In Search Of Utopia: Secret wiretaps=impeachable offense?

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December 16, 2005

Secret wiretaps=impeachable offense?

If you still support the Bush Administration after reading this story, then your partisan political sickness may be terminal:

President Bush signed a secret order in 2002 authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and foreign nationals in the United States, despite previous legal prohibitions against such domestic spying, sources with knowledge of the program said last night.
The super-secretive NSA, which has generally been barred from domestic spying except in narrow circumstances involving foreign nationals, has monitored the e-mail, telephone calls and other communications of hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of people under the program, the New York Times disclosed last night.

The aim of the program was to rapidly monitor the phone calls and other communications of people in the United States believed to have contact with suspected associates of al Qaeda and other terrorist groups overseas, according to two former senior administration officials. Authorities, including a former NSA director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, were worried that vital information could be lost in the time it took to secure a warrant from a special surveillance court, sources said.

There is no defense for actions such as these.

Wiretapping US citizens without a warrant?

This is against the law. There is absolutely no excuse for the President of the United States to violate the civil rights of US citizens..even to stop terrorism.

I can't imagine that this isn't an impeachable offense.

I recognize that there are a lot of scared Americans out there. Terrorism is a scary business.

But terrorism has been with us for centuries. And we've had US citizens die from terrorism on our soil prior to 9/11. When Eric Rudolph murdered abortion doctors and bombed the US Olympics in Atlanta..did we allow secret wiretaps of suspected abortion doctor killers and other suspected whacked out US citizens? When Tim McVeigh bombed the Federal Building in Oklahoma City...did we start those activities then? When Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold murdered their classmates at Columbine High School, did we start secret wiretaps of suspected angry high schoolers?

This is insanity. Any quarter of American society that supports allowing the POTUS to secretly wiretap Americans without having secured a warrant is either so blindly partisan or so blindly scared that they are beyond the reach of common sense.

Posted by Carla at December 16, 2005 05:16 PM
Filed Under Domestic Spying | 380 Words

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Comments

You might be interested in a report I did a few years ago
regarding the NSA spying on us domestically.

It includes a treatment of how they perform Internet email
monitoring, by way of my describing how I monitored the
emails of more than 7000 employees on Wall Street.

http://orwellian.org/Cryptography_Manifesto.txt

It's a bit of a slog, but hey, it was my first large polemic.

Posted by: George Orwell at December 16, 2005 08:51 PM

Out of respect for your own minimalist style, David, I'm gonna answer you with two words, and two words only:

Iyman Faris.

OK, I'll elaborate.

When we caught Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, he was interrogated most rigorously, including, as I understand, "waterboarding" -- and he apparently broke in less than three minutes. One of the names he gave up was Faris.

We started investigating Faris, a naturalized American from Pakistan, including via some of these NSA taps that you're protesting. That's how we found out that Faris, a long-haul truck driver, was a solid Al Qaeda member, had attended training camps in Afghanistan, and was working on a plot to destroy, among other things, the Brooklyn Bridge. Faris pleaded guilty in May 2003.

SO yeah, you got all these scary hypothetical possibilities floating around. Here's one concrete example of what actually did happen.

Posted by: Jay Tea at December 17, 2005 02:46 AM

I have no idea who 'David' is, your ability to analyze is suspect.

You couldn't have possibly read it this quickly either.

Excerpt:

David Watters, a telecommunications engineer once attached to the CIA's communications research and development branch, pulls out a microwave routing map of the greater Washington area and jabs his index finger at a small circle with several lines entering it and the letters NSA. "There's your smoking pistol right here." Watters says it is tied into the local telephone company circuits, which are interconnected with the national microwave telephone system owned by AT&T. Other specialists testified to the same thing: purely domestic intercepts.

Posted by: George Orwell at December 17, 2005 05:10 AM

Whoops... I didn't look at the author; I presumed that David had posted this. As an author at a group blog myself, you'd think I'd be more careful.

And I just can't get that hugely excited about this sort of thing. The signal-to-noise ratio must be huge, so I don't worry about it too much.

Posted by: Jay Tea at December 17, 2005 07:12 AM

Ah, but I give a first-hand story of how to filter out the noise, while monitoring 7000 employees' Internet emails, on Wall Street.

The results were amazing.

Well, I'm sure you have better things to do than read my slightly meandering polemic.

Posted by: George Orwell at December 17, 2005 07:29 AM