Power Begets Power

Marcy Wheeler has the gory details of today's markup for the renewal of the Patriot Act. Basically, the Obama Administration and friendly Democrats in Congress - mainly DiFi and Pat Leahy - have used the Mohammed Zazi investigation to reauthorize provisions of the Patriot Act, some of which have never been used, some of which represent deep intrusions into our civil liberties.

So the Obama administration has its first allegedly big Terrorism case, and they can hardly contain themselves as they exploit it to justify a continuation of the very Patriot Act and FISA powers which Democrats (and, in the case of FISA, Obama himself) long claimed to oppose. Indeed, key Obama ally Dianne Feinstein has worked diligently in the Senate not just to block Patriot Act reforms, but to make the law even worse, and has repeatedly cited the Zazi case to justify that.

Absolutely none of the methods used in the Zazi investigation would have commenced without Zazi being tied directly to Al Qaeda. But Feinstein and the White House doesn't want to have this burden of proof. They want the ability to engage in fishing expeditions, to use roving wiretaps or "sneak and peek" searches or the use of business records without having to prove that the subject is suspected of terrorist activity. It's pretty clear that this is leading toward tracking the records of anyone who bought large quantities of hydrogen peroxide. So look out, women who dye their hair and like to stock up!

This has come in conjunction with major pronouncements by Administration officials about how very dangerous the Zazi case was and how it proves that law enforcement needs these tools. I rebutted that earlier - they need tools, but not OPEN-ENDED ones. It also makes a mockery of Administration boasts that they're not politicizing terror - the juxtaposition of these press events and the Patriot Act markup is pretty obvious.

But that's apparently what they're getting. Russ Feingold is upset. Only him, Dick Durbin and Arlen Specter (!) managed to vote against the final bill from the perspective of civil liberties.

Before I get into the specific provisions that concern me, I want to say how disappointed I was in the debate in the committee. Today particularly, I started to feel as if too many members of the committee from both parties are willing to accept uncritically whatever the executive branch says about even the most reasonable proposed changes in the law. Of course we should consider the perspective of the FBI and the Justice Department. Keeping Americans safe is everyone’s priority. But we also need to consider a full range of perspectives and come to our own conclusions about how best to protect the American people and preserve their freedoms. Protecting the rights of innocent people should be a part of that equation. It's not the Prosecutors’ Committee; it's the Judiciary Committee. And whether the executive branch powers are overbroad is something we have to decide. The only people we should be deferring to are the American people, as we try to protect them from terrorism without infringing on their freedoms [...]

Specifically, the bill reported out of the Committee today on an 11-8 vote (five Republicans and only three Democrats voted No) fell short in a few key areas. Perhaps the most important was the failure to include the reasonable 3-part standard for issuing a FISA business records order under Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act. This standard was in a bill unanimously reported by the Committee, under Republican control, in 2005, and it was in Sen. Leahy’s original bill this year. Last week, Senator Durbin offered an amendment to put the standard back in the bill. It would have ensured that these secret authorities can only be directed at individuals who have some connection to terrorism or espionage. The standard is broad and flexible, but it places some limits on this otherwise very sweeping authority. Unfortunately, Senator Durbin’s amendment failed. When it did, I hoped the Committee would instead consider at least adopting that same standard for issuing National Security Letters, which are not approved by any court, and which were seriously abused by the FBI. Today, that, too, was rejected.

The bill that passed out of committee did include some positive changes. I was pleased my amendment to reform invasive "sneak and peek" searches was included, as well as my amendment to require the executive branch to issue minimization procedures for NSLs. But these improvements did not make up for the bill’s shortcomings, and I was unable to support it on the final vote.

I only wish that Julian Sanchez could make another rebuttal video and we'd be done with this, but Fox News is hardly the problem. We've morphed pretty solidly into a surveillance state, a factor of being a state at permanent war.

I tend to side with Anonymous Liberal that at least Obama isn't asserting the divine right to break the law just by dint of being the unitary executive. That theory is on the dustbin of history, I hope. But if he's gathering the same powers, that's a distinction without a difference.

Conservatives Vs. Liberals, Lesson MCMXXXVII

The last Administration actually instituted a program asking people to call in tips on their neighbors or anyone who looked suspicious to them. After bipartisan outcry the program was supposedly canceled, and yet trained terrorism liaison officers culled from the law enforcement and elsewhere continued to look for "suspicious activity," secret surveillance programs continued to data mine the private communications of Americans, etc.

This Administration responds to deliberate misinformation passed out about health care reform by asking their supporters to flag them for them, essentially crowdsourcing the lies. This becomes twisted by the right as an effort to spy on neighbors and friends and "turn in" opponents of health care reform, to the extent that Sen. John Cornyn calls it a "data collection program." And predictably, the White House shut it down.

So one President actually rampantly spies on the entire population of America for eight years, the other asks for tips on misinformation, and not only are they described as the same thing, but conservatives are actually successful at shutting down what they find abhorrent, while this President joined Congressional efforts to legalize the abuses of the surveillance state from the last regime.

And we're surprised, in this environment, that it's difficult to pass health care reform?

Nobody Could Have Predicted

The warrantless wiretapping program collected information through far more than warrantless wiretapping.

A new internal government report says President George W. Bush authorized secret intelligence activities shortly after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that went beyond wiretapping without court orders.

Details of those activities remain classified, but are referred to in the newly released report as the President's Surveillance Program.

Practically everyone in the Bush Administration associated with this program, including John Ashcroft, George Tenet, Andrew Card, David Addington and John Yoo, all declined to be interviewed by the Inspectors General for this report. One of the only on-the-record sources for this report is cheerleader Michael Hayden, who as NSA Director when this program was enacted thinks it stopped multiple terrorist attacks (how reliable a narrator is he, really?). As a result we get a pretty murky picture of what exactly happened, with the additional intelligence gathering still classified, and each Inspector General working on the report hitting a wall of difficulty at assessing the effectiveness or even scope of the program. NSA talks it up, CIA wasn't read into the system (although, as Spencer Ackerman reports, they had a deeper role than at first thought), DoJ couldn't really asses it, the Director of National Intelligence has less of a clear idea as well.

There is this, from the report:

The DOJ OIG review concluded that several considerations favored initiating the process of transitioning the PSP (President's Surveillance Program) to FISA authority earlier than had been done, especially as the program became less a temporary response to the September 11 terrorist attacks and more a permanent surveillance tool (emphasis mine). These considerations included the PSP's effect on privacy interests of US persons, the instability of the legal reasoning on which the program rested for several years, and the substantial restrictions placed on FBI agents' access to and use of program-derived information due to the highly classified status of the PSP.

If I had to guess, I'd say all this mystery was intentional. Nobody really knew what was going on with the intelligence-gathering capabilities of the NSA, by design. The only ones who knew directed the policy, and they aren't talking. After the fact they desperately tried to keep the scope of the program a secret. The bottom line is that we still do not know the nature of the program, even after this IG report. Incidentally one Senator who voted for the FISA Amendments Act, which indemnified the telecoms and expanded the intelligence-gathering capabilities under FISA, said that as a consolation to civil libertarians, at least we would get a full accounting of the Bush-era program through this investigation.

