Justice Department To Review Domestic Spying 222
orgelspieler writes, "According to the New York Times, Justice Department Inspector General Glenn Fine has opened a review of his department's role in the domestic spying program. Democrats (and some Republicans) have been requesting an all-out investigation into the legality of the so-called 'Terrorist Surveillance Program' since it was made public. But this new inquiry stops short of evaluating the constitutional legitimacy of the program." From the article: "The review, Mr. Fine said in his letter, will examine the controls in place at the Justice Department for the eavesdropping, the way information developed from it was used, and the department's 'compliance with legal requirements governing the program'... Several Democrats suggested that the timing of his review might be tied to their takeover of Congress in this month's midterm elections as a way to preempt expected Democratic investigations of the N.S.A. program."
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Preemptive strike (Score:5, Insightful)
So this is a preemptive move, designed to head off a full investigation.
Stops short? (Score:5, Insightful)
Unless, when they say "Justice Department" they actually mean "Judges," then of course it "stops short" of determining the constitutionality of a program. That's what judges do. They don't always do it well, but that's what they do.
Re:What the Program Actually Is (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:What the Program Actually Is (Score:2, Insightful)
And how do you know this? Because they told you so?
Yes, actually. If we all took your stance then we could assume the government is kidnapping babies out of hospital maternity wards and turning them into mutant super fighters. How do you know they're not? Because they told you so? You naive fool!
After all, you have no proof one way or the other. So yes, we go by what has been released to the public so far and we don't need to make up more conspiracy theories.
There are probably numerous terror cells living here in the US that the G-men are interested in...
Yes, the feds are monitoring groups within the U.S., but it has nothing to do with this particular program or these particular accusations.
Clinton's People Impressed with it. (Score:2, Insightful)
But that will not prevent the coming Congressional Wankfest and Witch Hunt. Henry Waxman as much as said so.
The next two years will be a reprisal of the inept, ill conceived and utterly useless Iran Contra Hearings.
This program sounds fishy. (Score:4, Insightful)
In all these years one can count the number of terrorist convictions racked up by the DOJ on one hand. Experts are saying there is no vast al queda presence in the United States (see PBS Frontline "enemy within" http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/enemywith
Who the heck are they listening to...?
Re:What the Program Actually Is (Score:5, Insightful)
My understanding is that the true nature and extent of this program is still top secret. All that has been released to the public is a couple of leaks and a bunch of denials/justifications from the government. Given the fact that before the leaks Bush was claiming that they were getting warrants for all their tapping, what is the rational basis for believing what they say now? If this program is still top secret, doesn't the Administration actually have a duty to lie about or obfuscate the true nature and extent of the program?
The program as you and the Administration describe it could easily fit within the existing FISA law. Which raises the question, why risk the political and legal fall-out of avoiding the FISA court if you don't have to? Why is the lame duck Congress trying to push through new legislation to authorize the program if the program could actually fit within the existing legal framework?
Why is there an investigation? (Score:1, Insightful)
Put simply, no investigation is necessary to determine that the "domestic spying" is unacceptable, should thus be immediately stopped, and legislation passed to prevent such nonsense from arising in the future. The fact that the Democrats haven't immediately put an end to it suggests to the rest of the world that they're not truly different at all from those in the Bush administration.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What the Program Actually Is (Score:3, Insightful)
So if being monitored by the government, without a warrant or any oversight, while you make a call to Canada from within your own house doesn't bother you, I assume you also wouldn't mind if the government listened to any phone calls you make purely inside the United States?
I'm curious why one seems acceptable to many anti-bill-of-righters but the other presumably is not.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Clinton's People Impressed with it. (Score:1, Insightful)
Most intelligent people do not question the existence of the program but rather how it
is being implemented. The administration comes along and says hey we do not like how
judges rule sometimes so lets just cut them out of the program by removing the oversite. That
just is not how stuff is supposed to work in the ole USA. That judicial oversite is there
to provide balance to the system, without it abuse is nearly certain.
Re:"Domestic"? (Score:2, Insightful)
How do they find out who is a terrorist and who is not? A part of that process is listening into RANDOM conversations with people they THINK might have SOME connection.
In translation: They are grasping at straws. What are you going to do when they grab yours?
Re:They'll Still Be Remembered For What They Did (Score:2, Insightful)
This domestic spying is without warrant. Thus, it very clearly violates that amendment of the Constitution known as the Fourth. It also is against the very specific set of statutes known as the FISA statutes. FISA is short for Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. If an executive branch office wants to spy on the American people because they think they may gain foreign intelligence (i.e., the infamous bad guys were calling into the United States so we had to spy on all of you excuse), the executive branch officer is required by law to follow the law. The law governing is the FISA statutes. Bush chose consciously and intentionally not to follow the law. He chose consciously and intentionally not to get the required warrant. It is not in any way revisionist history to call George Bush an enemy of the Constitution and thus an enemy of the United States of America. This is but one of his many Constitutional violations. Nixon looks like a saint.
