DIGG THIS!! Angry Bloggers On Left And Right Unite Over FISA (NPR)
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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=92814309
Type of Content: Article Angry Bloggers On Left And Right Unite Over FISA The Strange Bedfellows In the last couple of months, bloggers on both ends of the political spectrum have been railing against Congress's rewrite of FISA — the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They say it makes it far too easy for spy agencies to vacuum up data from private phone calls and e-mails without meaningful oversight by an independent court. They're also upset that the legislation, signed by President Bush on July 10, gives immunity to telecoms that may have aided illegal government surveillance in the past. The result of this online anger is The Strange Bedfellows, a Liberal-Libertarian joint effort to raise money to punish the Democratic and Republican lawmakers who sponsored the FISA legislation. *** Morning Edition, July 25, 2008 · Bloggers across the political spectrum have been raising money in recent weeks in an effort to punish certain members of Congress for supporting a government surveillance bill backed by the White House. Earlier this month, Congress passed a rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. Opponents say it gives the president too much power to tap private communications without court oversight. That argument was made none too subtly by a TV ad that ran in the home district of Chris Carney, a Pennsylvania Democrat who supported the new FISA law. "Chris Carney is surrendering to Bush and Cheney the same un-American spying powers they have in Russia and communist China," the ad says. Apparently, the ad hit a nerve. A Carney spokeswoman called the ad a "smear campaign" and said NPR should not do a story about it. But the ad was paid for by Carney's fellow Democrats. Blue America is a political action committee promoted by Democratic bloggers like Jane Hamsher. She is disappointed with Congress since it went Democratic. "I'm very upset with my party right now," Hamsher says. "They were given the majority, and they have a 9 percent approval rating right now for a reason." Hamsher is especially angry about the changes to FISA. Proponents say those changes actually strengthen privacy rules for certain phone calls, but in fact, the bill also streamlines the government's ability to sweep up large amounts of data without court warrant. What really gets Hamsher's goat is the fact that congressional Democrats agreed to give immunity to phone companies that may have cooperated with past illegal spying. "They gave George Bush everything he wanted on FISA, and he said so himself," she said. "I think they've shown no leadership, and that's why there's so much energy online for change." Blue America raised $350,000 on this issue in just a couple of months. In the process, Hamsher made new friends, including blogger Rick Williams. Bloggers Join Forces Although Williams considers himself a lifelong Republican, on FISA he sees eye-to-eye with left-leaning Democrats. He was a Ron Paul supporter, and he and other Libertarian-minded Republicans have joined forces with leftist bloggers in a new group called The Strange Bedfellows. Williams says they're planning a Ron Paul-style online fundraiser for Aug. 8. "That's the day that Richard Nixon resigned the presidency," Williams said. "We feel that the Nixon example — his resignation — needs to be reinforced. No one is above the law — not President Bush, and certainly not a group of law-breaking telecoms." Ron Paul's people call these online fundraisers "money bombs." If past performance is any prediction, the Strange Bedfellows group could find itself with millions of dollars to spend. It has been targeting FISA-supporting members of Congress with full-page newspaper ads and robo-calls, along with the TV ads. "For a long time, we have supported Congressman Steny Hoyer," an anonymous speaker in one robo-call says of the Maryland Democrat and House Majority leader. "But last week, Congressman Hoyer just negotiated a deal with George Bush that let the big telecom companies off the hook!" Fall-Out From Bloggers' Ads It remains to be seen whether any members of Congress need to worry about FISA fallout. Hoyer, for one, says he has not heard a lot of discussion in his Maryland district on these issues. Hoyer says wiretapping is not going to sway any elections this year. "I think that the economy is the major issue," he said. "Changing our policy in Iraq, housing, the environment, global warming — I think those are going to be the major issues that the American people are concerned about and are going to address." Still, the FISA issue looms large online. On Barack Obama's Web site, it's come to dominate the discussion forums. More than 20,000 of his supporters begged him to vote against the bill. He voted for it, but he made a point of sending them an explanation. The supporters were not satisfied. Those Obama supporters have now spun off into a new organization — focused on producing a FISA TV ad of their own.
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I have read the comments posted here and first off, 9/11 is/was a hoax that was badly done. I know I am a "tin hat" conspiracy theorist, right? Seriously, that event was used to rip our privacy to shreds and this FISA thing is just another nail in the coffin of liberty. I would almost bet good money that the 8 million Americans in the alleged database are people like us - people who question what the Bush administration is and was doing; what Congress is doing. It is no surprise to me that the approval rating of government as a whole is so low. Even people who are too busy watching TV shows are becoming aware that things are terribly wrong in this country but it is those of us, like in these groups, who will be targeted as troublemakers, anarchists, etc. Our biggest job is to wake our fellow citizens up and demand that the elitists who want to run our country be kicked out.
The terrorists are our government!
I am witness to the slow death of freedom. Little by little and piece by piece until there is only a figment of what once stood revered and cherished, leaving us with but a whisper of what once was and wondering how we were brought here. Imagine if freedom was extinguished with haste, people would not stand for it. The deck is rigged, the forces set in motion by the elite are racing towards a pinnacle. Will the ideology of a few rule over us all or will we the people take back what is ours?
