Bush’s interest in the telecoms’ ‘switches’

January 3, 2006

About a week ago, the New York Times moved the ball forward on the controversy surrounding Bush’s warrantless-search program, noting that the administration worked with telecommunications companies to trace and analyze large volumes of telephone and Internet communications, without warrants, after 9/11.

As the NYT explained, the NSA eavesdropped on specific conversations, but also utilized telecom “switches” to “comb through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.” The Times added that the telecoms “have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.”

But National Journal’s Shane Harris and writer Tim Naftali explored the relationship between the administration and the telecoms in more detail today in an interesting piece for Slate. Among the revelations:

A former telecom executive told us that efforts to obtain call details go back to early 2001, predating the 9/11 attacks and the president’s now celebrated secret executive order. The source, who asked not to be identified so as not to out his former company, reports that the NSA approached U.S. carriers and asked for their cooperation in a “data-mining” operation, which might eventually cull “millions” of individual calls and e-mails. […]

[O]ur source says the government was insistent, arguing that his competitors had already shown their patriotism by signing on.

The administration wanted to engage in this sweeping surveillance before 9/11? You mean, the Bush gang just used the terrorist attacks to demand the same far-reaching powers they wanted anyway?

Who would have guessed?

Note the description here. They are not listening into the calls to see what keywords or codewords you and I are saying.

Rather, they are looking at the pattern of calls. They are trying or have tried to develop a template of a terrorist mole’s communication so that they can spot when a terrorist will become active and strike at their per determined target.

Supposedly, they have been successful before. They have tracked, arrested and convicted terrorists based on this?

What I’m wondering is, why not tell the terrorists we can track their communications? Disrupting Al Queda’s communications is a very valuable step in this war. Just look at the complaints al-Zawahiri (in the Pashtun regions of Pakistan, probably) makes in his letter to al-Zarqawi in Iraq complaining about how he can’t communicate and noting the ERRORS of al-Zarqawi is making in Iraq by attacking Muslims.

I mean, are we trying to win this war?

  • See, everything you need to know you really did learn in Kindergarten… This one just makes me think…

    Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when we practice to deceive…

  • I wonder how much the executives of these telecom companies (and the companies themselves) had previously donated to the GOP and its candidates. I wonder if there would be such cooperation with a Demo…

  • Besides, all of this shit is connected. Remember when the Pentagon got in some hot water in 2003-2004 over receiving information on airplane passengers? Does anyone still want to argue that we conspiracy theorists are just crying wolf?

  • Lance,

    You miss at least three serious issues with your post above. While I appreciate that you want us to be victorious over the “terroists” — who doesn’t? — that is much more likely if these issues are addressed within the context of our Constitutional democracy:

    1. The spying started long before 911 and the rationale now asserted by Bush and his thugs. This was spying on Americans, pure and simple, in complete contravention of both the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the 4th Amendment to the Constitution. It seems that Cheney’s desire to expand the powers of the executive (i.e., the President), was put into effect long before the supervening actions on 911 might otherwise give the “motive” some legitimacy. BUT, the “methods” of circumventing the rule of law was illegal; constitute high crimes and misdemeanors; and are deserving of impeachment and conviction.

    2. The FISA court IS adaptable to changing technologies, but that was not the reason for BushCo’s ignoring FISA. What is the real reason that Bush has ignored the FISA court? Why has Bush had so much trouble using the FISA court in the last two years? Why didn’t BushCo seek changes from Congress to address allegeded shortcomings of the FISA process? Are the NSA, DOD, and CIA spying on Americans IN America for reasons other than national security? These questions need to be addressed both in serious Senate hearings AND by the punditry.

    3. We cannot ignore the lawlessness of Bush by allowing him to suddenly feign concern that the NYTimes revealed his lawlessness! What the NYT did was in the form of being a whistleblower, and that should be celebrated, not bludgeoned into silence by a ruthless government investigation. Where the hell was Bush’s concern with Valerie Plame and other government whistleblowers that have been screwed by his cronies for telling the truth? This is just one more way that Bush and his Rethugs are destroying the media, and making them his lapdog. We cannot allow that to go on if we have any chance of saving our democracy.

    So, Lance, we stand much more liklihood of having our country destroyed from within by our our government than by terrorists. I think that that is the risk that should have our principal focus. Because at this point, George Bush and his henchmen ARE becoming the serious, real and present danger to our way of life.

    P.S. On a hunch, Lance, I’ll bet you are about 23 and never studied the history of Western Civilization, especially the first half of the 20th Century. How about it, huh?

    P.P.S. Being a little less oblique, Lance, have you had the opportunity to study and learn the lessons of how Germany morphed from the gutted and humiliated hulk under onerous restrictions as the vanquished in World War I into the Nazi empire that waged a bloody and horrifc abomination against jews and the rest of humanity? I suspect not; otherwise, you would not be missing the much bigger pictures and dangers that Bush’s actions foretell.

