[Originally published at Corrente.]
Surprise!
Honestly, reading the McConnell interview in the El Paso Times, of all places, is like having your head pushed through mush. The guy is just an obfuscatory master of the filibuster. And has anyone ever noticed how much he sounds like Bush the First? ("Don't want to go there. Just think, lots"; "Just let me leave it, not too much detail." Na ga happen...)
There's plenty of Inside Baseball stuff, and McConnell develops his own timeline for the Democrats FISA betrayal, but this exchange leaped out at me, because our hair has been on fire about this for years:
[MCCONNELL] Now there's a sense that we're doing massive data mining. In fact, what we're doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that's, we've got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we're doing things we're not doing.
The warrantless surveillance program targets both voice and data. From the beginning (see here at "diversionary tactic"), when the administration and its enablers wish to conceal the scope of the program, they don't mention email. McConnell does that here, and the interviewer---surprise!--doesn't call him on it.
As the Christian Science Monitor wrote back in 2006:
The US government [outlaw Bush regime] is developing a massive computer system that can collect huge amounts of data and, by linking far-flung information from blogs and e-mail to government records and intelligence reports, search for patterns of terrorist activity.
A major part of ADVISE involves data-mining - or "dataveillance," as some call it. It means sifting through data to look for patterns. If a supermarket finds that customers who buy cider also tend to buy fresh-baked bread, it might group the two together.
What sets ADVISE apart is its scope. It would collect a vast array of corporate and public online information - from financial records to CNN news stories - and cross-reference it against US intelligence and law-enforcement records.
This is "surgical"?
The NSA has built "secret rooms" to intercept all internet traffic, according to ABC and Wired Magazine:
"ABC News Chief Investigative Correspondent Brian Ross will sit down for an exclusive interview with AT&T whistleblower Mark Klein, a former technician who describes secret NSA rooms at AT&T switching centers that he says allows the government to intercept all domestic internet traffic. Speaking publicly for the first time, Klein details how he discovered the secret rooms and the lengths the government has gone to keep his story from the public."
This is "surgical"?
The NSA has been collecting the cell phone records of tens of millions of Americans, according to USA Today:
The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.
The agency’s goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation’s borders, this person added.
This is "surgical"?
The NSA's programs are so massive that the NSA is running out of electrical power to run the damn computers!
The demand for electricity to operate its expanding intelligence systems has left the high-tech eavesdropping agency on the verge of exceeding its power supply.
This is "surgical"?
FISA judges have found the program so egregious that they've resigned in protest, according to WaPo:
A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush’s secret authorization [sic] of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.
"What I’ve heard some of the judges say is they feel they’ve participated in a Potemkin court."
This is "surgical"?
There's plenty of other good stuff, too, like the claim that putting the warrantless surveillance program under the rule of law in a democratic society kills people, and and McConnell's straight-faced, hilarious claim that he's non-political. But this will do to go on with.
What I'd really like to understand the regime's definition of "foreign." Not their public explanation, but whatever they've had some Federalist Society operative gin up in Cheney's dank basement. Here's what McConnell says on "foreign":
Q: And this is still all foreign to foreign communication?
A: All foreign to foreign.
But I want to know what foreign means in this context: If they argue that it's OK to surveill a foreigner if their data flows through a US router, is it OK to surveill me if my data goes through a foreign router? If so, that means that they can surveill my data whenever they want, because a packet switching network like the Internet is agnostic about political boundaries. All data is potentially "foreign." I've got no evidence of this at all, of course; just this general sense that because they're operating under the carefully crafted Theory Of We Get To Do Whatever The Fuck We Want, they're doing whatever the fuck they want. Give these guys an inch, and they take off our whole arm up to the shoulder.
NOTE 1 The discussion in our famously free press has been predictably heinous, focusing on raised eyebrows for [his] frank discussion". I hope we've disposed of that canard, at least. (For previous examples, see Izvestia on the Hudson and Pravda on the Potomac.)
NOTE 2 I'm still waiting for the "politically explosive disclosures" to which McClatchy alluded after Bush deigned to place the program under the authority of the FISA court. Or was non-disclosure the Democrat's price for their midnight capitulation?