-Kenny
War is Peace
Freedom is Slavery
Ignorance is Strength
Your walkin backwards man!!! Spin around and see the beauty!! the constructs of our enemies are toppling, and its messy, and its ugly, and its gonna cause lots of stress, pain and suffering on us, But as we move forward, our movement and other movements with similar intent are blazin a trail into the future. A trail thats not anywhere near perfect, there will always be dissidents, but it will be a trail of peace and prosperity, focused on Americas domestic welfare. Soon, in my life time and in yours, our elected officials will be back about the business of governing OUR country, and protecting OUR rights.
never forget whats behind you, but focus on whats ahead, and by God whatever you do, don't slow down.
If you put a noose around the neck of a neo con and put him up on a stool, he'll kick the stool out from under himself because "well for better or for worse I'm already here."
A new Church Committee? Interesting story over at Salon (where Mr Greenwald - one of the strange bedfellas- calls home).
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/07/23/new_churchcomm/index.html?s...
This could make the FISA issue seem rather tame in comparison.
Snippet: July 23, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.
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Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally. A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.
According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.
An article in Radar magazine in May, citing three unnamed former government officials, reported that "8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect" and, in the event of a national emergency, "could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and even detention."
The alleged use of Main Core by the Bush administration for surveillance, if confirmed to be true, would indicate a much deeper level of secretive government intrusion into Americans' lives than has been previously known. With respect to civil liberties, says the ACLU's Steinhardt, it would be "pretty frightening stuff.
*story continues for a few pages*
Wonder who them 8million would be? Ron Paul voters? 9/11 truthers? Political activists of all stripes?
I remember after 9/11 there was a lot of criticism of the government for not having enough communication between the various intelligence departments. Apparently there was enough information available on the hijackers to alert the authorities to the plot, only that information was not sufficiently centralized. The implication was that if we had had a better database we could have prevented the attack. I guess you might disagree with that asessment, or you might feel that it is better for attacks of that kind to occur from time to time than for our civil liberties to be violated.
I am not necessarily critical of this position, but I think we do need to acknowledge that if we shut down the Main Core we may be less likely to know in advance about future attacks. Ultimately it may come down to deciding whether our freedom from government surveillance is worth the price of a certain number of innocent lives lost in America, and the cost in lives and money of another retaliatory war. We may very well wish to decide in favor of civil liberties. As Ben Franklin puts it, "they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety". I hope that if we do away with government surveillance and we are successfully attacked as a result, people can remember these wise words, and we don't have to start this whole cycle all over again.
when you sacrifice liberty for security you lose both. I think that is far more accurate.
I don't, for a second, buy into the idea that gov't surveillance of 8 million domestic citizens makes us any safer. How many stadiums full of terrorists do we have walking around? 8 million? How many times bigger than our standing army is that? This idea defies common sense. Really!
and I should be clear that the 8million number was contained in the Salon report so I don't know its accuracy. Its obviously classified information so who knows the real number. But even if it is half that, 4 million American CITIZENS (not aliens, not illegals, not people on temporary visa's) - - i guess if they had every militia member, every skinhead, neo nazi, anarchist or whatever perhaps that would get that high of a number.
But then you have the problem of gov.t targeting people because of unsavory political/personal beliefs - - which is bordering on thought crime. Maybe these millions exercised their first amendment rights in a way that scared someone so now they are "suspect." Whatever the 1st amendment protects, it surely protects a person's right to speak their mind - even if what they say is ignorant, racist, anti-government or whatever. So long as it doesn't incite crime or constitute treason, it shouldn't be the basis of gov.t snooping on otherwise private information.
I don't know how the database is generated, what type of information goes into it, how one gets on or off the list, etc... Everything is secret, which is in itself should be disturbing to a free people whose gov.t is accountable to them. Secrecy and tyranny go hand in hand. Excessive surveillance of domestic citizens goes hand in hand with tyranny. This whole program is a mechanism for imposing tyranny actually and its why i brought it up. Its like FISA on steroids. But not for a foreign intelligence purpose. This would appear to be purely domestic and falls right in line with what the ATT whistleblower says about NSA servers sucking up EVERY single bit of information that passes through the communication facilities. Perhaps that 8million figure is way too low?
there is no justification for Main Core to have 8million AMERICAN citizens on file with detailed records of banking transactions, etc... all aquired in violation of the 4th amendment and federal privacy laws meant to safeguard us from intrusions into our private lives. Let's use a little common sense here. Assuming the gov.t's story about 9-11 to be the true one and it was foreign (muslim) men who committed those horrible acts. Some of them took classes at various pilot schools here in the USA and some were even reported as suspicious to FBI field agents near those schools by instructors at said school. The FBI field agents, like workers in all large bureaucracies, hands the information to someone else, who sends it off to washington where it gets put in a dust bin with a million other suspicious person reports. A report is generated and lost in the maze.