His name was Barack Obama.

...Spencer:

The Bush administration called its warrantless surveillance efforts “very, very important to protect the national security of this country,” in the words of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in 2005. Today’s Inspectors General report on the President’s Surveillance Program doesn’t really substantiate that assessment. “[M]ost PSP leads were determined not to have any connection to terrorism,” according to the Justice Department’s inspector general.

Former Bush administration officials gave the generic statement that the PSP was “of value,” to quote FBI Director Robert Mueller’s rather conspicuously understated judgment. But there’s no evidence given in the report about valuable contributions that the PSP uniquely provided to the counterterrorism fight, even when conceding that most of that stuff is classified.

If You've Done Nothing Wrong, You Have Nothing To Worry About

Last week, the Department of Homeland Security released a report on right-wing extremism, being fueled by the recession and the disturbing increase in activity from white supremacy groups after the election of the nation's first black President. Basically, fear and economic uncertainty breed a certain strain of anger that could morph into violence. And in particular, the targets here are anti-government hate groups, who may recruit and radicalize American citizens, including veterans.

Of course, this has set off conservative media, who claim that the President is directly targeting conservatives with this report. Never mind that the report initiated with the Bush Administration, and was a companion to a similar report on left-wing groups potentially using cyber-attacks (Here's a separate report referring to left-wing groups back in 2001). Somehow conservative media groups take a look at murderous extremists like Timothy McVeigh and see themselves. Here's Dave Neiwert, an authority on the subject:

Because, you know, the report -- which in fact is perfectly accurate in every jot and tittle -- couldn't be more clear. It carefully delineates that the subject of its report is "rightwing extremists," "domestic rightwing terrorist and extremist groups," "terrorist groups or lone wolf extremists capable of carrying out violent attacks," "white supremacists," and similar very real threats described in similar language.

Nothing about conservatives. The word never appears in the report.

Because, you know, we always thought there was a difference between right-wing extremists and mainstream conservatives too. My new book, The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right, does explain that the distance between them has in fact shrunk considerably, thanks to the help of people like Malkin [...] The report itself, in fact, is all about accurately identifying very real looming threats. And, while it's obvious Malkin hasn't been paying attention, there in fact is considerable data coming over the transom to indicate that there's a real problem looming with the far right.

Don't forget: Before he'd even been sworn into office, we had skinheads [photo above] being arrested for plotting Obama's assassination.

Those who are slightly smarter than to describe themselves in the same breath as neo-Nazis are trying to shift the issue and claim that the report attacks veterans. Some good examples of this whining are Joe Scarborough, who said the Obama Administration is "more focused on targeting veterans than on protecting our border," and Newt Gingrich, who claimed that the White House "used terrorism to describe worrying about Americans but the word has been banned for describing foreigners." To their credit, some conservatives have maintained their sanity in discussing a report targeting violent extremist groups with a stated goal and long history of committing acts of terrorism.

Now, I think there is a potential danger of government over-reaching in the name of national security when it comes to monitoring citizen groups. I've ALWAYS thought so. That's why the utter hypocrisy coming from the right on this issue is too insane to ignore.

The political faction screeching about the dangers of the DHS is the same one that spent the last eight years vastly expanding the domestic Surveillance State and federal police powers in every area. DHS -- and the still-creepy phrase "homeland security" -- became George Bush's calling card. The Republicans won the 2002 election by demonizing those who opposed its creation. All of the enabling legislation underlying this Surveillance State -- from the Patriot Act to the Military Commissions Act, from the various FISA "reforms" to massive increases in domestic "counter-Terrorism" programs -- are the spawns of the very right-wing movement that today is petrified that this is all being directed at them.

When you cheer on a Surveillance State, you have no grounds to complain when it turns its eyes on you. If you create a massive and wildly empowered domestic surveillance apparatus, it's going to monitor and investigate domestic political activity. That's its nature [...]

I was in Minneapolis and St. Paul during the 2008 GOP Convention and witnessed first-hand massive federal police raids and "preventive" arrests of peaceful, law-abiding protesters and even the violent arrests of journalists, and I don't recall any complaints from Jonah Goldberg or Michelle Malkin. I don't recall Glenn Reynolds or Mark Steyn complaining that the FBI, for virtually the entire Bush administration, was systematically abusing its new National Security Letters authorities under the Patriot Act to collect extremely invasive information, in secret, about Americans who had done nothing wrong. Russ Feingold's efforts to place limits and abuse-preventing safeguards on these Patriot Act powers in 2006 attracted a grand total of 10 votes in the Senate -- none Republican.

Indeed, thanks to the very people who are today petulantly complaining about politically-motivated federal police actions (now that they imagine it's directed at them rather than at people they dislike), the Federal Government today has the power to eavesdrop on telephone calls and read the emails of American citizens without warrants; monitor bank records without court approval; obtain all sorts of invasive personal records, medical and financial, without Subpoenas; and obtain and store a whole host of other personal information about American citizens who have not been accused, let alone convicted, of having done anything wrong.

It was obvious that the same cheerleaders for excessive government surveillance, warrantless wiretapping, and police-state crackdowns would turn on a dime the moment that the federal apparatus transferred to Democrats. And it was obvious they would not fall back on their previous justifications - "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about," - once their party lost power. So they really have no right to complain at all. If they had any intellectual honesty at all, maybe they'd work with civil liberties groups to dismantle the national security state and put an end to the threat of concentrated power in the hands of the few. But they won't, because they're perpetual victims and rage addicts who just want to feel oppressed by their enemies.

Enough About The Election For Two Seconds

I know that this intro is supposed to have some fun schadenfruede type of a sentence with a new poll number or something about McCain being ancient or how that one is whipping his you know what or something. But in the midst of this impending rout, it'd be nice to remember WHY we need new leadership in this country. And it'd be nice if, in tonight's debate, the last chance for a large audience until the election, some mention was made of the total evisceration of the Constitution that has occurred over the last eight years, and what the candidates will do to restore it.

Yesterday I drove in to work listening to Democracy Now and drove home listening to Fresh Air. Both had James Bamford on as a guest. Who's he? He's the investigative reporter who has covered the National Security Agency for the past 30 years and just finished his third in a trilogy about them, called The Shadow Factory. It is from Bamford's book that we learned last week about the two whistleblowers, intercept operators at a facility in Georgia who were told to listen to, record and transcribe personal conservations of all the phone calls innocent Americans, members of the US military, journalists and members of aid organizations and NGOs. They would listen to them and pass around the more salacious bits, intimate conservations between spouses or lovers, for their own amusement. And that's really just the beginning.

