Look Everybody We're East Berlin, Pre-Wall Topple!

[BigV]

Originally Posted by richlevy

...
It might be that we need guys like you. Too many men mix in conscience with duty, causing problems. You seem like you would be unhindered by any qualms. Illegal order? I doubt that you would even consider that such a thing is possible.

I feel stung on UG's behalf.

Ouch. Dayum!

[Undertoad]

So this is a leak about a federal investigation into leaks?

I can't remember, are we for or against leaks this week?

[mrnoodle]

Get your terminology right -- it's "whistleblowing" when a liberal does it.

[glatt]

Nothing wrong with investigating the source of a leak. What's wrong is where they are looking. How can a press be free when the government is logging all their phone calls?

[Happy Monkey]

It's very charitable of you to say that only liberals are conscientious enough to whistleblow, but I'm sure that there's a counterexample at some point in history.

[Undertoad]

If there's a leak reported at 3rd and Market I would check it out at 3rd and Market. If there's a leak reported to the press, where should they check it out, the Dep't of Agriculture? I don't think the press feels too threatened... if they print a story from an anonymous senior law enforcement official, with no corroborating evidence, and then a sort of "push speculation":

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Parse this paragraph. There are no facts in it. ABC News "does not know", but connected the events casually so that the reader could draw their own conclusion.

And you did. Your own reading was "ABC News is reporting that the NSA is targeting them..." But that wasn't what they said, but - for some reason - they phrased it to strongly suggest that link.

If they are being investigated, is it legal or not legal? If they had facts on that, would they be reported? Did they contact anyone from the investigating agency to get an official statement on the matter? That would be Good Journalism so when they don't do it, why not?

Our reports on the CIA's secret prisons in Romania and Poland were known to have upset CIA officials. The CIA asked for an FBI investigation of leaks of classified information following those reports.

People questioned by the FBI about leaks of intelligence information say the CIA was also disturbed by ABC News reports that revealed the use of CIA predator missiles inside Pakistan.

Parse parse parse. They claim the government is watching what numbers they call. Then they say CIA is mad at ABC News. Is this related - did they mean to claim that CIA was watching their phone calls? When they were suggesting two paragraphs earlier that it might be NSA?

No, they just threw out a load of speculation and left the dots for you to connect.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Parse this paragraph. There are no facts in it. ABC News "does not know", but connected the events casually so that the reader could draw their own conclusion.

And you did. Your own reading was "ABC News is reporting that the NSA is targeting them..." But that wasn't what they said, but - for some reason - they phrased it to strongly suggest that link.

Fair enough. I assumed "NSA" when they said "government." Maybe it was NSA. Maybe not. It's certainly in the NSA's field of expertise. I think it's a little irrelevant what part of the executive branch is doing this.

Here's what they said: "A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources."

I admit it's an article that's pretty sparse on facts, and is poorly written, but you are wrong when you say there are no facts in it. There is one new fact: the government is logging the calls of ABC News. Isn't one fact enough to be reported?

[Happy Monkey]

I think you're missing the point. It's not that they are investigating leaks. It is that they are investigating leaks by using warrantless searches of a database of every phone call made through the majority of the phone companies in the US. These phone calls are not a) international or b) involving a known terrorist, so this is the first example to surface of the use of this NSA program for warrantless domestic surveilance outside of a terrorism investigation.

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

I think you're missing the point. It's not that they are investigating leaks. It is that they are investigating leaks by using warrantless searches of a database of every phone call made through the majority of the phone companies in the US. These phone calls are not a) international or b) involving a known terrorist, so this is the first example to surface of the use of this NSA program for warrantless domestic surveilance outside of a terrorism investigation.

That's because they are not looking for terrorists, they are trying on their jack-boots.

[Undertoad]

The story offers a lot of truthiness towards that conclusion. It sure feels like our rights are being violated, so they probably are.

[Undertoad]

The fact reported is not "The government is logging the calls of ABC News."

The fact reported is "A senior federal law enforcement official says that some government entity is tracking the calls of Brian Ross and Richard Esposito."

What entity? They don't say. They don't ask anyone. They merely suggest.

Is the investigation without a warrant? They don't say. They don't ask anyone. They merely suggest.

[Happy Monkey]

COLLECTING the database should require the signature of a judge, possibly one per customer.

Each listen, each recording, needs a specific warrant.

[Undertoad]

the followup

...suggests that it wasn't the NSA or CIA, who fail to make a reappearance here. Now it was the FBI, but again they fail to directly connect any dots.

...pulls back, on the basis of a fresh take from this anonymous senior government official, on the whole concept of the calls being "tracked". ('more like "backtracked"', now says official.)

...then weighs in with the utterly weak "But FBI officials did not deny", and a ridiculously loose conjecture on how the FBI might operate in an investigation.

[tw]

Don't fool yourself for one minute. This administration is not about the law. Like another administration that also hid behind "We enforce the law" to subvert the United States, George Jr administration has been doing same. That means bugging other nation's diplomatic communications to force Security Council approval for 'Pearl Harboring' of Iraq. That means bugging and listening to international calls - without any judicial approval - only because they want to. That means extraordinary rendition and torture because they could not find mythical WMD and mythical terrorist cells in the US.

So like in Nixon's time, patriots had to leak truth to the press. Like the crook Nixon, George Jr's administration demands loyalty first; principles of America secondary. Anything that would stop whistle blowers is essential to this administration. And programs that would expose patriots - the whistle blowers - are best for a draconian and dictatorial administration.

But we can trust George Jr people to build databases on everyone's phone records - just like we can trust them to uncover who exposed a CIA agent for political purposes. Phone records that once required court orders are now acceptable in 'honest' administration hands? Same people who have no guilt about kidnapping and torturing people .... and lying about it?

