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The NSA
developed a nifty way of quickly derailing a planned Justice Department investigation of their newly disclosed massive data collection activities. They simply refused to issue the investigators necessary security clearances! We can’t find out what this super sleuthing domestic spying program is all about because… it’s secret, see, and that would be telling. So it therefore gets to proceed without oversight into the possibility of any wrongdoing its masters choose to devise. (Oversight, thus far, has been limited to selected “briefing” of a few members of congress.) The Justice Department caved in, which is no surprise since the Department Head is a Bush man, and wouldn’t want any embarrassing investigations uncovering inconvenient truth. In like manner, when Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class action lawsuit against AT&T for its unlawful collaboration with the NSA in turning over phone records, the government quickly filed a motion to quash the suit stating: “continued litigation of the matter threatens the national security.” National security has now become the primary modus operandi to continue the egregious pattern of law breaking, circumvention, and secrecy that seems to create a new outrage almost weekly now. But nothing ever gets done to seriously check the runaway power of the Bush administration.
So many of our institutions have capitulated to this ever increasing power grab by a security manic executive branch under Bush. Congress has been hobbled as it continues its worship of the wealthy, the landed, the connected, the corporate. Why is it any surprise to see such easy reciprocation of the big communications companies? The NSA ploy to dodge the scrutiny of justice was the same basic argument made by Attorney General Gonzales when he was questioned by Senator Biden last February when the first wiretap story broke.
First off, Gonzales, sat down to “testify” without being sworn under oath, (insisted upon by the Republicans who controlled the committee). Nothing like writing the Attorney General a blank check to get him started. Truth or untruth—all the same here. In spite of that, a few intrepid democratic senators carried on.
Senator Biden asked: “Who determines which phone call or e-mails are to be monitored?”
Gonzales answered: “Intelligence experts.”
Biden: “What criteria do they use to make that determination?”
Gonzales: “That’s classified.”
Biden: “Can you assure us that no one other than Al Qaeda suspects are being monitored?”
Gonzales: “No.”
Biden: “Who can?”
Gonzales: “I’ll have to get back to you on that...”
Because, you see, it was classified.
It was the same circuitous runaround logic that Gonzales used to justify the warrantless spying on American citizens, as I wrote in my article “The Enemy”
– ‘Gonzales went on to explain to Senator Hatch that Bush may gather information “against persons he determines.” And here is the clincher: “And he cannot make such a determination
without intelligence.” Now how’s that for a Catch 22? In order to make a determination that you need to be legally spied on, the President first needs to have you surveilled illegally to gather
“intelligence.” What a nasty little vicious circle that draws around the Constitution!’
Profiles and Patterns
So
what has the NSA done, and why? For years we have known about programs like “Echelon” where the NSA taps into telephone communications and sifts e-mails looking for “keywords of
interest.” Heaven forbid you ever write an e-mail that has words like terrorist, Washington, nuclear bomb, attack, and Bush in it. Even if you were a staunch conservative Bush supporter and wrote:
“Gee I hope the terrorists never use a nuclear bomb to attack Washington DC and kill President Bush.” I can just hear the bells ringing at the NSA as your message gets flagged for closer inspection by
one of those faceless “intelligence experts.” Get flagged too many times and your message of interest will soon make you a person of interest, and perhaps one where the NSA gives you some very special
loving attention—all without court order, oath, affirmation or conformance with the fourth amendment of our Constitution. It was all done on the President’s executive whim, without investigation by the
Justice Department or any meaningful oversight by congress—because it’s secret.
This time the NSA program is massive, not the narrowly focused interception of calls to suspected
foreign nationals, and it has been going on since October 6, 2001. The NSA has been collecting the data telephone companies keep for billing purposes about just who Americans call, by the hundreds of millions, with wholesale access to the records of some of our leading telecommunications companies. And when this was revealed, Bush stood before us and said: “we are not trolling, not mining.” News anchors on the major channels have been complicit in covering for the outrage, trying to characterize it as a convenient way to track down a number from a call by an al Qaeda operative to someone here in the US. Sure, and they need hundreds of millions of American phone records to try and find that single needle in the haystack? Why don’t they first get a court order, then go to AT&T and ask for the data on the specific number involved? Nope, instead they just cleaned out the whole cupboard—your calls, my calls, everyone’s calls. And here’s why…
The
data collected can yield some very interesting results, allowing the NSA to graphically plot the social networks of American citizens. It’s a bit like the cool TouchGraph Google Browser, which presents the results of a Google search graphically instead of a list. (Try it sometime!) So with this data the NSA
will quickly know all your regular contacts, a graphical map of your collective friends, relatives, close associates, business partners, customers etc. Such a graph might be called a “cell” or
“profile” to use spymaster terminology. Since each phone number is connected to a billing address, and these databases are readily available, the NSA will easily know who you are, where you live, who all
your friends are, where they live, when you call them, how often you call, and so forth. This establishes a baseline or “context” of your typical social and business behavior and contact patterns. Once
this pattern is established, the algorithms that sift the data will be trained to notice patterns that suddenly change,
just like the credit card companies watch for odd incidents of card usage.