On Democracy Now (which had those two whistleblowers on the show back in MAY) Bamford described the enormity of the effort:

AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. Well, let’s talk about Adrienne Kinne’s allegations, spying on Americans and international aid workers in Iraq. What’s wrong with this?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, there’s a lot of things wrong with it. First of all, they’re wasting their time, when they should be spying on or trying to intercept communications to and from terrorists. That was one of the complaints that Adrienne had and also Murfee Faulk had, that they didn’t join the military to listen to Americans doing pillow talk, because a lot of this was intimate conversations between Americans and their spouses back in the United States. They’ve been separated a long time, and you can imagine what a lot of those conversations dealt with. They were very personal matters dealing with finance, affection, and so forth. So they felt that they were morally wrong by eavesdropping on these people and then just wasting government money and wasting their time by listening to things that had nothing to do with the war on terrorism.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. One of the things Adrienne Kinne told us was that she was spying on journalists at the Palestine Hotel. She knew they were journalists. She heard what they were saying over time. Here she was in Georgia, but spying on those people, those journalists, in Iraq. And she said she saw a document, she saw an email that put the Palestine Hotel on a—as a bombing target, and she immediately went to her superiors, because she was spying on them, she knew that they were journalists. She said, “But there are journalists in that hotel.”

Yes, we're talking about finding journalists and directly targeting them. In fact, this small facility in Georgia, where all of the communications for the Middle East were swept up, was charged with making determinations on bombing targets. And they are making snap decisions on whether or not a communication is code. There weren't any speakers in the many Arabic dialects spoken in Iraq at the facility. There were NO Pashto speakers, the main language of Afghanistan, at the facility. And this was the "intelligence" center for the Middle East.

This was going on for SIX YEARS and is still going on. The two whistleblowers, Adrienne Kline and David Murfee Faulk, did not work for the NSA at the same time, never met, but had the same exact story to tell.

And there's more to make you sick:

AMY GOODMAN: Jim Bamford, can you talk about how the NSA picked up the very first clues about the 9/11 attacks well before the 9/11 attacks?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, the very first clue to the 9/11 attack occurred in late December 1999, when the NSA picked up a message from a house in Yemen. The house was being used by bin Laden as his operations center. He didn’t have much capability to operate out of Afghanistan, so all the phone calls, all the messages, email and all that would go to this house in the city of Sanaa, the capital of Yemen. NSA had been eavesdropping on that house for a number of years, and in late December 1999, it picked up a particular intercept, picked up a particular phone conversation.

And the phone conversation said that—send Khalid and Nawaf to Kuala Lumpur for a meeting. So, NSA picked that up, and they—first of all, they figured that Nawaf and Khalid had to be very important potential terrorists, because they were being assigned by bin Laden out in Afghanistan to go to a meeting in Kuala Lumpur. That seemed like a terrorist summit meeting. NSA gave that information to the other intelligence agencies, and the CIA set up a surveillance in Kuala Lumpur, and then they lost them in Kuala Lumpur.

After they lost them, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi went to California. They got in without any problem. NSA, even though they had the last name of Nawaf al-Hazmi in their computers, they never bothered to check, so they both got in without any problem into the United States. They went down, and they lived in San Diego. And they began calling back and forth to that house in Yemen, the house that NSA was eavesdropping on. So NSA is picking up their conversations to the house in Yemen, translating them and then sending out the conversations to—or summaries of the conversations to the CIA without ever telling anybody that they were in the United States. And they were in the United States for almost two years. Al-Hazmi was there from January 2000 to September 2001. And again, they’re communicating back and forth; NSA is picking up but not telling anybody that they’re in the US.

AMY GOODMAN: You say that they set up their final base of operations almost next door to the NSA headquarters in Laurel, Maryland?

JAMES BAMFORD: Well, that’s the ultimate irony, was they eventually travel across country from San Diego, and they set up their final base of operations—these are the—this is the crew that was about to attack the Pentagon—about a month before, they set up their base of operations in Laurel, Maryland, of all places, that happens to be the same city that NSA is headquartered. So they set up their base of operations in this Valencia Motel, and almost across the Baltimore-Washington Parkway is NSA headquarters. The director’s office is on the eighth floor, and, except for some trees, he could almost see the motel where they’re staying. So, NSA is over there trying to find terrorists, and here is the 9/11 terrorists sitting right opposite the NSA on the other side of the parkway making their final plans.

And after 9/11, in the wake of this massive failure, they started sweeping up everything. Everything in the entire world. They are recording everything, building a giant facility in Texas the size of the Alamodome to store all the data. The warrantless eavesdropping was authorized at the very top be Justice Department legal opinions so secret that the NSA's OWN LAWYERS were not allowed to look at them. They are getting this information by setting up big rooms at telecommunications facilities to tap the major switchers of the top companies (they have outsourced the tapping to a group of tiny companies, many from Israel), and they even built a large submarine to directly feed into the undersea cables which house overseas communications.

It is an unbelievable and infuriating story. What I am writing right now, what all of you are writing, every word you say on the phone, every text message, every email - the government has it. Locked up in a room in Texas. And the legality is so murky that it's basically indemnified.

And then today we learn more about the torture committed in our name.

The Bush administration issued a pair of secret memos to the CIA in 2003 and 2004 that explicitly endorsed the agency's use of interrogation techniques such as waterboarding against al-Qaeda suspects -- documents prompted by worries among intelligence officials about a possible backlash if details of the program became public.

The classified memos, which have not been previously disclosed, were requested by then-CIA Director George J. Tenet more than a year after the start of the secret interrogations, according to four administration and intelligence officials familiar with the documents. Although Justice Department lawyers, beginning in 2002, had signed off on the agency's interrogation methods, senior CIA officials were troubled that White House policymakers had never endorsed the program in writing.

The memos were the first -- and, for years, the only -- tangible expressions of the administration's consent for the CIA's use of harsh measures to extract information from captured al-Qaeda leaders, the sources said. As early as the spring of 2002, several White House officials, including then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney, were given individual briefings by Tenet and his deputies, the officials said. Rice, in a statement to congressional investigators last month, confirmed the briefings and acknowledged that the CIA director had pressed the White House for "policy approval."

We have no idea who signed them - perhaps the President himself. But certainly, at the top levels of the government, there was written communication, not just a handshake agreement, on more than one occasion, to allow the CIA to torture prisoners. Again, this is based on secret Justice Department directives that expand the power of the state, and by January 2009 will have outlasted any Congressional efforts to even investigate them, let alone stop them. That cements them as precedent and they become something you have to take out of the hands of a President instead of putting in.

An Obama Administration faces challenges in the economy at home and with failing occupations abroad. But there's the very real question of whether there's a functioning Constitution to begin with. If the government can sweep up the communications of every man, woman and child on the planet, if the government can sign off on torture and indefinite detention, and if the Congress can essentially indemnify the government for doing so, what is this state that Obama would inherit?

