First, Dana Priest fields a question:
Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writer Thursday, February 16, 2006; 12:30 PM [...] Anonymous: How would you counter the argument of a distraught American citizen that the country of his birth has devolved into an empire in denial with little respect for the wisdom of our founding fathers, or the Constitution, in short, a military industrial rogue state with the self-declared right to emulate Pearl Harbor when and where it is unilaterally to our national interests?
Dana Priest: With a stiff drink?! A jog through Rock Creek Park? Is there something in the water today? I'm getting besieged with despairing notes such as this one. Maybe everyone should go outside (if you're in Washington at least), take a deep breath, smell the spring in the air, and then push the restart button and see what happens. I'm not agreeing or disagreeing with your analysis, only the tone, which is defeatist.
[That it... that's the best she can do on the subject: The de-evolution of the American Dream (tm).//lcm] http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/discussion/2006/02/10/DI2006021001326.html
Hear No Evil: Congress, FISA and NSA Surveillance JURIST Guest Columnist Peter Shane of Moritz College of Law, Ohio State University, says that decisions by the Republican leaders of two congressional committees not to launch probes into warrantless NSA surveillance of Americans contrary to FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, reflect a serious breakdown in the constitutional system of checks and balances between different branches of government...
[...] A recurring question in the FISA-gate debate is why the executive branch, which actually has emergency authority under FISA to conduct warrantless surveillance, did not use it. This seems especially mysterious given that the President and Attorney General insist the NSA has listened in only on conversations involving parties who belong to or are associated with al Qaeda.
I actually have a guess about this, and I emphasize it is only a guess. The question to ask is, how did the government know that it was listening on conversations of this kind. My hypothesis is that they were using a technique called “pattern recognition.” That is, using computers to sift through data about thousands of telephone communications – things like call length, points of origin and reception, and so on – as well as word sampling from the conversations themselves, the NSA developed an algorithm for which patterns would likely be characteristic of al Qaeda-related phone calls. If I am right, then the following two things would also be true:
1. The Administration can accurately say that it limited its “listening” to al Qaeda-related phone calls only if you don’t count the original computer surveillance of the contents of phone calls as “listening.”
2. The information that led to the identification of certain phone calls as al Qaeda-related did not include information specific to the actual parties to the phone call. The information was only a “pattern,” which, judging from the results, typically was not well designed to yield fruitful “hits.”
The reason I think this is a decent guess is that FISA would not permit the computerized “listening in” that I suspect has occurred, and it’s not clear whether the FISA court would accept pattern evidence as the sole basis for establishing probable cause that a phone call would actually yield foreign intelligence information. The court might also have rebelled against the process that yielded the pattern information in the first place. That would explain why the Administration did not rely on the court.
What it fails to explain – again, if my guess is right – is why the Administration did not ask for an amendment to FISA to allow this sort of program. With Republican majorities in both Houses and the Administration’s skill in the politics of national security, what were they afraid of? [...] http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/forumy/2006/02/hear-no-evil-congress-fisa-and-nsa.php
Leigh www.leighm.net http://leighmdotnet.blogspot.com/