  • Here is a dot from the NYTimes Oct. 23 2005.

    The federal government, vastly extending the reach of an 11-year-old law, is requiring hundreds of universities, online communications companies and cities to overhaul their Internet computer networks to make it easier for law enforcement authorities to monitor e-mail and other online communications.

    The action, which the government says is intended to help catch terrorists and other criminals, has unleashed protests and the threat of lawsuits from universities, which argue that it will cost them at least $7 billion while doing little to apprehend lawbreakers. Because the government would have to win court orders before undertaking surveillance, the universities are not raising civil liberties issues.
    […]
    If law enforcement officials obtain a court order to monitor the Internet communications of someone at a university, the current approach is to work quietly with campus officials to single out specific sites and install the equipment needed to carry out the surveillance. This low-tech approach has worked well in the past, officials at several campuses said.

    But the federal law would apply a high-tech approach, enabling law enforcement to monitor communications at campuses from remote locations at the turn of a switch.

    I’ll leave it as an exercise to reader to connect this dot to the other dots in the snoopgate story.

  • Hi AL,

    45 with a Bachelor of Arts in History from the George Washington University.

    Certainly Bush should have gone through FISA. Did I imply that he should not?

    My point, which was meant to be limited, was rather than LISTENING into phone conversations, this program of spying seems to be about tracking number and place of phone calls to try and identify likely terrorists. Thus, it is far more a program of profiling than of easedropping.

    Since I excluded a long-winded diatribe against George Bush et al, I suppose you feel justified in your less than well-grounded post-post script. Still, if you wish to be taken as something other than a TWIT, perhaps you should constrain yourself just to what other posters have written and not try to read more into their words than is there ???

  • Lance,

    At the risk of being a TWIT (is that an acronym or just your attempt to substitute wit for intellect?), I stand by my analysis of the tenor of your post #1: it is sophomoric AND myopic. How the hell do we know what was being done, and how can we trust anything that Chimpy says?

    For example, your last question in your post #1: “I mean, are we trying to win this war?” The thrust of my reply was, “Yes, but at what cost to our democracy?” Or, read another way, my reply was, “Yes, but it does not require destroying our way of life to save the country.”

    Lance, I suspect that you and I agree on a whole lot about what is wrong with BushCo and what passes for political discourse in this country today. My fight is not with you, and perhaps I overreacted to your post. Bush’s illegal and unconstitutional spying is so abhorrent to me that discussing the merits of it just produces a viceral reaction against it.

    In any event, I for one am damned tired of Bush and his thugs using the bogeyman of the terrorist to flush every other right, principle, and priority down the crapper. Enough is enough. If we can’t take a stand against this snooping on the basis of principle, whether it “works” or not, then all is lost. After all, if Bill Bennett is right, we can reduce the crime rate by aborting all African-American fetuses, but even discussing the merits of such an abominable idea gives validity to that which ought not even be considered as a nightmare scenario.

    Merely discussing whether all the illegal snooping works lends legitimacy to idiots like Kristol and other neo-con wannabes, and I for one refuse to do so. It is illegal; it is immoral; it is a violation of Chimpy’s oath of office and our trust; and he and Cheney ought to be impeached/convicted, then tried/convicted and locked up for life!

  • Al writes: “My fight is not with you, and perhaps I overreacted to your post.”

    Now was that so hard?

    I really don’t think you read my post that closely.

    Point one. This seems to be about profiling, not easedropping.

    and I wondered at the thought that this might have actually lead to convictions.

    Point Two. Why not tell our enemies we can do this? That would stop them from communicating, which is a critical tool in their terrorist activities. And then we could actually not do it and not tell anyone we stopped 😉

    I’m sorry, but I don’t think you can dismiss effectiveness just because it gives Bill Kristol some grounds for supporting an activity you regard as illegal. If it is effective (which I do not concede, by the way) then there is a moral quandry. If it is ineffective, then Bush et al are just being stupid, breaking the law and further eroding their crediability for a program that may have not yielded any real results.

    When I was in college, not two years ago but twenty-two, one of the American History books we read was about slavery and expressed the opinion that slavery was in fact, economically sound. Most history books before this had suggested that slavery was in fact economically unsound. Thus, losing the institution of slavery was actually a benefit to the South, and so sad they didn’t realize it (and hundreds of thousands of Americans died). This revisionist book I read in class clearly showed the moral quandry, an economically sound institution that was just plain WRONG!

    You suggest that “Merely discussing whether all the illegal snooping works lends legitimacy to idiots like Kristol”. If it works, and it’s wrong to do, then we have an issue. I’m not about to suspend Bill Kristol’s first amendment right to argue his side of this issue just because you have become tired of the processes of democracy.

