I guess today’s revelations that the [tag]NSA[/tag] is maintaining a [tag]database[/tag] of every [tag]domestic[/tag] [tag]American[/tag] [tag]phone call[/tag] has rattled the [tag]White House[/tag] at least a little, because [tag]Bush[/tag] felt compelled to make a brief public statement today.
“First, our international activities strictly target al Qaeda and their known affiliates. Al Qaeda is our enemy, and we want to know their plans. Second, the government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. Third, the intelligence activities I authorized are lawful and have been briefed to appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat. Fourth, the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities.
“We’re not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans. Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates. So far we’ve been very successful in preventing another attack on our soil.”
Almost all of this was beside the point and an apparent attempt to confuse the public. Bush says our “international activities” focus on al Qaeda, but this doesn’t address the massive NSA database of domestic phone calls. The president insists he doesn’t listen to “domestic phone calls without court approval,” which may or may not be true, but the question today is why the government logs all of our calls into a secret database without court approval or oversight.
Bush wants us to know that he’s not “trolling” through our personal lives; he’s just allowing a secretive government agency to covertly [tag]log[/tag] every American phone call for [tag]secret[/tag] reasons, without oversight, and with undetermined controls on privacy and/or abuse.
Reading over the president’s remarks this afternoon (he did not take any questions), I kept thinking about the evolving nature of his defense. When the warrantless-search story first broke six months ago, Bush emphasized how innocent Americans’ calls were of no interest to the federal government.
“[T]hese calls are not intercepted within the country. They are from outside the country to in the country, or vice versa. So in other words, this is not a — if you’re calling from Houston to L.A., that call is not monitored. And if there was ever any need to monitor, there would be a process to do that.”
We could, I suppose, quibble over the meaning of the word “monitor,” but the president was, at a minimum, being disingenuous. The law-abiding American’s call Houston to L.A. is monitored, inasmuch as the NSA enters that call into a secret government database for still-unknown reasons.
It prompted Glenn Greenwald to note that federal officials “are so interested that they make note of it and keep it forever, so that at any time, anyone in the Government can look at a record of every single person whom every single American ever called or from whom they received a call. It doesn’t take a professional privacy advocate to find that creepy, invasive, dangerous and un-American.”
At this point, Congress seems interested in getting at least a little more information.
The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said on Thursday he would ask U.S. phone companies whether they are providing phone records of tens of millions of Americans to the National Security Agency.
Sen. Arlen Specter, a Pennsylvania Republican, was reacting to a report in USA Today saying the NSA was secretly collecting the records and using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity.
The disclosure, if confirmed, means the agency’s domestic program would be far larger than previously suspected…. Specter said U.S. lawmakers have been unable to determine if that domestic spy program was legal. “We’ve got to call on those telephone companies to provide some information to figure out what is going on,” he said.
Congressional Dems, meanwhile, are livid.
Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, held up a copy of USA Today’s front-page story during the panel’s meeting and said, “Shame on us for being so far behind and being so willing to rubber-stamp anything this administration does.”
He said that if lawmakers are unwilling to demand answers from the administration, “then this Congress, this Republican leadership, ought to admit they have failed in their responsibility to the American government.”
And my friend Peter Daou asked a question that I’ve been mulling all day.
When will this administration’s overreach attain crisis-level attention? Will it simply be another blogswarm and a few days of scattered coverage? Will OJ Simpson and Natalee Holloway and Michael Jackson and Bush’s rehashed speeches be the only items that receive roadblock coverage on the cable nets? Will Dem leaders step up and say “enough!” Will so-called ‘conservatives’ draw a line in the sand?
Once again, I have my doubts.
Unfortunately, I do too.