Japanese internment was very much a wrong, It did not take a revision of history for reparations to be made and the government to very publicly apologize for what it did (something Nixon and the Reagan-Bush-I-Iran-Contra-Affair-Cabal have never done). And a country known as Japan attacked the United States. Did the American people attack George Bush? Is that why his domestic surveillance program in violation of FISA and without warrants is okie-dokey?
It is not revisionist history to call George Bush a traitor to this country for his numerous conscious choices to violate the United States Constitution and our law. It is a joke to have the justice department investigate its own boss.
Re:"Domestic"? (Score:3, Insightful)
You are correct in that the spying program is not "Domestic". This is just a term thrown around by politicos that want to frame the debate as one where one side is "Protecting the freedoms of Americans" and the other side is "Trying to take away our freedoms". The truth of the matter is that this is a program used to keep tabs on terrorist suspects abroad and their contacts in the United States. It's important and necessary as one of the weaknesses of any terrorist organization is thier communication link. As they are not a nation-state with the resources to develop thier own communications technology, they must rely on civilian technologies to for thier CAC functions. By tapping into these lines of communication we can thwart their efforts to attack us.
The problem with many of those that don't like this program is that they see Terrorism in much the same way that the Clinton administration did. As a law-enforcement problem. That type of limited vision is how we ended up with 9/11 in the first place. By not treating terrorism as what it is, a MILITARY action against the US and other countries by an organized but decentralized force, and assuming that subpoenas, police and lawyers will be effective in stopping a global jihad, we place ourselves directly in the line of fire for another terror attack.
But there are plenty of people on Slashdot with mod points that just don't get that. Of course, many of them also think that Michael Moore is a visionary and Al Gore is an Environmental genius. There's no accounting for Common Sense I guess.
I'll believe it when I see results (Score:3, Insightful)
But is it impeachable? (Score:1, Insightful)
He's loaded the NSA and CIA with his cronies, if the DOJ finds anything bad, those cronies will accept the blame on behalf of the NSA or CIA and apologize to the President for their failures and a cosy stitch-up will happen, just like the CIA took the flak for over WMDs in Iraq.
However if the independent investigator gets in, he'll speak to the real NSA staff, and the real CIA intelligence men and get the real story and real guilt will be determined.
"The fact that the Democrats haven't immediately put an end to it suggests"
You do understand that they're not yet in power?
Re:This program sounds fishy. (Score:5, Insightful)
These people basically have a centralized, facist mindset. They don't really believe in freedom; they think that the masses people need to be managed and controlled. They believe that there should be a class of ruling elites who run the show, and then the common folk, who have no real power or influence. They view society as a corporation, with a few owners, some managers, and a bunch of peon workers who just take orders. They want to be the CEO sitting in the control chair, watching a real-time dashboard of everything that everyone is doing.
All of this tracking and surveillance they are doing has nothing to do with watching Al Qaida and terrorists. What they want to do is what all totalitarian governments -- be they communist or fascist -- want to do: track everybody. That way you can have control over everybody. Knowledge is power. Check out "IBM and the Holocaust". The Nazis were using then state-of-the-art information processing technology to keep track of Jews, opposition groups, everybody. Everybody had a number, everybody had a file. The same thing happened in communist Russia and in Iraq under Hussein. It's the calling card of totalitarianism.
The smoking gun is the Total Information Awareness [wikipedia.org] program which was introduced shortly after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. It is a conglomerate database of all electronic information that exists about everybody in the US -- all your bank, medical, school, work records -- even the purchases you make with your shopping club card. Due to public outcry, the program was ostensibly canceled, but in actuality all of the seperate features were just broken up into smaller programs. Check out the wikipedia article linked above.
9/11 was the excuse for all of these fascistic plans to come out of the woodwork and be given a go. Yes, we do need to be protected from Al Qaida and other terrorists, but not at the expense of the constitution.
Things are not bad yet, but they could go bad. Pieces are being moved into place that would give a dictator all of the tools that he would need to exercise incredible power. We are already seeing the media bullied, silenced, and propagandized. I guess the next sign of things getting worse would probably be disappearances and prominent people flee^H^H^H^Hleaving the country.
Re:What the Program Actually Is (Score:3, Insightful)
What the headline calls domestic spying is actually the tapping of phone calls to and from people inside the United States to and from someone outside the United States who is a known terrorist or member of Al Queda. It is not, as some believe, the government wiretapping phone calls internal to the United States.
Would the people that determine the known list of terrorists be the same ones who were certain that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction?
Re:They'll Still Be Remembered For What They Did (Score:3, Insightful)
Did everyone just forget that Bush (who they oddly trust implicitly) will not be in power forever.
