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September 19, 2007
Amidst Dubious Claims, Push to Extend Surevillance Is On
As a citizen in a free society that elects representatives instead of holding referendums for every single thing, I'm comfortable with the idea that my representatives will get to know things I don't. Extending that to the problem of international terrorism ... heck ... even international relations in general, I can accept the idea that there are people in the world who could do much more harm with a piece of intelligence information than I could good. If I didn't get that before I served in the military, I did coming out of it.
What I don't understand is how my representatives continue to be stymied by assertions that they are, in effect, no more qualified or trustworthy than I am to evaluate matters of national intelligence or security. That's the takeaway I get when I read things like TPM's followup on Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell's continued selective disclosure:
Yesterday, the director of national intelligence, Admiral Michael McConnell, casually informed the House Judiciary Committee that the FISA Court had gotten so restrictive that its rulings required the NSA to obtain warrants before spying on Iraqi insurgents that had kidnapped U.S. troops.
That sounded dubious to us. Would the FISA Court have really issued such a patently absurd ruling? And it turns out we're not the only ones. FISA expert Kate Martin of the Center for National Security Studies also finds McConnell's statement dubious.
"It's totally implausible, like the claim about the arrests in Germany. Doesn't NSA have collection capabilities in Iraq? If so, they are totally outside FISA," Martin says. "Even if they're taking the Iraqi insurgent calls off the wire in the U.S. talking to each other, they don't need a court order and no court is going to bar them. Or is it that the NSA is so incompetent that it doesn't know they are Iraqi insurgents talking to each other and they were just blindly searching all traffic, which the court said they weren't allowed to do?"
Ryan Singel at Wired doesn't buy it, either.
The ongoing presentation of assorted horror stories about our intelligence operatives being hobbled without, or triumphing thanks to, some new erosion of our privacy is consistent primarily in the way much of it is dubious and vague, and the way demands for more information from the people you and I elected to write laws to help us find our way through these challenges are deflected when they're inconvenient to the narrative.
Nevertheless, the AP reports that the push to make temporary expanded surveillance powers permanent is on, even though those temporary provisions were widely considered even by those who passed them to be hastily slapped together and over-reaching.
Worse, Glenn Greenwald notes, there are signs that heretofore illegal activities by telecom companies conducting data gathering are likely to get a piece of retroactive immunity they've been demanding that'll clear them of past illegal activity.
Posted by mhall at 5:59 PM | Add Comment
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