The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.
The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.
"So what else is new?" you may ask. After all, the Bush Administration's attack on civil liberties and privacy has been unrelenting since they day took office.
But the next part of the report is what caught my attention:
The Justice Department has proposed a new domestic spying measure that would make it easier for state and local police to collect intelligence about Americans, share the sensitive data with federal agencies and retain it for at least 10 years.
The proposed changes would revise the federal government's rules for police intelligence-gathering for the first time since 1993 and would apply to any of the nation's 18,000 state and local police agencies that receive roughly $1.6 billion each year in federal grants.
Quietly unveiled late last month, the proposal is part of a flurry of domestic intelligence changes issued and planned by the Bush administration in its waning months. They include a recent executive order that guides the reorganization of federal spy agencies and a pending Justice Department overhaul of FBI procedures for gathering intelligence and investigating terrorism cases within U.S. borders.
Taken together, critics in Congress and elsewhere say, the moves are intended to lock in policies for Bush's successor and to enshrine controversial post-Sept. 11 approaches that some say have fed the greatest expansion of executive authority since the Watergate era.
Hmm. Where have I seen this dynamic before?
A spying technique that's currently illegal or otherwise prohibited, but which we're actually engaged in anyway, which the "administration" now proposes we legalize before somebody who takes the rule of law seriously gets elected to the White House.
But don't worry! The FOX Nutwork will have no problem finding Democrats to go on the air and endorse the plan, along with the usual useless caveats:
Former Justice Department official Jamie S. Gorelick said the new FBI guidelines on their own do not raise alarms. But she cited the recent disclosure that undercover Maryland State Police agents spied on death penalty opponents and antiwar groups in 2005 and 2006 to emphasize that the policies would require close oversight.
Oh, OK. All we need is some close oversight. Gotcha. No prob.
Seriously, is now any time to really be so glib about needing close oversight of, well, anything? Saying something requires close oversight to be done right is, these days, tantamount to saying it can't be done.
To borrow a phrase often heard in these parts not so long ago, "Shut up about FISAwarrantless surveillance domestic spying already! It's over!"
What do you know? There might have been something fundamentally wrong there, after all.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Follow me below the fold as I argue that when you put recent events regarding searches and seizures together, what you see is the evolving creation of a New United States of America (NUSA), a nation that would have looked quite foreign and unacceptable to our forefathers.
For almost a decade I have been tracking Jack Abramoff and the Culture of Corruption and since I became uid 9214, I’ve written about that work here on Daily Kos.
Recently, I came across a major link between Jack Abramoff and the modern Conservative movement that I had over looked.
I have known for a very long time that Jack Abramoff functioned as a Bag-man for the VRWC. I knew his roots went deep—back to the late 1970s, and that much of his work has always been crafted and executed in the shadows. I knew he played a part in the Iran-Contra Affair (working in the basement of the WH with Ollie North) and that he was a lobbyist for the Apartheid era South African Secret Police. I knew he was a dedicated movement conservative who wanted to establish One-Party Rule in the USA. I knew that he almost succeeded.
Hiding in plain sight was that fact that—for the last three decades—Jack Abramoff was also involve in a Domestic Spying program privately run and financed by his fellow co-conspirators on the Right.
Most of us here have a cause that puts us into action in our communities.
And I'm willing to bet that your cause, on some level, puts you at odds with policies of your local, state, or federal government. As a nation conceived through an act of dissent, I view this constructive activism as a true expression of patriotism.
While we continually strive toward that more perfect union, the inertial forces of the status quo stand as a barrier to our goals. But sometimes the entrenched interests of the status quo take on an activism of their own. Disturbingly, this often is expressed through instruments of the state.
On July 17, 2008, the ACLU of Maryland made public documents it received through a Maryland Public Information Act lawsuit. These documents revealed that the Maryland State Police conducted 288 hours of covert and undercover surveillance of groups dedicated to peace and ending the death penalty over a fourteen month period beginning in March 2005.
While other disclosures of surveillance of peace groups have occurred over the past 3 years, these documents show for the first time the detail and persistence of these surveillance programs.
Yesterday I posted a comment about the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight, and was surprised by the response. My comment suggested that perhaps Hollywood ought to pay as much attention to the messages of their films as they do to their fundraisers. The Dark Knight, as I read it, went a little too soft on the torture and domestic spying points. The upshot seemed to be that it was okay to do both -- as long as you only do it once, and it works.
But there's a larger concern than just this one movie. Sometimes, well-meaning directors can become the mouthpiece for pretty horrific propaganda from the right. The Steven Spielberg film Jurassic Park is a great example.
Eight days ago, I saw the video of the second meeting Veterans for Peace held with Congressman John Conyers and ran completely out of patience.
The wrongdoing of this administration is clear. We have been presented with lie after lie and excuse after excuse by this complicit Congress for a lack of movement on the impeachment issue. The Bush administration has been cited with NINE subpoenas by Congress that they have completely ignored.
WaPO reports that Maryland police infiltrated and spied upon peace and death penalty abolition groups in 2005. The information the cops gathered was apparently sent to other law enforcement agencies. No crimes were alleged to have been committed by the activists.
