The Washington Post has an in-depth
piece today about what Bush's warrantless eavesdropping is really producing in the battle to thwart attacks.
According to the article:
Intelligence officers who eavesdropped on thousands of Americans in overseas calls under authority from President Bush have dismissed nearly all of them as potential suspects after hearing nothing pertinent to a terrorist threat, according to accounts from current and former government officials and private-sector sources with knowledge of the technologies in use.
This is clearly important, but more crucially from where I'm sitting, is the story's detail into how wide this net has become. In future days, we'll be talking about the "washout" rate -
the higher the rate, the more suspect all of this is under the fourth amendment.
Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, "wash out" most of the leads within days or weeks.
The scale of warrantless surveillance, and the high proportion of bystanders swept in, sheds new light on Bush's circumvention of the courts. National security lawyers, in and out of government, said the washout rate raised fresh doubts about the program's lawfulness under the Fourth Amendment, because a search cannot be judged "reasonable" if it is based on evidence that experience shows to be unreliable.
Other officials said the disclosures might shift the terms of public debate, altering perceptions about the balance between privacy lost and security gained.
We also have to address and expose the President's seemingly false characterization of his program:
Those arguments point to a conflict between the program's operational aims and the legal and political limits described by the president and his advisers. For purposes of threat detection, officials said, the analysis of a telephone call is indifferent to whether an American is on the line. Since Sept. 11, 2001, a former CIA official said, "there is a lot of discussion" among analysts "that we shouldn't be dividing Americans and foreigners, but terrorists and non-terrorists." But under the Constitution, and in the Bush administration's portrait of its warrantless eavesdropping, the distinction is fundamental.
And given that this power flows from an unchecked unitary executive, we shouldn't be surprised that:
Many features of the surveillance program remain unknown, including what becomes of the non-threatening U.S. e-mails and conversations that the NSA intercepts. Participants, according to a national security lawyer who represents one of them privately, are growing "uncomfortable with the mountain of data they have now begun to accumulate." Spokesmen for the Bush administration declined to say whether any are discarded.
There are a lot of facts here that should drive an aggressive inquiry during upcoming hearings.