If this isn't discussed openly before the election, it becomes that much harder to actually reverse these policies, which have been growing through inertia for at least six years, if not longer. Obama has agreed to look at every executive order and throw out the ones that are unconstitutional. That is not a specific enough answer. Signals intelligence and the NSA needs to be addressed. Torture and rendition need to be addressed. We practically don't have a country to lead anymore, or at least one worth leading. The Constitution, the founding document, has become a non-issue in this election or really any election. No President has tarnished it as much as this one, and yet we continue on, muddling through, talking about tax cuts or who has the more comfortable demeanor. This election will repudiate conservatism but it's necessary to define terms. Is it a rollback of torture? A rollback of the surveillance state? A rollback of official secrecy and lost civil liberties? I don't think we know. And I think we need to have that conversation out in the open.

Are we ever going to talk about our loss of honor as a nation?

They Would Never Invade Our Privacy

Since the revelation of the illegal surveillance program in December 2005, the fundamental question - who has the government been spying on? - has yet to be answered, and with the FISA legislation providing immunity for the telecoms we thought it would forever fade into the background. But it's more likely that the truth will come out in drips and drabs; maybe not the whole truth, but enough of it to shock the conscience. Today we have another fallen domino:

Despite pledges by President George W. Bush and American intelligence officials to the contrary, hundreds of US citizens overseas have been eavesdropped on as they called friends and family back home, according to two former military intercept operators who worked at the giant National Security Agency (NSA) center in Fort Gordon, Georgia [...]

"These were just really everyday, average, ordinary Americans who happened to be in the Middle East, in our area of intercept and happened to be making these phone calls on satellite phones," said Adrienne Kinne, a 31-year old US Army Reserves Arab linguist assigned to a special military program at the NSA's Back Hall at Fort Gordon from November 2001 to 2003.

Kinne described the contents of the calls as "personal, private things with Americans who are not in any way, shape or form associated with anything to do with terrorism."

She said US military officers, American journalists and American aid workers were routinely intercepted and "collected on" as they called their offices or homes in the United States.

But, we were told that it was a Terrorist Surveillance Program, and Obama Osama bin Laden (darn it, I just always mix them up) would come to our ballgames and sell tainted Dodger Dogs to us if we didn't allow wise and benevolent Government access to every piece of communication in the world!

Funny how that worked out.

Turns out that the ordinary grunts listening to this stuff were passing around audio snippets to each other:

Faulk says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer.

"Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.

And then there's this amazing statement, which kind of sums up life in the 21st-century surveillance state:

Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."

"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country's warrantless surveillance program.

"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said....

"Information assurance." How pleasantly banal.

See the beginning here for who was spied on - not just military and government personnel but journalists and aid workers. That's exactly who I would target if I wanted to control the flow of information to the public. And there was no mistake here - members of the International Red Cross were surveilled and were "identified in our systems as 'belongs to the International Red Cross'," according to one of the intercept operators.

This is what everybody voted for in the Congress. Not to "protect America from harm," but to maintain and indemnify a shadow spying system so the highest levels of government can maintain control and power. It's against the law and many of our foundational principles and George Bush did it anyway, and the Congress - Democrats and Republicans - enabled him.

And they're still doing it.

It goes without saying that such attention to the calls and communications of ordinary Americans actually hurts our capacity to deal with any terrorist threat as simply a function of time management and prioritizing. Bush's Department of Homeland Security funded this report.

The government should not be building predictive data-mining programs systems that attempt to figure out who among millions is a terrorist, a privacy and terrorism commission funded by Homeland Security reported Tuesday. The commission found that the technology would not work and the inevitable mistakes would be un-American.

The committee, created by the National Research Council in 2005, also expressed doubts about the effectiveness of technology designed to decide from afar whether a person had terrorist intents, saying false positives could quickly lead to privacy invasions.

"Automated identification of terrorists through data mining (or any other known methodology) is neither feasible as an objective nor desirable as a goal of technology development efforts," the report found. "Even in well-managed programs, such tools are likely to return significant rates of false positives, especially if the tools are highly automated."

This is true, but of course you would have to believe that the system Bush and his pals set up was in any way designed for terrorist surveillance. Based on the details we now know, I can't imagine it was. The program is an example of how authoritarian societies maintain order and power.

You'll be thrilled to know that Jay Rockefeller is going to begin an examination of this and request information from the Administration about it. I don't know what's more hysterical - that he thinks he can get one scrap of paper from the White House, or that he thinks we'll buy that he's about to sit down and investigate himself, in effect.

Greenwald has more.

Proud To Be An American

Despite attending the DNC convention, the presence of protesters wasn't all that prominent unless you knew where to look. The security presence was palpable, and there definitely were lots of anti-abortion activists in the streets, but overall you had to look for and find the more wide-scale protests that were expected. And the cops actually facilitated the Tent State march on the Pepsi Center on Wednesday by leading the parade.

The RNC is far different, at least so far. Before one activist has hit the streets, before the delegates have even assembled, there is a coordinated effort by law enforcement to raid suspected protesters and imprison them.

Protesters here in Minneapolis have been targeted by a series of highly intimidating, sweeping police raids across the city, involving teams of 25-30 officers in riot gear, with sub-machine guns drawn, entering homes of those suspected of planning protests, handcuffing and forcing them to lay on the floor, while law enforcement officers searched the homes, seizing computers, journals, and political pamphlets. Last night, members of the St. Paul police department and the Ramsey County sheriff's department handcuffed, photographed and detained dozens of people meeting at a public venue to plan a demonstration, charging them with no crime other than "fire code violations," and early this morning, the Sheriff's department sent teams of officers into at least four Minneapolis area homes where suspected protesters were staying.

Jane Hamsher and I were at two of those homes this morning -- one which had just been raided and one which was in the process of being raided. Each of the raided houses is known by neighbors as a "hippie house," where 5-10 college-aged individuals live in a communal setting, and everyone we spoke with said that there had never been any problems of any kind in those houses, that they were filled with "peaceful kids" who are politically active but entirely unthreatening and friendly. Posted below is the video of the scene, including various interviews, which convey a very clear sense of what is actually going on here.

Here's some streaming video of an ongoing raid as well. Lindsay Beyerstein has further info on another raid. There are reports of law enforcement snatching people off the streets as well. The National Lawyers Guild is dispatching attorneys to these sites and then THEY are being detained. This is a full-on police state in the Twin Cities so the authoritarians can hold their party without being burdened with dissent.

This is the 21st century reality of a growing surveillance state and how the feds handle big events - with brute force and ruthlessness. The STASI would be impressed.

Today In Your Surveillance State

They're going to want your laptop, please. For your security.

Federal agents may take a traveler's laptop computer or other electronic device to an off-site location for an unspecified period of time without any suspicion of wrongdoing, as part of border search policies the Department of Homeland Security recently disclosed.