    Oh, and Cheney first on the impeachment block please. First charge, ordering the Air National Guard to fire on American airliners in contravention of the Uniformed Code of Military Justice (Cheney is not in the chain of command and does not have the authority to order the shoot down of planes just because they are flying in his direction).

    As for the Weimer Republic, I suggest you study how the Nazis used their first election with less then 35% of the vote to get into the parliamentary system (and people complain about our two party system), use thuggery in the Reichstag to shut down the Government and get Hitler accepted as head of government with a minority, then used their position as the Government to fix the next election. Perhaps the parallel between 2000 and 2004 might be striking, as well as the electronic voting machine vendor for Ohio promising that Bush would win the state, guarrenteed?

    So save the sophpmoric comments, okay?

  • Lance,

    It is not the “processes of democracy” of which I am tired, but the frustration and distortion and outright denial thereof.

    You demonstrate some proficiency in finding the parallels between our present day moral/political/Constitutional crises and the horrific theft of the government and the German people through the effective use of propaganda, lack of moral conscience, and the abuse of the rule of law. How, then, can you wade down into the moral morass by asking whether there is anything of value in Bush’s illegal spying?

    My bottom line may not be your bottom line, but it is this: there is NOTHING that would justify his illegal actions; nothing. I would rather live free with the possibility of being blown up by a terrorist’s bomb than to live in a police state where everything I do, I say, and I am, is known to the “big brother” in D.C.

    It is that simple: the debate starts and ends with whether Bush’s actions were illegal and/or unconstitutional. Getting to the “merits” of what he is doing is to compromise one’s humanity; sort of like discussing whether torture works — it is morally repugnant. Illegal spying on Americans is just as repugnant to me.

    I’m not worthy, but I will quote Patrick Henry as it reflects my sincere belief: “Give me liberty or give me death.” I don’t fear what comes after death, but because of this particular government I now fear what comes before it.

  • AL,

    I totally agree with your bottom line. If we have to resort to spying on American citizens to feel safe, then we’ve already lost. I truly believe the biggest threat to America is the sitting administration. No one has done more harm to our way of life in the last five years than these evil-doers.

    Shannon

  • AL: “It is not the “processes of democracy” of which I am tired, but the frustration and distortion and outright denial thereof.”

    “The solution to bad speach is more speach not no speach”: ??

    I demonstrate ‘some’ proficiency? Thanks for compliment.

    Where do you get the idea I’m justifying anything? Oh, right. I conceded that the data mining might have found terrorists. Since that sounds positive, the knee jerk reaction is that it justifies the warrantless search.

    Read ‘Time on the Cross’!

  • NSA is No Ordinary Spy Shop
    by Dudley C. Wells

    http://www.commondreams.org/views06/0103-27.htm

    Dudley Wells, of Moorhead, North Dakota, was a Russian translator in the U.S. Air Force. He also flew on long-range reconnaissance missions against Soviet Bloc targets in the 1960s, gathering data, which was used by intelligence agencies, including the NSA.

    “When I heard Vice-President Dick Cheney say that the administration was eavesdropping on American citizens “to protect their civil liberties,” my gut reaction was: “Big Brother is watching you.”

    The eavesdropper is no ordinary wiretapper – it is the National Security Agency, the Puzzle Palace, the master of decoding, with some of the world’s largest computers. It is an Orwellian Cold War relic that honed its surveillance skills by electronically peeping through the Iron Curtain for 40 years.

    NSA has at its disposal reconnaissance aircraft, ships, submarines and satellites, as well as a vast array of antenna farms and listening posts to pick up radio signals from anywhere on the globe. It can intercept any frequency and record, download, demultiplex, decode and translate virtually anything humans can transmit. Where it operates, there is no such thing as privacy.

    NSA takes its mission extremely seriously, only a few years ago doggedly lobbying for a federal legal limit on private encoding devices to 64-bit encryption, half of the 128-bit encryption we now use on our home computers.

    Because NSA handles codes and foreign intelligence, its files are “top secret” and exempt from automatic downgrading to “secret” or “confidential” as the file contents age. So, American citizens will never be able to access NSA files to find out who is being monitored or how much their government knows about them, until someone is arrested and prosecuted.

    NSA is far too insidious a weapon to unleash on the American public without clear judicial oversight. President Bush and Cheney defend the use of the NSA without court review, saying that the end justifies the means – they must have this latitude to protect the country effectively. This is precisely the kind of reasoning that we despised most about communist dictatorships, and we loathed Saddam Hussein because he operated above the law.

    The Bush administration’s four-year surveillance of American citizens by the NSA is a sinister encroachment on our civil rights, an intrusion into our privacy by a zealous professional intelligence agency and a violation of federal law. Yes, we are involved in a war on terror, but are we giving up more than we are gaining? With Big Brother watching us, why worry about terrorists?”

    • Comments are closed.