Ever get one of those calls from Visa asking you about a charge that was made recently on your account? It’s because the
established pattern of your spending behavior has suddenly changed. You bought something somewhere that was out of the norm, and the bank wants to know what’s up. A friend of mine recently went to Hong Kong on
vacation. He walked up to an ATM machine to withdraw some cash from his account, and the machine promptly sucked in his card, refusing to return it, or deliver any cash. After a 24-hour haggle that forced him to
have emergency funds wired to him from the US, the bank apologized and returned his ATM card. The problem was that his ATM card had never been used outside a 60 mile circle of his home. Now, mysteriously, it turns
up in Hong Kong. A computer flagged the data, and ate the card.
See how useful having control of all our personal records can be? These little red flags can migrate from one database to another, like a
virus I suppose, and you could suddenly find yourself categorized as “unperson,” just like Sandra Bullock in the motion picture “The Net.” A hint of suspicious activity could theoretically
see your ATM and credit cards turned off, your cell phone turned off, your car turned off. You get the point. Information is power, and power controls. The information is the power to find you, spy on you, control
your finances, purchasing power, movement, even restrict your internet access. (Thousands have had battles with ISPs who closed their e-mail , AIM or net account for some reason or another.)
These patterns in
the data-trail each and every one of us leave behind us every day are routinely collected, stored and sifted for interesting knowledge about us. Many of them are even sold to companies for marketing purposes.
That’s one reason we have web cookies being databased by Doubleclick. Your entire financial history is being monitored by Experian, Equifax and Trans Union, and the DMV is collecting yet another vast database
that includes, among other things, your thumb print. These institutions out there, the government prominently among them, all want to know who you are, where you live, where you go, what you buy, what you view on
the web, on TV, what you read, and god knows what else. There are miles of files on each and every American, and the system believes its records, not you. The frightening thing is that the records are
editable, and all without your knowledge or consent. In effect, you are this data stream. It is as real a manifestation of “you” to the system as your physical body.
The data tells the system who, what, when and where, the same questions detectives have used for generations to prove wrongdoing and convict a suspected criminal. The answer to all those questions is now easy
enough to determine, but the last item on the list is the all important one: why? It’s that nasty little peek inside your head that gets at motive, tickles at things Orwell called “Thoughtcrime,” things you might be planning that someone in power may not like. That’s the bottom line. They
want the data so they can look for a crime that has not yet happened, just like the police in Speilberg’s “Minority Report.” When you think about it, this is the every same rationale Bush used
on a macro scale for Iraq and now Iran, launching preventative war on them for what they might be planning to do, and all without any credible evidence, sanction under international law, or any oath or affirmation
beyond Colin Powell’s discredited performance at the UN. This time they are mining data for what you might be planning to do, watching for changes in your life patterns, and again, it is sanctioned by no law—in fact it is prohibited by numerous statutes governing telecommunications and data storage that have simply been bypassed by presidential signings. What they have done to Iraq, they now do to you and I, and all under the same convoluted and clandestine rule.
Ok… let’s say you usually order pizza on Friday night, and pay with your visa card. Then you go home and chat with friends on the Internet. Lately, you have not been on your AIM account, interrupting a long held pattern, and now, mysteriously, you make no such pizza purchase on Friday, and instead your credit card records a motel check-in hundreds of miles away from your home! This is confirmed by the cell phone beep track and the GPS chip in your car. You’re not where you should be, your pattern has changed. Oddly, you’ve gone to a city where your social network phone call data indicates no
meaningful business or social contacts…Why? A red flag is up all across a range of databases from Visa to your phone company to the NSA. Your pattern has suddenly changed, not only in one database, but in
several, spending habits, internet behavior, etc. And the city you went to just happens to be the place where three suspected domestic terrorists have been holding forth under surveillance by the FBI. Your motel is
just five blocks from one of their safe houses. Time to check in on you with a warrantless cell phone wiretap, you are now, quite definitely, a person of interest.
