On the eve of Attorney General Gonzales's testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Washington Post reveals what the administration is desperately trying to hide: the extra-judicial domestic spying program is a massive data-mining program that is illegal, intrusive, and highly ineffective.
Here is what Gonzales plans to testify to tomorrow:
The Attorney General plans to tell Specter that the program is more limited than has been portrayed in some news reports, which have suggested that it could impinge on the privacy of innocent Americans through vast data mining of conversations and e-mails carried by telecommunication companies' trunk lines. "Contrary to the speculation reflected in some media reporting," Gonzales writes, "the terrorist surveillance program is not a dragnet that sucks in all conversations and uses computer searches to pick out calls of interest. No communications are intercepted unless first it is determined that one end of the call is outside of the country and professional intelligence experts have probable cause (that is, `reasonable grounds to believe') that a party to the communication is a member or agent of al-Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization."
This echoes Bush's defense that the program is "limited" :
The NSA program is one that listens to a few numbers, called from the outside of the United States and of known al Qaeda or affiliate people.
At last weeks Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, General Hayden and other intelligence officials were pressed to define the scope of the program. Did they agree with Bush that it was "a few" numbers intercepted? Or did they agree with Homeland Security Secretary Chertoff, who admitted it was a data-mining program affecting thousands of Americans? The officials stated they didn't know or, in the case of Hayden, that he would like to answer in closed session.
Today, splashed across the front page of the Washington Post is the revelation that the extra-judicial spying program has affected directly affected possibly 5,000 Americans, with hundreds of thousands of communications from emails to faxes intercepted:
The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.
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 article, citing intelligence officials, says that not even 10 people per year raise enough suspicion to tap their domestic calls as well. And as for ultimate effectiveness? Cheney made the extraordinary claim that the program has saved "thousands of lives"...but FBI Director Robert Mueller told Congress that the program hasn't led to a single al Qaeda operative.
So now we get why they claim FISA is "inadequate." The court approves roughly 1,500-2,000 secret warrant applications per year. Yet the government wanted to spy on some 5,000 Americans. Poor Gonzales would get carpel tunnel's syndrome filling out all those applications. But beyond that, the intial phase, the phase where an indeterminate number of communications are harvested and filtered through computers, does not meet the reasonableness requirement of the 4th Amendment. This administration has stood by a standard of "reasonable belief" for intercepting communications. Yet do they actually "reasonably believe" that every communication fed into that first phase has a link to Al Qaeda?
There's a lot more in the WaPo article I'll be touching on throughout the day. For now, we know that Gonzales's testimony is already thoroughly debunked. This program pure data-mining, and woefully ineffective data-mining at that.