And that this 'war' will continue forever, too.
Conservativism==Whatever the Republicans in power are doing, exactly until the Americans get so annoyed at them they vote them out or they have obvciously failed, at which point the whole thing becomes fake conservativism..real conservativism, you see, has never been tried, or never been tried correctly.
It's a lot like communism that way. All the failings are on the implementation and the people who try, or just pretend to try, to implement it, and it is never wrong.
Just wait. They're already turning on Bush, talking about how he's not really conservative. They are, of course, correct, but everyone else started pointing that out six fucking years ago. They don't get to disown him after years and years of sucking up.
So-called so-called (Score:1, Insightful)
It is so-called domestic spying by the enemy media.
Bush's Eight Rules of Modern Autocratic Government (Score:5, Insightful)
- This war on terrorism is our new Cold War. It will last a generation or two.
- Because we are at war it is necessary to engage in certain behaviors--renditions, torture,
domestic spying, secret prisons, etc.
- We cannot tell you what we are doing because it would compromise national security during a
time of war.
- The courts cannot review what we are doing because it will compromise national security during
a time of war.
- Any newspaper reporter or news outlet that reports a leak of these programs can be put under
oath and forced to reveal sources, under threat of going to jail for contempt.
- Only select members of Congress can know what we are doing. But they cannot tell anyone because it will compromise national security.
- When Congress passes laws, the president has the right to ignore these law if he believes they
infringe upon his war powers or his role as Commander in Chief.
- The courts cannot review the president's decision in rule no. 7 because it would compromise
national security.
These rules have the very convenient effect of disabling ALL of the checks and balances on the executive branch of the government. Frankly, unless many thousands of Americans are dying, violence is erupting everywhere, and this country is teetering on the brink of economic/political oblivion, I see no reason to install an emergency autocratic government. Even if we were at that point, I would still want some above-board cost/benefit arguments explained to me as to how I'm going to be safer in reality (as to just "feeling" safer) by giving up some of my civil liberties and watching the world learn to hate us.Much like the rest of his political strategy (Iraq war, etc), Bush puts forward nothing but a flim-flam job of justifying inflated neo-con theories of the use of discretionary executive force. How nice it would be to make all the trains run exactly on time, if we could just arrest anyone who used to make them run late? Fascism has a certain appeal when you don't realize that it actually is fascism.
We need checks and balances in the country.. anybody who doesn't believe that should closely read the Federalist Papers. Those guys were certified geniuses in the realistic exercise of power. They had the benefit of 1,000 years of European wars and history to examine human nature at its Machiavellian worst. They knew EXACTLY what they were doing when they set up checks on presidential power, they envisioned internal and external threats to the country every bit as clear and present as they are today.
Re:What the Program Actually Is (Score:2, Insightful)
After all, you have no proof one way or the other. So yes, we go by what has been released to the public so far and we don't need to make up more conspiracy theories.
FISA doesn't allow the government to spy on communication between Americans and terrorists without a warrant, you lying sack of shit:
Notwithstanding any other law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year if the Attorney General certifies in writing under oath that--
(B) there is no substantial likelihood that the surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party; and
Period. That's what the law says.
There's no other way to intercept without a court order, or at least a retroactive court order. (There are plenty of ways, however, to intercept with one.) Now, we can argue if that requirement is a good idea, or if it can be removed without constitutional issues. But it's right there, in the law. The Attorney General did not authorize the spying under that rule, because he knew he was listening to Americans. So the president is not 'withstanding other laws', specifically the law: 'A person is guilty of an offense if he intentionally engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute'.
So, as the executive branch has, you know, already admitted breaking the law(1), so maybe taking their word as to to, exactly, how much of the law they are breaking is not a good idea.
And stop saying 'the government'. I trust the government to follow the law. 'The government' includes the judicial branch issuing warrants and the legislative branch doing oversight of the program in general. It's the executive branch that decided to operate outside of that framework.
1) Yes, they have. Their 'AUMF authorized it' theory, which was actually only advanced by the media whores and not the administration, was shot down in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, where the courts said that authorization to invade a country didn't magically invalidate other laws, especially laws designed to cover, duh, war time. The AUMF could not, and does not, void FISA, anymore than it voided the UCMJ.
The only other thoery they have, and the only one they've actually advanced, is their nonsensical one that basically reduces to 'If the president does it, it's not illegal', which is just so manifestly incorrect under our system of government that it's actually hard to explain why, except to explain that all people must follow the law at all times unless explicitly noted.
Re:They'll Still Be Remembered For What They Did (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is, when a large group of people essentially hijack a term and take it as their own, there's not a lot you can do about it. I used to call myself a conservative, until I realized that I didn't agree with any of the new Evangelical would-be "conservatives." Like a lot of other people I know, I now tend to describe myself more in terms of libertarianism.