Never mind that you haven’t logged on
to AIM because your software crashed last week, and that you put off pizza tonight because a friend gave you tickets to the Cubs game in Chicago, and you packed a sandwich for the trip. You love baseball, and miss
Ernie Banks something fierce. The NSA knows about your baseball habit, but darn, they think you are a Cardinals fan because you usually go to the games in St. Louis. The Redbirds are playing New York tonight, so why
are you in Chicago? And guess what, Abdul Hakim al Nasir stayed in that very same motel last week, and so the spooks at NSA are very nervous. Never mind that it’s none of the government’s damn
business who you call, what you eat, how you pay for it, where you choose to go, what team you root for and when—whether you’ve ever been to Chicago or not. But your patterns have changed and
overlapped other more sinister patterns. Now you’ve got more trouble than that bad cylinder in your car that you hope will get you home on Sunday. Now you’ve got the NSA waiting for the very next cell
phone call you make, and God help the person on the other end of the line. They just may become a person of interest too!
 It is said we are all connected by the sixth degree. You know someone, who
knows someone, etc. who eventually knows Bin Ladin. Now suppose, just one or two degrees into your profile, you have a friend who knows someone, who happens to
make a call to a “person of interest.” Does that make you a person of interest, because your social web overlaps theirs? It’s scary stuff. And no thirty second
disclaimer by Bush about how he fiercely protects the rights of Americans will wash. He’s the guy who declares people enemy combatants by executive fiat, (even US
citizens). He’s the decider. He knows what’s best for you, right? And now he’s creating the largest database in history—something that should frighten and offend
both liberals and conservatives alike. The liberals have been defending privacy rights for generations, and conservatives have been in the ring as well to protect things like
gun registration, and prevent things like national ID cards. Bottom line: Americans value their privacy, and they don’t like big government agencies snooping on their
records and making databases—particularly when these agencies sidestep the courts, quash investigations, bend laws and have the ability to tell countervailing overseers
in Congress and the Justice Department to get lost by simply classifying their data!
On a typical debate format aired during the Larry King Show recently, a conservative
talk show host defended the data collection program saying if the NSA was not collecting these phone numbers, they should be. Liberal radio personality Randi Rhodes took the floor next with one question:
“OK, what’s your phone number? Give me your phone number right now.” Her flustered opponent tried to
stammer around the issue, to no avail. She kept up the demand: “What’s your phone number? You see
how reluctant you are when it gets personal?” And that’s what this is for millions of Americans now. It’s not
strictly business any longer, as Michael Corleone might say, no matter what AT&T thought they would get in return for their cooperation with the NSA. Now it’s personal. It involves you.
As the Beatles once wrote: “Everybody’s got something to hide...except me and my monkey.” And so do
we all. Whether it’s something legal or illegal is not the point. People call doctors, AIDS clinics, Divorce Attorneys, Drug Counselors, Probation Officers, Psychiatrists, Escort Services, Loan Officers, Tax
Counselors, Credit Repair Bureaus, Bookies, phone sex lines, all perfectly legal, but things they would also like to keep perfectly private. People have affairs, abortions, babies out of wedlock, runaway
teenagers with drug problems, and all sorts of other human problems that are all well documented in the data stream. And here we have an administration that has perfected the art of the smear as a preferred
tactic against their “enemies.” That’s what the Valerie Plame CIA leak case is all about. They leak when it suits them, and rail against anyone else who leaks to expose their wrongdoing. The NSA knows every
phone number you have called for the last five years. What a nice picture that paints of your private life, eh
? What would happen if that were ever used against you should you become “troublesome” in your opposition to this runaway government? The point is, now it can be. The genie is out of the bottle.
This business of using national security and secrecy as a shield for breaking the law is what the Bush
administration has been all about from day one. They’ll de-classify and leak to go after their enemies, and
they’ll classify to prevent anyone from investigating them. Then they spy on reporters to discover who else
is in this poker game. When the president wasn’t simply re-writing the laws to suit his own desire, as he
has now done 750 times through “Signing Statements” according to the Boston Globe, or when he was not
simply assuming some new sweeping authority by executive order, well there’s always plan B—classify it,
stamp it secret, hide it, and of course, never testify under oath. This tactic deflects and neutralizes all the checks and balances the Founding Fathers wrote into our constitution. No Justice department
investigations, no testy judges or tiresome court orders, no evidence, just the tyrant’s will. Bush says he’s in charge, and he does whatever he damn well pleases. Well, a 29% approval rating shows what
Americans think of that. Bush’s numbers, sagging for months now, just took yet another tumble, down four points in a week.