That crushing sound you hear is the crumbling of the First Amendment.
Looking at my past postings on Daily Kos there are far too many times when I have ridden the wave of emotion to intellectual oblivion. This was no different when it came to Obama's FISA vote. Some time has passed and the musings of rational thought have managed to creep back into my head. I was advocating "cutting the funds" to the Obama campaign and even the notion of writing a candidate in come November. It is obvious these are grave mistakes if too many people were to go this route. While Obama's FISA vote is inexcusable at best, like myself, he is far from a perfect man. It only took seconds for me to think of a McCain victory to realize the true tragedy this nation faces should the so-called "straight talk" express be parked at the White House on inauguration day.
We have exited the honeymoon, even before any actual coitus has taken place. Well, other than that sneaking adventure into our rectum the Congress offered us yesterday — which, I guess, wasn't actually that sneaky, preceded by any number of obvious signals by hamfisted, Hoyer-regimented collaborationist jagoffs in recent months of their intentions to punch a whole in the Constitution and pump us right through it like randy Hasidim. Okay, look, fuck the analogies, the Senate in approving the FISA "compromise" ushered us into a realm of non-law yesterday, creating a selective bubble where the Constitution of the United States does not apply.
Normal people, of course, workaday citizens, you and I, cannot enter therein; nope, it is a velvet roped club, reserved for wealthy criminals, who have bought their way out of criminality. And those vested with looking out for the rest of us are working the fucking door, including our ostensible last best candidate for the presidency.
Below are 2 ideas for amendments that our congress should debate before capitalizing on the terrible legislation which is FISA. The amendments below are what I feel is the compromised position that is likely to pass. I have also added the reasoning behind the amendments and some extra points that I would like to see put in them.
I would like to see the works gummed up as much as possible so am also recommending that congress debate variations of these amendments. This will help determine exactly were each member stands and how far they are willing to go. With the added benefit of keeping discussion open as long as possible.
Senator Obama has said that he will vote for the pending FISA bill. Some of his Democratic colleagues in the Senate, however, have pledged to vote against that piece of legislation and have offered their reasons for choosing to do so. Let us look at comments by some of those who stand in opposition to Senator Obama's position and why they stand in oppostion. This may better help us to assess where Senator Obama stands on the left/right political continuum.
Back in March, I wrote a story laying out the rationale for drawing out a FISA fight that everyone expected us eventually to lose. ("We don't have the votes!") The basic premise:
Every time Congressional Dems actually slow down and take stock of the situation -- from Senator Chris Dodd's brave (and lonely and seemingly futile) stand, to the cautious maneuvering of House Dems today -- new revelations arise that should make all Americans who value our freedoms glad they did.
Well, the House stopped slowing down recently, and have handed an all-too-willing Senate (which has all along been more willing than the House, it must be noted) a bill that puts retroactive immunity for the pay-for-play telecom spies back on the table. Now it's back in the Senate's lap, with a few brave souls preparing to do what they can to keep the train wreck in slow motion.
Is that worth doing? Sure. And for all the same reasons, which perhaps deserve mention again as Senators prepare to vote on this mess when they come back to work next week. And it couldn't hurt for you to be armed with this list if you see your Senators or Representatives at your local Fourth of July festivities.
So, over the years since we first learned of the Bush domestic spying scheme, and in the six month reprieve that the extended FISA fight has given us, what have we learned about the security and surveillance practices of the "administration" that we supposedly should trust with these new powers?
A U.S. government office in Quantico, Virginia, has direct, high-speed access to a major wireless carrier's systems, exposing customers' voice calls, data packets and physical movements to uncontrolled surveillance
Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.
The Justice Department's inspector general told a committee of angry House members yesterday that the FBI may have violated the law or government policies as many as 3,000 times since 2003 as agents secretly collected the telephone, bank and credit card records of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals residing here.
A technical glitch gave the F.B.I. access to the e-mail messages from an entire computer network — perhaps hundreds of accounts or more — instead of simply the lone e-mail address that was approved by a secret intelligence court as part of a national security investigation, according to an internal report of the 2006 episode.
And of course, we've not forgotten the good, old "No-Fly List"
The Transportation Security Administration's secret no-fly list includes some very unlikely terror suspects -- Bolivian President Evo Morales, 14 of the 19 dead 9/11 hijackers, and every single person named "Robert Johnson."
We learned that the argument still frequently made that foreign-to-foreign phone calls that pass through the U.S. can't be monitored without the PAA and the new FISA changes, and which are constantly pointed to as the proximate cause of the deaths of American soldiers was... a lie:
The fight in Congress and the big push for expanded wiretapping powers has nothing to do with intercepting foreign-to-foreign phone calls inside the United States without a court order. In fact, it turns out that the nation's secret wiretapping court is fine with that.
... our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations. See Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and William J. Haynes, II, General Counsel, Department of Defense, from John C. Yoo, Deputy Assistant Attorney General and Robert J. Delahunty, Special Counsel, Re: Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States at 25 (Oct 23, 2001).