Also, officials may share copies of the laptop's contents with other agencies and private entities for language translation, data decryption or other reasons, according to the policies, dated July 16 and issued by two DHS agencies, U.S. Customs and Border Protection and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"The policies . . . are truly alarming," said Sen. Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), who is probing the government's border search practices. He said he intends to introduce legislation soon that would require reasonable suspicion for border searches, as well as prohibit profiling on race, religion or national origin.

I think it was Digby who said that the security line at the airport is a massive psychological experiment to get Americans comfortable with having their liberties taken away. These days people take off their shoes without being prompted. The laptop removal will soon become commonplace as well. It's all to keep you safe.

And this principle then extends to wiretapping ("if you did nothing wrong, you have nothing to worry about"), and those laws must be determined in secret, in a star chamber, without the prying eyes of civil liberties advocates.

The Department of Justice filed court papers yesterday seeking to block the ACLU -- and any other third party -- from submitting briefs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the classified forums that will be primarily responsible for translating the federal law signed last month into practice.

The DOJ argues that any briefs the ACLU might file would be ill-informed because its lawyers cannot access the classified information at the heart of many FISA cases, and the proceedings would just clog the flow of cases.

They want to keep everything secret for your protection, you see. Not to subvert the law and create the most expansive surveillance system possible.

But you know, it's the Chinese doing all that spying on reporters at the Olympics that we have to worry about. We're doing it to keep you safe.

When asked about the NSA's own warrantless monitoring of electronic communications in the United States and how that's different from the Chinese government's practices, Brownback responded:

"We don't put the hardware and software on hotels. If there is a targeted individual that seems to be a likely prospect of terrorists, they must go through the FISA court and ask for a court to determine that there is probable cause to be able to listen in on that information.

This is a blanket requirement of a hotel to operate a license in China. It is non-specific to anybody. It can be used on journalists. It can be used on athletes -- or, excuse me, they're at the Olympic village -- but on their families. It can be used on democracy advocates, human rights advocates, none of which is prohibited. It is real time.

I think there is a huge difference between these two that are taking place."

No mention was made, during the grandstanding, of the Bush Administration's monitoring of animal rights, environmental and poverty relief activists, as documented by files released in 2005 as a result of a series of Freedom of Information Act lawsuits by the American Civil Liberties Union. (In those cases, the monitoring was done by the FBI.)

(We don't put hardware and software in hotels because we put it in a giant room in San Francisco that sucks up every communication imaginable.)

This really is a moment to fight back against these unnecessary takings of our privacy rights. The Get FISA Right movement that started on Barack Obama's website now has its own home on the Web, and they're pushing to incorporate FISA reform into the DNC platform, as well as holding those who voted the wrong way accountable and running this ad, using SaysMe TV to get it on television for as little as $6.00, to continue to raise awareness for the issue.



In addition, the Accountability NOW campaign, designed to punish Blue Dogs for their ignorance of the Constitution and the rule of law, is ramping up. August 8 is the date scheduled for a large money bomb to raise money.

Passive acceptance of these assaults on privacy and civil liberties will only yield more of them. We have to fight back.

Random Sunday Errand Thoughts

So I pop in the Urban Outfitters to see what the kids are wearing these days, and there are about 30 Obama T-shirts and buttons on display. "Obama Said Knock You Out," "Barack and Roll," you get the picture. In the spirit of bipartisanship, I suppose, there were a couple pro-McCain buttons off to one side, including one that read "No Pain, No McCain."

Now, I don't even think that's positive, is it? Doesn't that suggest that a McCain presidency would be extremely painful? I'm not disagreeing with the analysis, but either Urban Outfitters is really phoning in the McCain slogans or they're having some fun.

The other fun part of my day was listening to some random radio show which extolled the virtues of rummaging around in your kids' clothing and personal effects to search for drugs. At one point the host intimated that the kids appreciate this, because it shows their parents care for them and are paying attention to them.

We really are becoming more of a surveillance state every day, aren't we?

Toast Your New Surveillance State Tomorrow

There is one day left before the Constitution is tossed out the window and President Nixon's refrain that "If the President does it, then it isn't illegal," is enshrined into law. Tomorrow the Senate will vote to cover up George Bush's illegal spying program, with a compromise that isn't a compromise, and grant immunity to both the telecom partners who aided in the crime and the Administration themselves, who will now be able to end their term with the peace of mind that the extent of their illegal spying on Americans will never see the light of day. This is a bipartisan effort, aided by a cynical Democratic leadership that is either implicated in the spying or willing to give their bretheren in the Establishment a break. Either way, the upshot is that core Constitutional liberties will be taken away tomorrow, and the rule of law will be reduced to nothing but a slogan.

The progressive movement and the new coalition that has built up around this and other issues of civil liberties won't win every one of these battles. We put up one hell of a fight, identified key allies and also those who side with the Establishment surveillance state, and we will move on from this stronger and more committed to making things right and holding those who betrayed their core responsibilities accountable. Glenn Greenwald has the seminal post up about where we stand. Accountability NOW Pac, which I have signed onto as a sponsoring blogger, put together a Washington Post ad just to let those scoundrels know what they'll be voting for tomorrow. In addition, there will be a money-bomb to raise funds for future efforts on August 8. You can pledge your donation at the Accountability NOW link.



I really don't have a whole lot to add to Greenwald's piece - he covers admirably the facts of how the Congress will, by this time tomorrow, have voted to immunize lawbreakers without even knowing the extent of the lawbreaking, and will have used fear, intimidation and lies to do it. He explains how this is a symptom of an unaccountable ruling class, and what we can do to fight back. I'll just add a few links of supporting material.

Here's Daniel Ellsberg, who knows a thing or two about illegal surveillance:


What Every American Needs to Know (and Do) About FISA Before Tuesday, July 8th from Tim Ferriss on Vimeo.

1. Why does the vote this Tuesday, July 8th matter to normal people who have nothing to hide?

Ordinary citizens who want to live in a democracy — including those with nothing to hide — should be concerned about the ability of the government to use private, sensitive personal information to blackmail, manipulate, and intimidate their representatives, journalists and their sources, potential whistleblowers, and activists or dissenters of any sort.

2. Couldn’t it be argued that this type of surveillance ability has prevented another 9/11 from happening? Isn’t it possible that this type of legislation has saved American lives?

The administration has claimed that is has, but without presenting a single piece of evidence that this is so, even in closed hearings to Senators with clearances on the Intelligence Committee. The FISA court has granted warrants in virtually every request that’s been made of it that has any color of helping national security. The administration’s decision to bypass that court, illegally, leads to a strong suspicion that they are abusing domestic spying, as some of their predecessors did, in ways that even the secret FISA court would never approve.

Here's Tim Lee explaining how telecom immunity is practically the least offensive aspect of this bill.