Oh, the president says this is all above board. All this secrecy and spying is perfectly legal, because he says so. Forget the fact that, as Peter Swire and Judd Legum reported in their web site Think Progress: “The Stored Communications Act, Section 2703(c), provides exactly five exceptions that would permit a
phone company to disclose to the government the list of calls to or from a subscriber: (i) a warrant; (ii) a
court order; (iii) the customer’s consent; (iv) for telemarketing enforcement; or (v) by “administrative
subpoena.” The first four clearly don’t apply. As for administrative subpoenas, where a government agency
asks for records without court approval, there is a simple answer – the NSA has no administrative subpoena authority, and it is the NSA that reportedly got the phone records.”
And that is just one law on the books that this data mining violates, not to mention that it bypasses FISA,
that it is unreasonable search, and therefore a flagrant affront to the intent and the letter of our Bill of Rights. What do your phone records have to do with fighting terrorism? Still, Senators get stonewalled,
Bush minions refuse to testify under oath, (as he and the Vice President modeled for the 9-11 commission), corporations comply with Homeland Security and the NSA after simply being handed a National Security
Letter, the Justice Department drops its investigation, and we are all diminished yet one step further.
OK… what do we do about this? For starters, you can vote with your dollars. AT&T, Verizon and Bell South handed over up their data. Qwest refused, just as Google refused to give the government data on the
keyword search strings people use. Call AT&T and cancel. Go buy Qwest. Then vote for someone this November who will have the backbone to stop this nonsense, and bring the wrongdoers to justice. Demand
the data be immediately destroyed, under bipartisan supervision by key US Senators. Certify to the
American people this has been done. Because the sad truth of this whole matter is this: I’m not a criminal,
and you aren’t either, but the NSA is clearly committing a felony every time it violates these laws. No signing statement by the president can sanitize or excuse them. There is no righteous absolution under
the manifesto that this is all for national security—for my own good. It’s just flat out illegal. They do all this
and then have the audacity to worry about my telephone records? Talk about the pot calling the kettle black.
I have long said of governments that what they can do, they will do when it comes to consolidating and preserving their power. Governments have been willing to slaughter whole populations in events like the
Holocaust, The Armenian Massacres, Chairman Mao’s Cultural Revolution, Stalin’s purges, and Pol Pot’s
little rampage in Cambodia. What they can do, they will do, and they often marry the chaste bride of the law to satisfy their desires, abandoning her to the harlot of lawlessness when she no longer serves. Of
this Jefferson wrote: “The law is often the tyrant’s will.” But this NSA thing is beyond all that. Congress passed no law permitting this behavior. Merely informing a few select congressmen of what you plan to do
is not a license to violate existing laws. You think you have a legal interpretation that excuses you? Then bring it to court and let a judge decide that, before you proceed. No, in this case Bush made it so, in
some secret, nefarious executive order or signing statement quietly out of the view of the American people, who were the intended targets of this misbehavior. It was undoubtedly his very own imperial decree,
justified by some sycophant White House lawyer looking for favors, or perhaps an appointment to an important post like Attorney General. Well get this: a White House lawyer’s opinion of the law is not
sanction to violate it! Our system of government, which rests entirely upon a careful balance of powers, is now in severe jeopardy
Men like Thomas Jefferson must be rolling over in their graves to see the things this administration has been doing. It’s all been about corporate power and rewarding friends and supporters while screwing your
enemies. That’s the bottom line. And so now we have rigged elections, preemptive wars for Exxon Mobile,
no-fly lists, no-bid contracts, Neo-Con war planners running the World Bank, and detention camps being
built in the US to round up aliens under the FEMA “Endgame” plan, warrantless wiretaps, and wholesale data mining on American citizens—all to keep us safe and free. What a sham.
 "Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of
chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!" said Patrick Henry.
And you know what? There’s a dark corner of my mind where I can almost here Dick Cheney’s reply, a sibilant whisper out of the corner
of that twisted scowl: ‘Give you death? Well, that can be arranged. Because we know exactly where you live, what you say, to whom,
how often, and we don’t like it.’ And if you don’t think anything like that could ever happen here in this country, take a look around and see just what is happening, right now. The method is tried and true.
You take two steps forward, and when they protest, one step back. Then two steps forward, one step back. It’s the same way gasoline prices move.
Then one day you wake up to hear that knock on the door. “Winston
Smith! Stand UP! Do Not Move! You are under arrest for Thoughtcrime.” It has happened before, in an enlightened European place called Germany, and believe me, it can happen again.
Article By: John Schettler – May 15, 2006
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