Bipartisan Outrage

Now that leading conservatives like Grover Norquist (!) and Paul Weyrich (!!) have come out against the NSA illegal spying program, do you think the White House will get the message?

Patriots to Restore Checks and Balances (PRCB) today called upon Congress to hold open, substantive oversight hearings examining the President's authorization of the National Security Agency (NSA) to violate domestic surveillance requirements outlined in the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Former U.S. Rep. Bob Barr, chairman of PRCB, was joined by fellow conservatives Grover Norquist, president of Americans for Tax Reform (ATR); David Keene, chairman of the American Conservative Union; Paul Weyrich, chairman and CEO of the Free Congress Foundation and Alan Gottlieb, founder of the Second Amendment Foundation, in urging lawmakers to use NSA hearings to establish a solid foundation for restoring much needed constitutional checks and balances to intelligence law.

Despite those toadies who rushed to the aid of the President in the days following the scandal, this is not a partisan issue. Unless you think the Constitution is a partisan document.

Meanwhile, the New York Times reported yesterday that not only is this wiretapping illegal, it was a huge waste of time:

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. The spy agency was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of phone and Internet traffic. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former F.B.I. official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

It kind of ruins the whole "this is a vital tool" argument that some have been using as a basis to break the law and destroy civil liberties. On a practical scale, if this thing isn't even working, why on Earth would we keep doing it?

Well, the answer probably lies with WHO they're spying on over at the NSA. All roads on this thing lead to domestic spying of purely domestic "threats": peace groups, opposition parties, etc. Other agencies like the Defense Department have already admitted to this; mark my words, we'll find out that this is part of the NSA program as well.