When it comes to judicial oversight of domestic-to-foreign calls, the legislation the House passed last month is an unambiguous victory for the White House and a defeat for civil libertarians. The legislation establishes a new procedure whereby the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence can sign off on "authorizations" of surveillance programs "targeting people reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." The government is required to submit a "certification" to the FISA court describing the surveillance plan and the "minimization" procedures that will be used to avoid intercepting too many communications of American citizens. However, the government is not required to "identify the specific facilities, places, premises, or property" at which the eavesdropping will occur. The specific eavesdropping targets will be at the NSA's discretion and unreviewed by a judge. Moreover, the judge's review of the government's "certification" is much more limited than the scrutiny now given to FISA applications. The judge is permitted only to confirm that the certification "contains all the required elements," that the targeting procedures are "reasonably designed" to target foreigners, and that minimization procedures have been established.

Crucially, there appears to be no limit to the breadth of "authorizations" the government might issue. So, for example, a single "authorization" might cover the interception of all international traffic passing through AT&T's San Francisco facility, with complex software algorithms deciding which communications are retained for the examination of human analysts. Without a list of specific targets, and without a background in computer programming, a judge is unlikely to be able to evaluate whether such software is properly "targeted" at foreigners.

(it's very hard to excerpt that piece because all of it is vital.)

And finally, here's Bradley Olson, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, who notes that FISA is just one brick in the wall of a lawless surveillance state.

With Congress on the verge of outlining new parameters for National Security Agency eavesdropping between suspicious foreigners and Americans, lawmakers are leaving largely untouched a host of government programs that critics say involves far more domestic surveillance than the wiretaps they sought to remedy.

These programs - most of them highly classified - are run by an alphabet soup of federal intelligence and law enforcement agencies. They sift, store and analyze the communications, spending habits and travel patterns of U.S. citizens, searching for suspicious activity.

The surveillance includes data-mining programs that allow the NSA and the FBI to sift through large databanks of e-mails, phone calls and other communications, not for selective information, but in search of suspicious patterns.

Other information, like routine bank transactions, is kept in databases similarly monitored by the Central Intelligence Agency.

"There's virtually no branch of the U.S. government that isn't in some way involved in monitoring or surveillance," said Matthew Aid, an intelligence historian and fellow at the National Security Archives at The George Washington University. "We're operating in a brave new world."

We are well and truly screwed on tomorrow's vote. And as Olson notes, it's just part of a massive surveillance apparatus that has crept into our lives. But FISA is a rallying point. It wakes people up about the serious problem of unethical and criminal activity emanating from Washington. And it offers an opportunity to use this anger and frustration and energy toward political power. It's the only thing these guys will respond to, after all.

This fight is not over. Expect a lot more to come.

Spies Like Us

Turns out that, even before overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, we're engaging in plenty of foreign surveillance - of the Iraqi Army. Nothing says confidence in your allies more than tracking all of their movements.

Caught off guard by recent Iraqi military operations, the United States is using spy satellites that ordinarily are trained on adversaries to monitor the movements of the American-backed Iraqi army, current and former U.S. officials say.

The stepped-up surveillance reflects breakdowns in trust and coordination between the two forces. Officials said it was part of an expanded intelligence effort launched after American commanders were surprised by the timing of the Iraqi army's violent push into Basra three months ago.

The use of the satellites puts the United States in the unusual position of employing some of its most sophisticated espionage technology to track an allied army that American forces helped create, continue to advise, and often fight alongside.

Maybe the whole war isn't working out so great if we feel the need to spy on the Army that's supposed to give us the ability to leave. The White House can spin yarns about success all they want, but this is really the proof. We have no confidence in the Iraqi security forces to maintain order in the country, we have not progressed on the underlying causes of violence, and we're prolonging the inevitable at great cost in lives and treasure.

Meanwhile, one of the most depressing things about our surveillance state is that we're not even that good at it, or at least not as good as the Iranians.

David Ignatius has the gem down low in today's Washington Post column, which describes a half-hearted, even feckless U.S. covert action program to send operatives from Iraq into Iran.

"The danger of these cross-border activities was explained to me by one intelligence source," Ignatius writes.

He said the Iranians had recently captured several dissident Iranian operatives who had been recruited by U.S. military officers inside Iraq and then sent into Iran. The Iranians, whose intelligence network inside Iraq is pervasive, surveilled the meeting, then followed the agents across the border and seized them.

I'd gather that Iran has far better human intelligence inside Iraq in addition to electronic surveillance. So when we sink money into covert operations using front groups and dissidents, we should realize that the operations aren't that covert, are led by incompetents, and only serve to harden Iranian opinions about their need for a weapons program.

Whatever happened to the age when we had the good spies? Not even good at espionage anymore. Getting harder to believe in this country's leading-edge innovations.

AWOL No More

Just totally committed to the monarchy:

Statement of Senator Barack Obama on FISA Compromise

“Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. There is also little doubt that the Bush Administration, with the cooperation of major telecommunications companies, has abused that authority and undermined the Constitution by intercepting the communications of innocent Americans without their knowledge or the required court orders.

“That is why last year I opposed the so-called Protect America Act, which expanded the surveillance powers of the government without sufficient independent oversight to protect the privacy and civil liberties of innocent Americans. I have also opposed the granting of retroactive immunity to those who were allegedly complicit in acts of illegal spying in the past.

“After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year's Protect America Act.

“Under this compromise legislation, an important tool in the fight against terrorism will continue, but the President's illegal program of warrantless surveillance will be over. It restores FISA and existing criminal wiretap statutes as the exclusive means to conduct surveillance – making it clear that the President cannot circumvent the law and disregard the civil liberties of the American people. It also firmly re-establishes basic judicial oversight over all domestic surveillance in the future. It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses. But this compromise guarantees a thorough review by the Inspectors General of our national security agencies to determine what took place in the past, and ensures that there will be accountability going forward. By demanding oversight and accountability, a grassroots movement of Americans has helped yield a bill that is far better than the Protect America Act.

“It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives – and the liberty – of the American people.”

"Work to remove" telecom immunity should be rewritten to "maybe show up to vote on some amendment that will surely be struck down and then whimper away." What a colossal failure of leadership.

Sadly, Clinton wouldn't have been any better. Or any of them save Dodd and maybe John Edwards. Dodd, of course, isn't even likely to filibuster this time around.

As President, I'm sure Obama is going to have lots of fun with those new surveillance powers while mixing them in with all his super-cool Web 2.0 tools.

We're living in a bipartisan national surveillance state.

... Obama earns a Wanker of the Day from Atrios. And it's well-deserved. I thought he'd issue some vague statement of disapproval and then miss the vote. This endorsement of a terrible "compromise" is waaaay out of bounds.

Secret Laws

Russ Feingold is doing the Lord's work, trying to get to the bottom on a set of laws that have been passed by executive order that none of us mere citizens have awareness of or ideas about. He calls them secret laws, and apparently the President believes he can create or modify them without informing anyone.

It would appear that this is the direction which the Bush regime is trying to take America. John R. Elwood, the Office of Legal Counsel's deputy assistant attorney general, recently testified at a Senate hearing on "Secret Law and the Threat to Democratic and Accountable Government" and he revealed that the Bush regime believes "that the president could ignore or modify existing executive orders that he and other presidents have issued without disclosing the new interpretation."