All the FBI had to do was ACT on the information at the field location closest to said pilot schools (not centralize it), not hand it off to somebody else and just assume somebody else would take care of it. Putting all this information together in one database, instead of separate ones, just creates a larger dust bin. They had the information but failed to ACT.
Now, their lack of action is used as excuse to pass the patriot act, create a new bureaucracy named the Dept of Homeland Security, to centralize data from all sources and give big brother some teeth (national security letters, sneek and peak warrants, wiretaps, indefinite detention of u.s. citizens without recourse to judicial review, etc...)
Those 8 million "possible" or "potential" threats BECOME "actual" threats completely at the whim of someone in a political position in the executive branch of govt who may be faced with a public outcry to do "something"to make them safe and could target at random any name on that list and imprison them for life without so much as a hearing to contest the detention (see 4th cir court of appeals recent decision) by calling said person an enemy combanant. Soviet Premiers at the height of the Cold War had such power and we rightfully criticized them for such. Now, our government is assuming these same type of powers that could be applied against us? What? 8 million "possible threats"? C'mon!
Main Core was around since apparently the 80's. There was also carnivore. There is also Total Information Awareness (now allegedly defunct). And Echelon when we Americans go overseas. Billions of dollars spent on these programs prior to 9-11. The govt already had secret "databases" and it didn't do jack squat to stop 9-11. Making it bigger and more complex is going to help? If foreign people with no criminal background or known ties to a terrorist organization who come to this country are intent on doing harm, would they be on the main core list? No, likely not. Unless it automatically adds people from the middle east. Its appears to be a domestic data mining operation of American citizens. If they weren't here and are on a student visa or something there is no records to scoop up. So it actually could be rather useless for the group of people who have actually committed terrorists acts in the USA from time to time (for example WTC twice).
We don't need more centralization of power and information. We need common sense. In times of peril or threat, we need to adhere to the constitution even more, not less. I am not convinced that main core can stop any attacks because it surely didn't work for Tim McVeigh, it didn't stop the unabomber, and if someone was really intent on blowing themselves up or something in public - a million data mined pieces of information put together isn't going to stop them. This is the problem. Bad people do bad things. We don't have to sacrifice personal liberty of. u.s. citizens to address this problem. And we surely don't have to accept that executive branch employees can make themselves ABOVE the law and break laws passed by Congress or enshrined in the bill of rights to "protect us" - whether it is done in secret or not.
I live in a large city. My office is near the sears tower. I am more at risk than most other people because my city is a known target because of its size. I will gladly accept the risk (in the grand scheme of things the risk of being killed in a terrorist attack is still extremely small which is all the more reason this is a bad idea) that I could be hurt because people in the world hate America and want to kill us all. I just don't see what can be gained from sacrificing these liberties that you or I are entitled to by right because we are citizens - - (terrorists and foreigners don't have 90% of our constitutional rights anyway) but I see everything that can be lost. Its a lose/lose all around.
That makes sense. There already were centralized systems, and it didn't stop the 9/11 attacks, and indeed, the risk of dying in a terrorist attack would be infinitesimally small even if there were a large scale attack every year. It would certainly take a lot more than that to affect 8 million people, which is as many as are now affected by government surveillance. One potential consequence of another major attack, though, would be that it could very well launch us into another war, which of course affects everybody. But I suppose that will be up to Congress, which presumably will be more reluctant to approve it this time around.
Regarding the 9/11 hijackers, are those the kinds of suspects you feel it would have been legitimate for the FBI to monitor, if they had more conscientious? People from middle eastern countries with a sudden interest in flying planes? I mean, they weren't doing anything illegal, right? Any legal insights about this?
in this case, it was apparently one of the instructors at the flight school who alerted the local FBI because one of the (future) hijackers didn't care to learn how to land planes. Just fly them.
So you have a muslim guy from the middle east, taking flight lessons and doesn't want to learn how to land a plane. Is that inherently suspicious? Does it change the calculus if it were a white guy? I don't know. Any pilot not interested in learning to land a plane would seem kinda odd to me. It was odd enough for the FBI to be notified.
However, the FBI and DEA and local police get "tips" all the time about suspicious people. Maybe they are drug dealers, maybe they are dog fighting - whatever. The FBI can do a little bit of follow up and usually find out quickly if there is something there. In this case, if the FBI did a little bit of follow up, maybe they would have caught something that peaked their interest more. Its just as possible they could have found nothing and 9-11would have still happened. But what they did do was apparently generate a form, send it off to Washington and then...do nothing. I could have done that and I have no police training.
I dont know if there are any legal insights to gain from this end of the scenario, but the legal insights as to what is happening as a result of this is contained in my post above. I don't really care about the political correctness angle... but thats just me. I dont think its profiling if someone reports legitimately suspicious activity.
i know why Alberto Gonzales would always qualify his answers about the TSP (terrorist surveillance program) with words such as, "the program the president has admitted" "the program under discussion today" to questions on the scope of the eavesdropping program as uncovered by the NYT.
This is starting to all make sense now.