Confirmation

Over the weekend, the same New York Times authors that broke the initial domestic spying story confirm what a lot of us in the blogosphere thought: this was a massive data mining operation.

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

Thank you Verizon! Thank you AT&T! The American people welcome your commitment to privacy!

I think only the most forgiving of apologists would think that a computer data-analysis program on this scale would be foolproof 100% of the time. We have no idea what patterns of words or phrases the computer is screening for: and we can be fairly certain that the computer is unlikely to detect sarcasm or just two people discussing terrorism in the course of current events. This results in a KGB-era surveillance operation in which everyone is a potential suspect, everyone's phone is being tapped, and everyone needs to watch what they say. There's a difference between the old "yelling-fire-in-a-crowded-theater" and making a joke (or simply stringing a certain pattern of words together that would raise a white flag) in the midst of a private conversation. This complete abrogation of civil liberties and the right to privacy has led even Bush-friendly publications like The Chicago Tribune to lash out at the policy:

President Bush is a bundle of paradoxes. He thinks the scope of the federal government should be limited but the powers of the president should not. He wants judges to interpret the Constitution as the framers did, but doesn't think he should be constrained by their intentions.

He attacked Al Gore for trusting government instead of the people, but he insists anyone who wants to defeat terrorism must put absolute faith in the man at the helm of government [...]

But the theory boils down to a consistent and self-serving formula: What's good for George W. Bush is good for America, and anything that weakens his power weakens the nation. To call this an imperial presidency is unfair to emperors.

What will come out of next month's Senate hearings on the issue will be a bill, a bill re-affirming privacy rights, possibly re-affirming the jurisdiction of the FISA court, and ordering an end to illegal wiretaps. If the President vetoes it and continues the practice, that's when we'll be at a constitutional impasse.