In the past, even if you disagreed with the president's executive orders or the administration's interpretation of the laws, at least you'd know what they were — and perhaps challenge them in court, if you thought you had a case. Now, though, you can be potentially be arrested and tossed in jail without charges, without being allowed to contact your family, and for an indefinite period of time... all for violating an order or legal interpretation which you are completely unaware of. You'll be subjected to treatment which might cause you to lose your sanity, but you'll never be told why.

If you were allowed to consult a lawyer (which you wouldn't be), and if you were permitted to challenge your detention in court (not a chance), then not only would the evidence against you be so secret that your non-existent lawyer wouldn't be allowed to see it, but even the charges against you would be too secret for your non-existent lawyer to look at. To be fair, I guess there's no real point in allowing people to know what laws or rules they have broken when there aren't going to be allowed to defend themselves in a court of law. Wouldn't that just serve to make them even more insane?

Usually us librul hippie types are told to take off the tinfoil hat and that we're worried about nonsense. Whatever "secret laws" exist are there for our protection, after all, and we'll be damned happy they're in place when the time comes. Digby takes a look at this article in Radar Magazine which described what may happen when the time comes, particularly in the event of another terrorist attack.

Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as part of planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government."

Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law.

While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment.

According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention.

It could be paranoid folly to worry about this, or not. We have no idea, and we're being kept intentionally in the dark. Secret laws like this have no business in a democracy, the legitimacy for which is derived from the consent of the governed. It's pretty clear that the technical apparatus is in place to spy on and detain those who government officials believe constitute an emerging threat to the United States. Whether or not it will be used is an open question, but it may be legal to do so without any of us citizens knowing it.

That is a scary place to be, and a Democratic Administration simply has to eradicate this with the fullest amount of sunshine. Obama can be a reformer just by governing outside the shadows. I'd like a massive bonfire of all that data being collected, perhaps out on the White House lawn.

Everybody Must Get Stoned

See, there's a very simple explanation for how federal investigators discovered Eliot Spitzer's secret trysts in hotel rooms with prostitutes. They were merely alerted by a series of suspicious financial transactions and thought it was a bribery case and then just stumbled upon the prostitution ring. It's all so very s-

What's this now?

Almost four months before Gov. Eliot Spitzer resigned in a sex scandal, a lawyer for Republican political operative Roger Stone sent a letter to the FBI alleging that Spitzer ''used the services of high-priced call girls'' while in Florida.
The letter, dated Nov. 19, said Miami Beach resident Stone learned the information from ''a social contact in an adult-themed club.'' It offered one potentially identifying detail: The man in question hadn't taken off his calf-length black socks ``during the sex act.''

Stone, known for shutting down the 2000 presidential election recount effort in Miami-Dade County, is a longtime Spitzer nemesis whose political experience ranges from the Nixon White House to Al Sharpton's presidential campaign. His lawyer wrote the letter containing the call-girl allegations after FBI agents had asked to speak to Stone, though he says the FBI did not specify why he was contacted.

''Mr. Stone respectfully declines to meet with you at this time,'' the letter states, before going on to offer ''certain information'' about Spitzer.

''The governor has paid literally tens of thousands of dollars for these services. It is Mr. Stone's understanding that the governor paid not with credit cards or cash but through some pre-arranged transfer,'' the letter said.

So a well-known Republican ratfucker with a history of making threatening phone calls to Spitzer's father in the middle of the night, is contacted by the FBI, in reference to God knows what, and he refuses to talk to them, but through his lawyer he leaks a bit of oppo research he picked up in a sex club, which he's been known to frequent. The Miami FBI apparently TAKES NO FOR AN ANSWER, and may have forwarded the information to the FBI in New York (they would not say whether or not they received the letter). A month later Stone goes on Michael Smerconish's radio show and says unequivocally that "Eliot Spitzer will not serve out his term as governor of the state of New York." A couple months later Spitzer is picked up on a wire and you know the rest. Immediately Stone is interviewed by Newsday, and you can almost smell the smugness.

"I didn't make him go to a prostitution ring," said the most famous and ruthless Republican dirty trickster who still walks the earth. "He did that all on his own."

Stone said that even before I asked if his hand was somehow in Spitzer's latest trouble. I figured, somehow or another, it had to be.

"No comment on that," Stone said. "I will say I knew it was coming. That's why I wasn't too upset about the results of the special election," where a Democrat grabbed a supposedly safe Republican State Senate seat, leaving Democrats just one vote shy of control.

Conversations with Stone often go like that. Always cocky. A little cryptic. Leaving you wondering about more.

Yeah, I'm wondering why some slimy political operative is all but managing federal investigations in the Bush Justice Department.

Scott Horton at Harper's has some more, including this new article from the New York Times.

The Justice Department used some of its most intrusive tactics against Eliot Spitzer, examining his financial records, eavesdropping on his phone calls and tailing him during its criminal investigation of the Emperor’s Club prostitution ring. The scale and intensity of the investigation of Mr. Spitzer, then the governor of New York, seemed on its face to be a departure for the Justice Department, which aggressively investigates allegations of wrongdoing by public officials, but almost never investigates people who pay prostitutes for sex.

A review of recent federal cases shows that federal prosecutors go sparingly after owners and operators of prostitution enterprises, and usually only when millions of dollars are involved or there are aggravating circumstances, like human trafficking or child exploitation. Government lawyers and investigators defend the expenditure of resources on Mr. Spitzer in the Emperor’s Club V.I.P. case as justifiable and necessary since it involved the possibility of criminal wrongdoing by New York’s highest elected official, who had been the state’s top prosecutor.

So the Justice Department, under the direction of Roger Frickin' Stone, at least from the outside, deployed massive resources to capture the bad actions of a sitting Democratic governor, while in the analogous case of the DC Madam they expended no energy entrapping David Vitter or Randall Tobias. And we know the Bush Administration has a history with going after Democratic governors and even putting them in the slammer.

Eliot Spitzer did what he did; there's no getting around that. The selective prosecution and politicization of justice, however, continues to magnify in this case.

Passport-gate: Officially Over (UPDATE: Or Not?)

Since this Obama passport thing broke, I've been trying to figure out what's in a passport file and why that information would be useful. It would, I assume, have dates and places visited, and maybe if the passport holder checked in at embassies in various countries. But what else? When Bill Clinton's passport file was violated in 1991, the spin put out from the RNC was that they were looking for a letter Clinton wrote to a US Embassy abroad asking to renounce his citizenship. Only that wasn't true, and it wasn't in the file.

UPDATE: My assumption was not so hot. Computerworld has a primer:

What exactly is a passport record? A passport record typically consists of applications made by a person for a U.S. passport, together with supporting evidence of U.S. citizenship. The records include details such as date and place of birth, naturalization details, family status, occupation and physical characteristics. Passport records do not include evidence of travel, such as exit and entrance stamps, visas or residence permits. Passport records are protected by the Privacy Act of 1974 [...]