Bush, I think, will be viewed as an interesting figure in hindsight. He was neither a conservative nor really an authoritarian, because by all accounts he doesn't have much in the way of personal convictions or opinions either way. He and others in the Republican party seem to see themselves as having played the Evangelical bloc, secretly scorning them even as they paid lip service to whatever issues and stances that were required to stay on top and consolidate power. In terms of straight political maneuvering, the neo-con takeover of the Republican party and subsequent rise to power is quite amazing. I think you'd have to look back to the days of organized crime and the labor movement to find a time when a small group of people so thoroughly took over a part of the political process and got away with it, less so because of their own secrecy but because of the public's unwillingness to confront what was plainly happening.
DoD (NSA) has no standing in civilian courts (Score:3, Insightful)
This is similar to any other wiretap in that the warrant. The warrant does not cover the people that call or receive calls from the target. Police can use information collected from monitoring the target to get wiretaps on others.
How is this illegal? The NSA is doing their job with the primary target. It is completely legal to generate leads off of the primary target. Further investigation on the people that contact the primary will require further warrants. This is the acceptable way of doing things and has been for quite some time.
Re:What the Program Actually Is (Score:5, Insightful)
And how do you know if a person is a terrorist? Obviously, by convicting him of it in a court of law. Until then, the person being spied on is a lawful private citizen, with all the rights affirmed by the Constitution!
Re:They'll Still Be Remembered For What They Did (Score:3, Insightful)
It's also fairly well known that the Republican party TODAY bears little resemblance to the party 20 years ago. I can say the same thing about the democratic party. Both parties have been highjacked by fringe groups that don't represent the majority of Americans and have been subverted by lobbyists weilding big dollars.
I have to disagree with you on this (Score:3, Insightful)
While I generally agree with you on most points, I'll have to take exception to this one. The fact that people misuse a term to cloak their misdeeds does not mean that the term never had a cogent meaning, or that it is devoid of substance.
Would you say that "the word 'new' doesn't mean anything," for example, just because "New!" has been plastered all over thousands of products that weren't new at all? Or would you just say that the people who misused the word were lying?
I am a conservative. As such I have vocally opposed almost everything that this administration has done, since the spring of 2001 (at the time, it was Cheney's energy task force and their handling of the Florida recount that had me up in arms). If you google for my posts here and elsewere you will find a consistent pattern motivated by a single, clearly conservative theme:
Don't throw out, risk, abandon, or dismantle something of value for vague or incoherent reasons, no matter how swell the flim-flam show.
And on and on. This isn't a recent rejection of Bush on his way down; I have been mad had him and his ilk far longer than 80% of his present critics, and on principled, conservative grounds. Google me if you want proof.
--MarkusQ, conservative curmudgeon and proud of it.
Re:"Domestic"? (Score:3, Insightful)
Otherwise, given that the Justice Department has steadfastly refused to give any details on who is being monitored (to avoid "aiding the terr'ists") you don't know who is being monitored, or for what reasons. You have no way of gauging their decisions on who should and shouldn't be monitored. You have no way of gauging whether anyone's civil rights are being violated. You have no way of gauging whether the people running the program have valid probable cause for being suspicious of the people they're listening in on.
All you have is the promise of your president that the people we're spying on are bad people or are talking to bad people. But if they already know that, then why can't they just get a warrant? I can see only two possible reasons. The first is that these wiretappings really don't pass the sniff test. The second is that the Executive branch no longer feels constrained by the Judicial branch. I leave it to you to decide which is scarier.
Re:"Domestic"? (Score:3, Insightful)
If that's the truth of the matter then prove it.
Oh right, you can't can you? You, in fact, have no sane reason whatsoever to believe that ridiculous nonsense, do you?
In fact, all you have done is repeat a proven lie by Bush, who has lied about damn near everything he's said.
So, no matter how many times you repeat the same ignorant lies after people have already posted the links *proving* you to be a liar, there are still people who pay attention. There are still people who actually like the idea of a free country and will stand up against idiotic liars like yourself whose cowardly bootlicking of known traitors demonstrates clearly their complete lack of character and their utter contempt for their fellow human beings.
So, nice try, Sparky, but a lie repeated over and over again is still a lie.
And you are still a liar.
An extremely ignorant one too as several people have already linked to the *proof* that you're a fucking liar.
Re:"Domestic"? (Score:1, Insightful)
When comms cross a border, they can be monitored.
It's easy to score points with the paranoid conspiracy nuts, "THEY ARE LISTENING TO YOU!"
Duh. They should! It's stuff crossing a border. Crossing a border. Crossing a border. (Must be repeated because leftists are stupid, leftists are stupid, leftists are stupid).
Want secure comms? Use good crypto.