts. But government officials and lawyers said the ratio of success to failure matters greatly when eavesdropping subjects are Americans or U.S. visitors with constitutional protection. The minimum legal definition of probable cause, said a government official who has studied the program closely, is that evidence used to support eavesdropping ought to turn out to be "right for one out of every two guys at least." Those who devised the surveillance plan, the official said, "knew they could never meet that standard -- that's why they didn't go through" the court that supervises the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.
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If they believe it's legal they should be able to discuss it with other officaials in the intelligence community.
Intelligence lawyers said FISA plainly requires a warrant if the government wants real-time access to that information for any one person at a time. But the FISA court, as some lawyers saw it, had no explicit jurisdiction over wholesale collection of records that do not include the content of communications. One high-ranking intelligence official who argued for a more cautious approach said he found himself pushed aside. Awkward silences began to intrude on meetings that discussed the evolving rules.

"I became aware at some point of things I was not being told about," the intelligence official said.
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The "threshold" used by the NSA to determine if a communication between someone in the U.S. and an overseas contact is adequate to justify eavesdropping is "pattern analysis" of behavior:
Pattern analysis . . . does not depend on ties to a known suspect. It begins with places terrorists go, such as the Pakistani province of Waziristan, and things they do, such as using disposable cell phones and changing them frequently, which U.S. officials have publicly cited as a challenge for counterterrorism.

"These people don't want to be on the phone too long," said Russell Tice, a former NSA analyst, offering another example.

Analysts build a model of hypothetical terrorist behavior, and computers look for people who fit the model. Among the drawbacks of this method is that nearly all its selection criteria are innocent on their own. There is little precedent, lawyers said, for using such a model as probable cause to get a court-issued warrant for electronic surveillance.

Jeff Jonas, now chief scientist at IBM Entity Analytics, invented a data-mining technology used widely in the private sector and by the government. He sympathizes, he said, with an analyst facing an unknown threat who gathers enormous volumes of data "and says, 'There must be a secret in there.' "

But pattern matching, he argued, will not find it. Techniques that "look at people's behavior to predict terrorist intent," he said, "are so far from reaching the level of accuracy that's necessary that I see them as nothing but civil liberty infringement engines."
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Rewards being reaped from the program....
Bush has said his program covers only overseas calls to or from the United States and stated categorically that "we will not listen inside this country" without a warrant. [Air Force Gen. Michael V.] Hayden [the nation's second-ranking intelligence officer] said the government goes to the intelligence court when an eavesdropping subject becomes important enough to "drill down," as he put it, "to the degree that we need all communications."

Yet a special channel set up for just that purpose four years ago has gone largely unused, according to an authoritative account. Since early 2002, when the presiding judge of the federal intelligence court first learned of Bush's program, he agreed to a system in which prosecutors may apply for a domestic warrant after warrantless eavesdropping on the same person's overseas communications. The annual number of such applications, a source said, has been in the single digits.
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Once you "drill down" on these "single digits" how many terrorists turn up? Considering all the press I'd guess they'd have mentioned one if any at all turned up.


But hey, at least they protect the private information of innocents:
Many features of the surveillance program remain unknown, including what becomes of the non-threatening U.S. e-mails and conversations that the NSA intercepts. Participants, according to a national security lawyer who represents one of them privately, are growing "uncomfortable with the mountain of data they have now begun to accumulate." Spokesmen for the Bush administration declined to say whether any are discarded.
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Source...
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I propose people quit being ignorant, apathetic, enabling, gullible or whatever the hell their problem is WAKE THE FUCK UP and start holding our leaders responsible for their actions. Indict. Impeach.
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Pretty words. They don't really mean anything, but they are pretty. When was the last time you wrote to your congressman or senator, flavio? Do you think it made a difference? Do you think there is any possibility whatsoever that anyone in the administration will be indicted or impeached? I don't care whether you think they deserve it, do you think it will happen? Do you think you can make it happen?
 
I dunno. Ask Bill, who had this same program (the same one that dates back decades)
 
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