What else is in the system? In addition to passport applications and the related material, the system stores investigative reports that might have been compiled in connection with granting or denying a passport, or in connection with any violation of passport criminal statutes. It also stores court documents and administrative determinations related to passports and citizenship, as well as copies of birth and baptismal certificates, medical, personal and financial reports and details on arrest warrants of the person applying for, extending or renewing a passport and a person's Social Security number.

OK, so there's some stuff in there that's pretty noteworthy. It's not in every file, however; the investigative reports aren't necessary made in every case. The Social Security number is in that file, and certainly that could be used for all sorts of mischief, like obtaining personal financial records and the like. But you could pretty easily determine if those records were obtained, and I'm hoping that the appropriate authorities are doing so.

So now that we've seen that Hillary Clinton's file was breached as well, and that MSNBC is reporting the same about John McCain, this really feels to me like a bunch of cube rats in the State Department snooping around on their lunch breaks, doing some info-snacking. It's against the law, and their names should be released and the investigation should be held outside the State Department's Inspector General, especially considering that there is no State Department Inspector General at the moment, but I'm not seeing the advantage you could gain here. There's a ridiculous diary on Daily Kos intimating that the Clinton campaign had something to do with this, a fact-free "guilt by association" piece of tripe that really is sad, and as we've learned, foreign travel ISN'T EVEN IN A PASSPORT FILE. The level of critical inquiry in this campaign season is well and truly in the toilet.

I think this story is more telling about how much personal information the government has on you and how unsecure it all is. Which comes at precisely the time when the Bushes want the ability to wiretap on Americans without a warrant. This should spark total outrage with the national surveillance state.

UPDATE: The fact that one of the guys who looked at Obama's information also looked at McCain's leaves open the possibility that someone is selling information of political candidates. There's enough information in that file that would be of interest to oppo researchers. This could be an inside job to funnel info to a shop that digs up all sorts of dirt.

Breach

Earlier today I was talking about federal agencies as a campaign outreach arm. Apparently they're part of the oppo research shop, too.

Two contract employees of the State Department were fired and a third person was disciplined for inappropriately looking at Democratic Sen. Barack Obama's passport file.

Spokesman Sean McCormack Thursday night confirmed instances of what he called "imprudent curiosity" by the State Department employees.

McCormack said the department itself detected the breaches, which occurred separately on Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14.

The three people who had access to Obama's passport records were contract employees of the department's Bureau of Consular Affairs, NBC News reported.

A senior official told NBC News there was "no political motivation" to the incidents, adding that the three were low-level contract employees doing administrative work and accessed Obama's records out of "curiosity."

Riiiight.

The same thing happened to Bill Clinton's passport records in 1991, and then as now, two State Department employees were fired. The Obama campaign is calling for a full investigation.

My question is really what kind of information you can get from a passport file, which is a larger question about how much personal data is stored all over these federal agencies, ready to be swooped up at a moment's notice. And these are the people we're supposed to "trust" with a program of warrantless wiretapping.

In a surveillance state, none of your data is particularly safe. And with this Administration, that means it will be espied, downloaded, and used.

Actual Audacity of Hope

Now that the Spitzer nonsense is over (although, in a very important sense, it isn't, more on that below), I have to feel heartened by the swearing in of a blind man in one of the most populous states in the nation to become the governor. From everything I've heard from people in New York, he's a good man and very progressive, who will use a different governing style to achieve similar goals as Spitzer, and who will command respect and admiration for succeeding through his own struggles. Here's a show of support from the New York net/grassroots:

The Progressive community of New York State - activists, bloggers, fundraisers, organizers, ordinary men and women from all walks of life - welcomes our new Governor, David Paterson, as he assumes our state's highest office. We recognize that Governor Paterson is the first person of color to hold the office of Governor of New York and the first legally blind person to ever hold the office of Governor in the history of the United States. We are inspired by his life achievements to date, by his impressive and daring record of reform, and we are supremely confident that he is ready to lead our state.

We understand that Governor Paterson will face challenges and opportunities as he takes office. Our new Governor's long history of working with all stake holders will prove a valuable asset in delivering for New Yorkers. We believe that both houses of our legislature require drastic changes in their operations. Transparency and open government still elude our state, and too often, our citizens are shut out of decisions that affect our lives. The voices of too many New Yorkers still do not get heard in our state Capitol. These things must change. Governor Paterson's distinguished record of reform gives us great confidence that he will be an agent of this change.

The Progressive community of New York State is ready to support our new Governor in bringing about the change New York needs; the change that New Yorkers voted for in the 2006 election. After the trials of the recent past, we believe that New Yorkers want Governor Paterson to step forward with a bold plan for change that returns our government to our people and creates a better future for all New Yorkers. We look forward to working with our new Governor as we build a lasting Progressive majority, in Albany and around the state, conversation by conversation, vote by vote, district by district, until New York is again a beacon of Progressive governance bright enough to illuminate our entire nation.

As for the former Governor, his downfall was his alone and he must own it, but the way in which it was revealed does raise concerns about the extension of the national surveillance state into all walks of life.

These events offer a window into a much larger phenomenon, the National Surveillance State, in which the state increasingly identifies and solves problems of governance through the collection, collation and analysis of information. Governments have always used information, but today's techniques are made more powerful and more prevalent by lower costs of computing and data storage. This story also shows the important role played by private businesses in constructing and implementing the National Surveillance State. The Times report suggests that the banks in question volunteered more than the letter of the law might have required, because the transactions in questions were wire payments rather than coin or currency. The banks erred on the side of caution, seeking to assist the state in its efforts. Moreover, they already had their own pattern recognition systems designed to identify suspicious behavior. (Many people are probably familiar with the programs devised by credit card companies which analyze consumer transactions to calculate the probabilities that a card is being used fraudulently.)

If computing power increases enough, there is no reason why governments might not lower the threshold for reporting of suspicious transactions, or, indeed, require that every transaction over 100 dollars be reported. All this information could later be sifted through by data mining programs, in order to spot patterns of suspicious activity. The only limit is the technology and the manpower that law enforcement is willing to devote to analysis of financial transactions.

Read the whole thing, you'll be nervous by the end. The real problem I have with it is prosecutorial discretion. The NRCC, the campaign arm of House Republicans, had a treasurer who was a thief - he stole over a million dollars over the course of several years and deposited it into personal accounts. Eve Fairbanks gets this right.

...how is it possible that a ten-thousand-dollar Spitzer transfer to a prostitution ring tripped up authorities while the NRCC's treasurer stole one million dollars and nobody noticed anything?

It depends on who's doing the watching, I guess.

P.S. I don't understand why anyone running for Congress would react to this desperation move from the NRCC and give back contributions from Spitzer. If anything, I'd throw it right back in their face and ask every Republican candidate to give back money raised by the NRCC, who has a felon running their books.