So how large is this program? Are you so anti-American (which means as dumb as a mental midget) to believe phone records are all they are collecting? From the Wall Street Journal of 27 April 2006:

On March 19, 2005, about 200 mainly middle-aged peace marchers made their way through the streets of this city, stopping outside a Marine Corps recruiting center and a Federal Bureau of Investigation office to listen to speeches against the Iraq war. Close behind, police in unmarked cars followed them - acting on a tip from the Pentagon.

Note that date - over a year ago - and who has that information. Do you think this tip is an exception? Not according to the WSJ report.

For weeks prior to the demonstration, analysts at the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group in Fort Meade MD were downloading information from activist Web site, intercepting e-mails and cross-referencing this with information in police databases.

The Army's conclusion, contained in an alert to Akron police: "Even through these demonstrations are advertised as 'peaceful,' they are assessed to present a potential force protection threat." ...
Pentagon officials later issued an apology, admitting that some of the information in the military databases shouldn't have been there.

Yes, after a whistle blower - by definition a great American patriot - leaked what was happening. Do you think for one minute that program has stopped? If so, then you also believe Saddam attacked the World Trade Center - still think George Jr is a great president.

After 9/11, the Bush administration declared the continental US a theater off military operation for the first time since the Civil War, creating a demand to better research potential threats to American forces at home.

Does that make you uneasy? If not, learn why these techniques are found mostly in dictatorial nations - where government cannot trust its own people. Do you trust a military officer who need not answer to judicial oversight AND who might have Urbane Guerrilla's "libertarian" beliefs? Did we not learn from Nixon and Watergate? Apparently not considering so many who don't care what 'they' know about us - who clearly have no idea what even McCarthyism did to good Americans.

Now several parts of the vast Pentagon bureaucracy are building large databases of information from sources including local police, military personnel and the Internet. In doing so, the military is edging toward a sensitive area that has been off-limits to it since the 1970s: domestic surveillance and law enforcement.

One widely reported part to the new information battle is the National Security Agency's wiretapping of calls without a warrant between people in the US and suspected terrorists overseas. ... That practice is just one piece of a larger, less-discussed effort.

The military justified the gathering of domestic intelligence in part by relying on a key distinction between "receiving" information and "collecting" it. Military regulations over the past few decades have generally barred using soldiers to gather information on American citizens. Officials have interpreted the rules to mean that receiving information from the police and federal agencies is acceptable.

It was not acceptable before a lying president took power and demanded loyalty over all else. (Same loyalty that stopped four separate FBI teams from discovering 11 September attacks.) This administration's attitude of 'nothing illegal until challenged'. Principles that make America a free nation ... only apply to those who support a mental midget president? And so government can collect anything on you without any judicial review? They don't need no court approval if a court does not specifically rule against them. Yes, even torture and international kidnapping - extraordinary rendition - is acceptable because courts did not rule otherwise. Men as honest as Nixon.

Did you file income taxes using a tax service? Did you file electronically via some service? Why do some companies offer free tax filing software? Because they can sell your income tax information; this administration has that much regard for your privacy - and identity protection. You don't need identity protection? Good. Then you don't need your phone records protected by judicial review.

As a White House mouthpiece once declared and this is an exact quote, "You have no expectation of privacy."

Are you 'Deep Throat' desperately trying to protect the United States from a widespread and corrupt administration? Today, you are traceable because who you talk to is no longer secret - does not even require Judicial review. This is a radical departure from America of 10 years ago. And this is not just limited to collecting your phone records. If a machine does collecting, then the DoD is only receiving (not collecting) information?

On Nov 5, 2001, Lt Gen Robert W Noonan, then the Army's deputy chief of staff for intelligence, sent a memo to Army commanders titled, "Collecting Information on US Persons."

"Contrary to popular belief, there is no absolute ban on intelligence components collecting US person information," it said. ... "Remember," the memo stressed, "merely receiving information does not constitute 'collection' " under Army regulations. ....

As Mr Wolfowitz was starting up CIFA, researchers at a separate Pentagon unit ... began work on a massive data-capturing program known as Total Information Awareness. This program, too, envisioned mining government databases and personal records of individuals for patterns that would predict a terrorist attack. A huge public outcry over the project led Congress to cancel it in October 2003 - but Congress created a specific exception for tools that might aid "counterterrorism foreign intelligence."

Many computer programs and techniques developed during the Total Information Awareness project quietly survived. Some were taken up by the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group.

So what would avert or expose corruption by this group? Where is the oversight? They are called whistle blowers. Anyone trying to notify the fourth estate that a president wanted to nuke Germany, Russia, or India (as a Wolfowitz paper suggested we should be prepared to do) could then be arrested and held in a secret Afghanistan or Rumanian prison without even judicial review? We would never know he is gone - because this administration says such military action was not declared illegal (yet) by courts. Courts cannot rule on things not reported. And if a court does not rule, then it must be legal. Welcome to the George Jr atttitude even about domestic spying.

Why do we need Fatherland Security? Why do we need a military compiling dossiers on each of us? Because if any one finds corruption at the highest level of government, he cannot even go to the press. No wonder a president who demands 'total loyalty' is so upset that we might know about the 902nd MIG, that he is bugging phones without judicial review, and that private information can be sold to others without your knowledge. Once the military was not permitted information on your tax returns. Hello.

Once we were worried about no government effort to protect you from identity theft. Now they must know even who you talk to; even if you dial a wrong number. J Edgar Hoover wished he had this much power; this much information. Did you learn enough about history to appreciate how scary that is? J Edgar Hoover wishes he had this much information. J Edgar Hoover blackmail was legendary. But we can trust George Jr to be honest - just like those other Christians in Dover PA?

What was necessary to start a Spanish Inquisition? Cardinal Fag? It was not started by a cushy pillow.