We learned that that might not even matter, since the head of the NSA is dead certain there's no probable cause standard in the fourth amendment, anyway:
President Bush quietly has claimed sweeping new powers to open Americans' mail without a judge's warrant.
Bush asserted the new authority Dec. 20 after signing legislation that overhauls some postal regulations. He then issued a "signing statement" that declared his right to open mail under emergency conditions, contrary to existing law and contradicting the bill he had just signed, according to experts who have reviewed it.
A White House spokeswoman disputed claims that the move gives Bush any new powers, saying the Constitution allows such searches.
Nearly 40 years ago, the FBI was roundly criticized for investigating Americans without evidence they had broken any laws. Now, critics fear the FBI may be gearing up to do it again.
Tentative Justice Department guidelines, to be released later this summer, would let agents investigate people whose backgrounds — and potentially their race or ethnicity — match the traits of terrorists.
Such profiling faintly echoes the FBI's now-defunct COINTELPRO, an operation under Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s and 1960s to monitor and disrupt groups with communist and socialist ties.
Before it was shut down in 1971, the domestic spying operation — formally known as Counterintelligence Programs — had expanded to include civil rights groups, anti-war activists, the Ku Klux Klan, state legislators and journalists.
Among the FBI's targets were Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and John Lennon, along with members of black extremist groups, Fidel Castro sympathizers and student protesters.
And of course, all of these unchecked expansions of executive spying power are occurring in a context in which the Congress has found itself almost completely without power to compel any compliance at all with its most serious oversight responsibilities. Despite the assurances they're scrambling to give that all will be well and closely-watched, the reality is that this Congress has been unwilling and/or unable to exercise any serious control over the executive in the way it interprets or implements these powers, even when such implementation is clearly outside the law. In fact, it is precisely because the implementation was outside the law that we're even having this debate, and incredibly, it's a debate about retroactively legalizing it.
In the face of all of these absurdities, rely on the Washington Post to tell us that opposition to this bill at this time -- in the hands of this president, too -- is inherently unreasonable:
Reasonable people can differ on the issue of immunity, but the FISA debate hasn't been overpopulated by reasonable people. As a result, the immunity issue has assumed a significance in the legislative process that far exceeds its underlying importance. We understand the heartfelt arguments of those who believe that closing the courthouse door to Americans who claim the warrantless wiretapping invaded their privacy rights represents "an abandonment of the rule of law," as Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) said last month.
The editorial actually has passages in it that are considerably worse, and some which are outright false. For example, the assertion that "no one can claim with certainty that his or her communications were monitored." Untrue, as the parties in the Al-Haramain case (as well as that class of people in possession of eyeballs used for reading) well know, but the Washington Post apparently does not.
But if it's true, as the editorial whines, that immunity "is the least -- not the most -- important aspect of the complex FISA debate," you couldn't tell from the traditional media coverage of that debate. Crocodile tears from the Post editorial board are no substitute for the media's missed opportunity to discuss those "most important" aspects of the complex FISA debate. But they've been AWOL on those issues, and it took bloggers latching onto the most politically explosive of the issues to even slow the runaway train long enough for the more important issues -- and I agree there are plenty of them -- to even get a second look.
The Post, of course, would have you flush that opportunity down the toilet in the mad rush to inscribe the mistakes being made on those more important issues on the books. How "reasonable," indeed.
Unchecked expansion of spying powers. A complete lack of enforceability of Congressional oversight. A lapdog press that actually can't wait to cheerlead for the collapse of all controls.
Has there been any point in our history when it's made less sense for the Congress to cede even broader powers to the executive?
In one last, great irony, you and your representatives in Congress are given one last chance to think this over: the Independence Day holiday. I urge you to think more deeply and seriously about it than the Washington Post has.
While converting my LPs to MP3s, I was listening to Lily Tomlin's album This Is a Recording, the chronicles of a telephone operator named Ernestine. And what I heard shed some lights on current events.
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
You know, I'm tired. I'm tired of liberals acting like conservatives. Now, as I flipped through the liberal handbook I can't find anywhere where supporting spying on Americans is a liberal ideal. So, can somebody explain to me, why this new FISA legislation is good for us, liberals, or good for the country. There is so much about its domestic spying program that we know nothing about.
Something is missing beyond the spine of some Democrats in the rush to legalize warrantless wiretaps, end privacy, and reward corporations for betraying the public trust. Let's call it the beef (or nicely textured soy protein for the vegetarians among us).
I am an empiricist at heart. I want proof in the form of sound evidence before I am willing to believe something is true. I am also deeply cynical and suspicious of politicians because too few decisions favor the common good. That cynicism has grown after our elected officials 'misrepresented' the threat posed by Iraq. In the uproar over the FISA revisions, now is a good time to point out there are some glaring gaps in the evidence at hand.
Update: This Netroots community is quickly organizing to fight this FISA legislation. The House slipped the bill passed us too quickly for us to mount an adequate response. Below is more information from some of the guys who are writing some great stuff on this issue. (I have posted some more stuff on FISA including an audio interview with McJoan here and here.)
Senator Chris Dodd took to the Senate floor last night. (I'll get the video as soon as it is available) Thankfully, he will oppose the FISA legislation. here's a portion of what he said:
