NSA Spygate Scandal
• No to Government Impunity! Advance the Fight for
Empowerment!
• ACLU Sues to Stop NSA Spying
• ANSWER Coalition Files FOIA Request: Pentagon
Spying on the Anti-War Movement
For Your Information
• The NSA Program • NSA One of Many Federal Agencies Spying
on Americans
Views on NSA Spy Scandal
• An Unnecessary Breach of Law
• British, U.S. Spying Draws Us Closer to Orwell’s Big
Brother • NSA is No Ordinary Spy Shop • A Gestapo Administration
No to Government Impunity!
Advance the Fight for Empowerment!
President George W. Bush’s openly illegal use of the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on people inside the country is sharply revealing the complete impunity of the government. In openly flaunting the Constitution and Congress, Bush is declaring that the Office of the Presidency will spy on — and detain indefinitely if it chooses — anyone, here and abroad.
The NSA scandal, alongside numerous reports of spying and infiltration of organized resistance of all kinds, is showing that the civil and military spy agencies are being given a free hand to attack the people. No crime is required. No evidence. Just government say so. The spy agencies are also sharing information and providing the basis for the Joint -Terrorism Task Forces, which include local and state police agencies, also to act with impunity.
It is little wonder that right while this scandal is unfolding, people witnessed U.S. Marshals gun down and kill an unarmed man at the Miami airport. Then a police SWAT team isolated and then killed an eighth grader in a public school, also in Florida.
Bush’s actions mean government impunity at all levels of government will not only increase, it will be characterized by a greater use of force and brutality, here and abroad.
The NSA scandal is also sharply revealing the failure of the U.S. state, including all its constitutional arrangements. The “checks and balances” between the executive, legislature and courts, the relationship between civilian governance and the military, between the people and the government, between federal, state and local governments, all these arrangements have failed. What new arrangements will now prevail?
Bush and the ruling factions he represents are acting to put in place arrangements for military rule, to be used against the peoples here and worldwide. They also target other contending factions within the ruling circles vying for power. How things unfold now in Congress will be indicative of whether the Bush forces succeed. Congressional hearings, appointment of an independent counsel and impeachment are all being discussed.
The people have already made clear that their response to government impunity is to step up their organized resistance. There is broad recognition that the failure of government means the people themselves must advance their fight for empowerment. Organizing by the people faced with government failure after Katrina, alongside the nonstop actions organized against war and for rights in every state are bringing to the fore the demand The People Must Decide. Many are preparing to intervene in the 2006 elections as part of the on-going work to win empowerment. There is no doubt among the people that Impunity is the Crime, Resistance the Solution.
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Saying that the Bush administration’s illegal spying on Americans must end, the American Civil Liberties Union today filed a first-of-its-kind lawsuit against the National Security Agency seeking to stop a secret electronic surveillance program that has been in place since shortly after September 11, 2001.
“President Bush may believe he can authorize spying on Americans without judicial or Congressional approval, but this program is illegal and we intend to put a stop to it,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero.
The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a group of prominent journalists, scholars, attorneys, and national nonprofit organizations (including the ACLU) who frequently communicate by phone and email with people in the Middle East. Because of the nature of their calls and emails, they believe their communications are being intercepted by the NSA under the spying program. The program is disrupting their ability to talk with sources, locate witnesses, conduct scholarship, and engage in advocacy.
In addition to the ACLU, the plaintiffs in today’s case are: Authors and journalists James Bamford, Christopher Hitchens and Tara McKelvey
Afghanistan scholar Barnett Rubin of New York University’s Center on International Cooperation, and democracy scholar Larry Diamond, a fellow at the Hoover Institution
Nonprofit advocacy groups National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, Greenpeace, and Council on American Islamic Relations, who joined the lawsuit on behalf of their staff and membership
“ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson lead counsel in ACLU v. NSA, said: “President Bush’s claim that he is not bound by the law is simply astounding. Our democratic system depends on the rule of law, and not even the president can issue illegal orders that violate Constitutional principles.”
The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in the Eastern District of Michigan, seeks a court order declaring that the NSA spying is illegal and ordering its immediate and permanent halt.
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ANSWER Coalition Files FOIA Request
Pentagon Spying on the Anti-War Movement
Washington, D.C. — The Partnership for Civil Justice, a civil rights litigation firm, today filed a Freedom of Information Request, on behalf of the anti-war group the ANSWER Coalition, and also on behalf of the National Lawyers Guild, after learning that the Department of Defense (DoD) is maintaining a database of identified “threats” that includes information on protests and political activists who oppose the war. Defense officials responded to reports of the database on Tuesday by saying that the Pentagon has a right to maintain information to help protect military installations.
One of the database listings was a major anti-war protest on March 19, 2005 identified in the Pentagon’s records as taking place at Hollywood and Vine in Los Angeles. A confidential DoD document, according to NBC News indicates in-depth domestic surveillance such as the specific monitoring of vehicles and specific individuals from one protest to another. The database lists 1,500 “suspicious incidents” around the country over a 10-month period, including four dozen anti-war meetings or protests.
The Partnership for Civil Justice has for years filed litigation challenging unlawful government tactics that infringe on the First Amendment rights of protesters, including peace activists and war opponents. “Free speech is now considered a threat by the Pentagon. The exposure of the ‘threat incident’ database containing information on protests and political activists makes clear that the U.S. military is spying on civilians in the United States who oppose the war in Iraq and U.S. militarism. The Department of Defense’s assertion that it is keeping this list to protect military bases is belied by its collecting and maintaining information on the anti-war protest in downtown Los Angeles as well as activities on campuses and organizing meetings across the country. The ‘threat’ that the Pentagon is protecting against is a powerful mass movement of opposition to the U.S. war drive,” said Mara Verheyden-Hilliard, attorney and co-founder of the Partnership for Civil Justice and co-chair of the NLG Mass Defense Committee.
The FOIA request asks for information maintained by the Pentagon including in its Talon database system on protests and political activists. No amount of government intimidation can stop the anti-war movement,” stated Brian Becker, National Coordinator of the ANSWER Coalition.
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The NSA Program
President Bush has given the National Security Agency (NSA) the ability to conduct surveillance on communications inside the United States…The NSA is now tapping into the heart of the nation's telephone network through direct access to key telecommunications switches that carry many of America's daily phone calls and e-mail messages… One government lawyer who is aware of the NSA domestic surveillance operation told reporter Eric Lichtblau that the very few people at the Justice Department who are aware of its existence simply refer to it as "the Program." It may be the largest domestic spying operation since the 1960s, larger than anything conducted by the FBI or CIA inside the United States since the Vietnam War.[…]
While the Bush administration has never publicly discussed the NSA operation, the Justice Department did hint at the administration's thinking on domestic spying in a little-noticed legal brief in an unrelated court case in 2002. That brief said that "the Constitution vests in the president inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."
The small handful of experts on national security law within the government who know about the NSA program say they believe it has made a mockery of the public debate over the USA Patriot Act. The Patriot Act of 2001 has been widely criticized for giving the government too much power to engage in secret searches and to spy on suspects, and even some Republicans chafed at the idea of giving the government still more surveillance powers under an extended and expanded version.
The Patriot Act has increased the ability of the nation's intelligence and law-enforcement agencies to monitor conversations and Internet traffic by terrorist suspects with the approval of the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court. But it still requires the FBI to obtain search warrants from the FISA court each time it wants to eavesdrop on a telephone conversation, e-mail message, or other form of communication within the United States.
In order to obtain a warrant from the FISA court, the FBI must present evidence to show that the target is linked to a terrorist organization or other foreign agent or power. Even then, the FBI has, in comparison with the NSA, relatively limited technological resources and does not have the ability to monitor huge telecommunications networks. It lacks NSA's banks of supercomputers at Fort Meade, believed to be home to the greatest concentration of computing power in the world. […]
It is now clear that the White House went through the motions of the public debate over the Patriot Act, all the while knowing that the intelligence community was secretly conducting a far more aggressive domestic surveillance campaign. "This goes way beyond the Patriot Act," said one former official familiar with the NSA operation.
President Bush's secret order has given the NSA the freedom to employ extremely powerful computerized search programs -- originally intended to scan foreign communications -- in order to scrutinize large volumes of American communications. It is difficult to know the precise size of the NSA operation, but one indication of its large scale is the fact that administration officials say that one reason they decided not to seek court-approved search warrants for the NSA operation was that the volume of telephone calls and e-mails being monitored was so big that it would be impossible to get speedy court approval for all of them.[ …]
Today, industry experts estimate that approximately 9 trillion e-mails are sent in the United States each year. Americans make nearly a billion cell phone calls and well over a billion land line calls each day. NSA's technical prowess, coupled with its long-standing relationships with the nation's major telecommunications companies, has made it easy for the agency to eavesdrop on large numbers of people in the United States without their knowledge.
Following President Bush's order, U.S. intelligence officials secretly arranged with top officials of major telecommunications companies to gain access to large telecommunications switches carrying the bulk of America's phone calls. The NSA also gained access to the vast majority of American e-mail traffic that flows through the U.S. telecommunications system.
The identities of the companies involved have been kept secret. Unknown to most Americans, the NSA has extremely close relationships with both the telecommunications and computer industries, according to several government officials. Only a very few top executives in each corporation are aware of such relationships or know about the willingness of the corporations to cooperate on intelligence matters. […]
The new presidential order has given the NSA direct access to those U.S.-based telecommunications switches through "back doors." Under the authority of the presidential order, a small group of officials at NSA now monitors telecommunications activity through these domestic switches, searching for terrorism-related intelligence.
To understand how the Bush administration is spying on the American people, it is important to know a few basics about the U.S. telecommunications network. The telephone network today is digital and computerized, but is still built around a switching system that routes calls from city to city, or country to country, as efficiently and quickly as possible. In addition to handling telephone calls from, say, Los Angeles to New York, the switches also act as gateways into and out of the United States for international telecommunications.
A large volume of purely international telephone calls -- calls that do not begin or end in America -- also now travel through switches based in the United States. Telephone calls from Asia to Europe, for example, may go through the United States-based switches. This so-called transit traffic has dramatically increased in recent years as the telephone network has become increasingly globalized. Computerized systems determine the most efficient routes for digital "packets" of electronic communications depending on the speed and congestion on the networks, not necessarily on the shortest line between two points.
Such random global route selection means that the switches carrying calls from Cleveland to Chicago, for example, may also be carrying calls from Islamabad to Jakarta. In fact, it is now difficult to tell where the domestic telephone system ends and the international network begins. In the years before 9/11, the NSA apparently recognized that the remarkable growth in transit traffic was becoming a major issue that had never been addressed by FISA or the other 1970s-era rules and regulations governing the U.S. intelligence community.
Now that foreign calls were being routed through switches that were physically on American soil, eavesdropping on those calls might be a violation of the regulations and laws restricting the NSA from spying inside the United States. But transit traffic also presented a major opportunity. If the NSA could gain access to the American switches, it could easily monitor millions of foreign telephone calls, and do so much more consistently and effectively than it could overseas, where it had to rely on spy satellites and listening stations to try to vacuum up telecommunications signals as they bounced through the air. Of course, that would mean NSA would also have direct access to the domestic telephone network as well.
Any debate within the NSA about the legalities of monitoring transit traffic became moot after 9/11. President Bush was determined to sweep away the peacetime rules that had curbed the activities of the U.S. intelligence community since the 1970s, and he readily agreed to give the NSA broad new powers. The Bush administration's answer has been to place the NSA right into the middle of the American communications bloodstream by giving the agency the secret "trapdoors" into the switching system.
One outside expert on communications privacy who previously worked at the NSA said that the United States government has recently been quietly encouraging the telecommunications industry to increase the amount of international communications traffic that is routed through American-based switches. It appears that at least one motive for doing so may be to bring more international calls under NSA scrutiny.
According to government officials, some of the most critical switches are in the New York area, a key intersection between the domestic and international telecommunications networks. Switching facilities in the region feed out to telecommunications cables that dive into the Atlantic Ocean bound for Europe and beyond. The NSA now apparently has access into those switches, allowing it to monitor telecommunications traffic as it enters and exits the United States.
In addition, the NSA has the ability to conduct surveillance on the e-mail of virtually any American it chooses to target. One of the secrets of the Internet is that its infrastructure is dominated by the United States, and that much of the world's e-mail traffic, at one time or another, flows through telecommunications networks that are physically on American soil. E-mail between Germany and Italy, for example, or Pakistan and Yemen, is often routed through America.
The secret presidential order has given the NSA the freedom to peruse that international e-mail traffic -- along with the e-mail of millions of Americans. In the Program, the NSA is eavesdropping both on transit traffic -- calls from one foreign location to another that are routed through the United States by international telecommunications systems -- and on telephone calls and e-mail between people inside the United States and others overseas. Officials who defend the Program claim that the NSA tries to minimize the amount of purely domestic telephone and Internet traffic among American citizens that it monitors, to avoid violating the privacy rights of U.S. citizens. But there is virtually no independent oversight of NSA's use of its new power. With its direct access to the U.S. telecommunications system, there seems to be no physical or logistical obstacle to prevent the NSA from eavesdropping on anyone in the United States that it chooses.
In the Program, the NSA determines, on its own, which telephone numbers and e-mail addresses to monitor. The NSA does not have to get approval from the White House, the Justice Department, or anyone else in the Bush administration before it begins eavesdropping on a specific phone line inside the United States. Instead, it has set up its own internal checklist to determine whether there is "probable cause" to begin surveillance. […]
Bush's executive order gives the NSA broad latitude to decide what might constitute a suspicious phone number or e-mail address. The existence of the Program has been kept so secret that senior Bush administration officials have gone to great lengths to hide the origins of the intelligence it gathers. When the NSA finds potentially useful intelligence in the U.S.-based telecommunications switches, it is "laundered" before it is widely distributed to case officers at the CIA or special agents of the FBI, officials said. Reports are said not to identify that the intelligence came from intercepts of U.S.-based telecommunications. Bush administration officials offer conflicting information about whether intelligence gathered from the warrantless wiretaps is being used in criminal cases inside the United States. One senior administration official insisted that it never has been used in a criminal trial, but other top officials argued that the eavesdropping program has proved valuable in domestic terrorism investigations. Actually, both statements may be true. It appears that the NSA wiretaps are being used to identify suspects in the United States. But because the intelligence based on the warrantless wiretaps would almost certainly not be admissible in an American court, it is possible that the Bush administration is not attempting to take those cases to trial.
Several high-profile terrorism-related cases since 9/11 have ended in plea bargains and out-of-court settlements; few have actually gone to trial. One reason for that legal strategy may be that the administration is fearful of getting caught conducting illegal surveillance operations. […]
The Bush administration is obtaining FISA court approval for wiretaps at least in part on the basis of information gathered from the earlier warrantless eavesdropping. The government is apparently following that practice with increasing frequency; by the estimate of two lawyers, some 10 percent to 20 percent of the search warrants issued by the secret FISA court now grow out of information generated by the NSA's domestic surveillance program.
Bush administration officials say that the NSA is using the Program to conduct surveillance on the telephone and e-mail communications of about seven thousand people overseas. They also acknowledge that the NSA is targeting the communications of about five hundred people inside the United States. Each one of those individuals is likely to make several phone calls and send several e-mails each day, which could mean that the NSA is eavesdropping on thousands of telephone calls, e-mail messages, and other communications inside the United States on a daily basis.
Over time, the NSA has certainly eavesdropped on millions of telephone calls and e-mail messages on American soil. The expansion of NSA's role from spying on foreigners to conducting domestic surveillance has implications that are sure to provoke objections from civil liberties advocates. Even some senior officials within the administration have raised questions about the Program's legality. Government officials who were aware of the surveillance program "just assumed that something illegal was going on," said one Justice Department official. "People just looked the other way because they did not want to know what was going on."
* Excerpted from “State of War: the Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration,” by James Risen, New York Times reporter, p. 42-60.
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NSA One of Many Federal Agencies Spying on Americans
Spying on Americans by the super-secret National Security Agency is not only more widespread than President George W. Bush admits but is part of a concentrated, government-wide effort to gather and catalog information on U.S. citizens, sources close to the administration say.
Besides the NSA, the Pentagon, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Department of Homeland Security and dozens of private contractors are spying on millions of Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year.
“It’s a total effort to build dossiers on as many Americans as possible,” says a former NSA agent who quit in disgust over use of the agency to spy on Americans. “We’re no longer in the business of tracking our enemies. We’re spying on everyday Americans.”
“It’s really obvious to me that it’s a look-at-everything type program,” says cryptology expert Bruce Schneier.
Schneier says he suspects that the NSA is turning its massive spy satellites inward on the United States and intentionally gathering vast streams of raw data from many more people than disclosed to date — potentially including all emails and phone calls within the United States.
But the NSA spying is just the tip of the iceberg.
Although supposedly killed by Congress more than 18 months ago, the Defense Advance Project Research Agency’s Terrorist Information Awareness (TIA) system, formerly called the “Total Information Awareness” program, is alive and well and collecting data in real time on Americans at a computer center located at 3801 Fairfax Drive in Arlington, Virginia.
The system, set up by retired admiral John Poindexter, once convicted of lying to Congress in the Iran-Contra scandal, compiles financial, travel and other data on the day-to-day activities of Americans and then runs that data through a computer model to look for patterns that the agency deems “terrorist-related behavior.”
Poindexter admits the program was quietly moved into the Pentagon’s “black bag” program where it does escape -Congressional oversight.
“TIA builds a profile of every American who travels, has a bank account, uses credit cards and has a credit record,” says security expert Allen Banks. “The profile establishes norms based on the person’s spending and travel habits. Then the system looks for patterns that break from the norms, such as purchases of materials that are considered likely for terrorist activity, travel to specific areas or a change in spending habits.”
Patterns that fit pre-defined criteria result in an investigative alert and the individual becomes a “person of interest” who is referred to the Department of Justice and Department of Homeland Security, Banks says.
Intelligence pros call the process “data mining” and that is something the NSA excels at as well says former NSA signals intelligence analyst Russell Tice.
“The technology exists,” says Tice, who left the NSA earlier this year. “Say Aunt Molly in Oklahoma calls her niece at an Army base in Germany and says, ‘Isn’t it horrible about those terrorists and September 11th,’” Tice told the Atlanta Constitution recently. “That conversation would not only be captured by NSA satellites listening in on Germany — which is legal — but flagged and listened to by NSA analysts and possibly transcribed for further investigation. All you would have to do is move the vacuum cleaner a little to the left and begin sucking up the other end of that conversation. You move it a little more and you could be picking up everything people are saying from California to New York.”
The Pentagon has built a massive database of Americans it considers threats, including members of antiwar groups, peace activists and writers opposed to the war in Iraq. Pentagon officials now claim they are “reviewing the files” to see if the information is necessary to the “war on terrorism.”
* Doug Thompson, Publisher, Capitol Hill Blue
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If President Bush thought his responses to charges of illegal domestic spying — a studied lack of contrition, frontal attacks on the press and Congress and reliance on preposterous legal arguments — would quell criticism from across the political spectrum, he was mistaken.
Even self-identified conservatives failed to buy his argument that his status as commander-in-chief and the post-9/11 congressional resolution authorizing him to invade Afghanistan conveyed authority to break our domestic laws.
The law that forbids ordering the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Americans without any court order is the Foreign -Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA was passed in 1978 to strike a balance between national security and civil liberties.
But significantly, the FISA law tilts steeply in favor of national security interests. Rather than having to go to a federal court to get a warrant, intelligence officials can get a warrant to spy from a FISA court judge in a totally secret proceeding. And they need not show “probable cause” to believe a crime is being committed but only a “reason to believe” that there is a threat to national security.
Moreover, the FISA law already provides for Mr. Bush’s “enemy who is quick, clever and lethal,” because officials may spy first and get a FISA order three days later. And, finally, the FISA court is notoriously compliant. Since 1979, it has declined to issue warrants only four times out of the 18,747 times the government has sought one.
In short, breaking the law was hardly necessary to achieve the national security interests the President touted. That kind of arrogance of power compounds public and congressional expressions of alarm at the most far-reaching assertion of government power any president has had the audacity to make in recent decades.
Indeed, long-time NSA officials — none of them averse to intelligence gathering — reportedly were so appalled at administration overreaching that they helped blow the whistle.
Our sudden collective outrage may also stem from recognition of a longer standing pattern of a president who cheats on the rule of law. This week, the FBI’s own documents confirmed fears that, since 9/11, the FBI has been using its counterterrorism resources to monitor and infiltrate peaceful activist groups such as People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, Greenpeace and United for Peace and Justice.
In Colorado, one FBI memo revealed an federal interest in Food Not Bombs, a group that provides free vegetarian food to hungry people and protests war and poverty. Canadian border officials interrogated a vacationing Methodist minister from Kentucky for over an hour because he was the subject of an FBI file. In Michigan, an FBI document characterized a local peace group and an affirmative action advocacy group as potentially “involved in terrorist activities.”
But these are the tip of the iceberg. Our ACLU Freedom of Information Act project seeks to break open government secrecy for over 150 advocacy groups and individuals in 20 states and includes the who’s who of causes for the environment, animal rights, labor, religion, Native American rights, fair trade, grassroots politics, peace, social justice, nuclear disarmament, human rights and civil liberties.
Perhaps most chilling is the FBI’s penchant for labeling these groups as possible “terrorists.” Because of a unilateral Bush administration executive order, the T-word opens the door to secret investigations of people in this country by a variety of secretive government agencies, including the NSA. Before 9/11, domestic spying was off limits to the NSA. Over the past several days, the public has learned of more and more spying on these shores in violation of long-standing federal laws and policies.
Domestic spying abuses our trust and freedom, using limited tax dollars appropriated to fight terrorism in the process. Sen. Arlen Specter, a Republican from Pennsylvania, says he plans for his Judiciary Committee to conduct investigations. But that’s not enough.
An independent special prosecutor is also necessary to determine whether our federal criminal laws have been violated by this intentional surveillance of electronic communications of people in the United States without a court order. And Congress needs to build more safeguards into the Patriot Act to curb administration conduct that is utterly antithetical to any notion of a government of laws and a profound threat to our democracy.
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British, U.S. Spying Draws Us Closer to Orwell’s Big Brother
My waking thought on Christmas Day was that George Orwell’s vision of Big Brother was no longer a hypothetical possibility but an actual near-term threat. That realization was synthesized from two news events, one here and one in Britain.
In Britain, the government recently decided to deploy global positioning system (GPS) technology to track every vehicle in the U.K. every minute of the day. Just as GPS sensors are mandated for use in every cell phone in the near future in the United States (for our safety, of course), Britain will mandate the use of a GPS sensor in every car. “Has Reginald White arrived at the grocery store yet?’’ will become a question answerable by the security division of Britain’s DMV.
The British government promises safeguards to prevent spying on ordinary citizens, but who will follow up on those promises?
In the United States, President Bush is acting under apparently self-granted powers to “authorize’’ the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on Americans — of course, only on Americans threatening terrorist acts.
In an act of high integrity, one of the judges of the secret court that grants Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act search warrants resigned, citing the fact that Bush was now bypassing even that minimal civil rights guarantee by directly authorizing NSA spying on U.S. citizens. One can only imagine that this troublesome judge will be replaced with one more friendly to the administration.
With only the need to combine two real-world technologies for spying and tracking, the vision of 1984 — once just a dark philosophical concept — becomes an engineering project.
The president and those to whom he delegates his authority can now authorize government spooks to listen to us in our homes and on our cell phones. When we are not home, they can track us in our automobiles. The system could be airtight and could be used to control our actions.
It’s simple enough for most Silicon Valley companies to create a chip to detect a valid GPS signal and disable an automobile’s ignition system to prevent citizens from the “unauthorized use’’ of their own vehicles.
The final move into the totality of 1984 requires only a bit of philosophical drift, as exemplified by J. Edgar Hoover’s directive to spy on the Rev. Martin Luther King because he was a subversive. If Bush’s latest acts are left unchallenged, the government will become bolder at spying on whomever it wants and secretly jailing those it deems a threat to national security — all with no troublesome warrants or messy public trials.
In this environment, acts other than terrorism will certainly be put on the subversive activities list, all in the name of protecting our freedom.
Why should law-abiding citizens fear these trends? Because the government cannot be trusted. I don’t trust President Bush to honor my rights, nor did I trust President Clinton, who was caught with secret FBI files on his political enemies.
It’s not that I’m unpatriotic. The founders of our country did not trust any government — either that of George III or an uncontrolled democracy. That’s why we have the Bill of Rights to protect American citizens from their own government — by demanding, for example, that “Congress shall make no law abridging the right of free speech.’’
Our property is also protected from illegal search and seizure, and we are not to be put in jail without knowing the charges against us or having the right to confront our accusers in a public trial. Secret courts are inconsistent with the Bill of Rights, the defining document of American freedom.
What’s the worst thing that Al-Qaida can do to America? We have probably already seen it. Of course, the government can talk about bigger things, like the use of weapons of mass destruction, to justify its use of totalitarian tactics.
I would much rather live as a free man under the highly improbable threat of another significant Al-Qaida attack than I would as a serf, spied on by an oppressive government that can jail me secretly, without charges. If the Patriot Act defines the term “patriot,’’ then I am certainly not one.
By far, our own government is a bigger threat to our freedom than any possible menace posed by Al-Qaida.
* Appeared in the San Jose Mercury News (California), December 29, 2005
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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?
* 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.
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Caught in gratuitous and illegal spying on American citizens, the Bush administration has defended its illegal activity and set the Justice Department on the trail of the person or persons who informed the New York Times of Bush’s violation of law. Note the astounding paradox: The Bush administration is caught red-handed in blatant illegality and responds by trying to arrest the patriots who exposed the administration’s illegal behavior.
Bush has actually declared it treasonous to reveal his illegal behavior! His propagandists, who masquerade as news organizations, have taken up the line: To reveal wrong-doing by the Bush administration is to give aid and comfort to the enemy.
Compared to Spygate, Watergate was a kindergarten picnic. The Bush administration’s lies, felonies, and illegalities have revealed it to be a criminal administration with a police state mentality and police state methods. Now Bush and his attorney general have gone the final step and declared Bush to be above the law. Bush aggressively mimics Hitler’s claim that defense of the realm entitles him to ignore the rule of law.
Bush’s acts of illegal domestic spying are gratuitous because there are no valid reasons for Bush to illegally spy. The Foreign Intelligence Services Act gives Bush all the power he needs to spy on terrorist suspects. All the administration is required to do is to apply to a secret FISA court for warrants. The Act permits the administration to spy first and then apply for a warrant, should time be of the essence. The problem is that Bush has totally ignored the law and the court.
Why would President Bush ignore the law and the FISA court? It is certainly not because the court in its three decades of existence was uncooperative. According to attorney Martin Garbus (New York Observer, 12-28-05), the secret court has issued more warrants than all federal district judges combined, only once denying a warrant.
Why, then, has the administration created another scandal for itself on top of the WMD, torture, hurricane, and illegal detention scandals?
There are two possible reasons.
One reason is that the Bush administration is being used to concentrate power in the executive. The old conservative movement, which honors the separation of powers, has been swept away. Its place has been taken by a neoconservative movement that worships executive power.
The other reason is that the Bush administration could not go to the FISA secret court for warrants because it was not spying for legitimate reasons and, therefore, had to keep the court in the dark about its activities.
What might these illegitimate reasons be? Could it be that the Bush administration used the spy apparatus of the U.S. government in order to influence the outcome of the presidential election?
Could we attribute the feebleness of the Democrats as an opposition party to information obtained through illegal spying that would subject them to blackmail?
These possible reasons for bypassing the law and the court need to be fully investigated and debated. No administration in my lifetime has given so many strong reasons to oppose and condemn it as has the Bush administration. Nixon was driven from office because of a minor burglary of no consequence in itself. Clinton was impeached because he did not want the embarrassment of publicly acknowledging that he engaged in adulterous sex acts in the Oval Office. In contrast, Bush has deceived the public and Congress in order to invade Iraq, illegally detained Americans, illegally tortured detainees, and illegally spied on Americans. Bush has upheld neither the Constitution nor the law of the land. A majority of Americans disapprove of what Bush has done; yet, the Democratic Party remains a muted spectator.
Why is the Justice Department investigating the leak of Bush’s illegal activity instead of the illegal activity committed by Bush? Is the purpose to stonewall Congress’ investigation of Bush’s illegal spying? By announcing a Justice Department investigation, the Bush administration positions itself to decline to respond to Congress on the grounds that it would compromise its own investigation into national security matters.
What will the federal courts do? When Hitler challenged the German judicial system, it collapsed and accepted that Hitler was the law. Hitler’s claims were based on nothing but his claims, just as the claim for extra-legal power for Bush is based on nothing but memos written by his political appointees.
The Bush administration, backed by the neoconservative Federalist Society, has brought the separation of powers, the foundation of our political system, to crisis. The Federalist Society, an organization of Republican lawyers, favors more “energy in the executive.” Distrustful of Congress and the American people, the Federalist Society never fails to support rulings that concentrate power in the executive branch of government. It is a paradox that conservative foundations and individuals have poured money for 23 years into an organization that is inimical to the separation of powers, the foundation of our constitutional system.
September 11, 2001, played into neoconservative hands exactly as the 1933 Reichstag fire played into Hitler’s hands. Fear, hysteria, and national emergency are proven tools of political power grabs. Now that the federal courts are beginning to show some resistance to Bush’s claims of power, will another terrorist attack -allow the Bush administration to complete its coup?
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