" [O]ur government is incompetent and it doesn't matter whether Republicans or Democrats are in charge, even as the latter circle the wagons. This many years after 9/11 and we still can't get it down that someone on a terrorist watch list should have extra screening?"--Taylor Marsh. (http://bit.ly/6fx6JT)
"Mr Abdulmutallab's file was marked for a full investigation should he ever reapply for a visa.
His name was also added to the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (Tide) watch list, which contains the details of around 550,000 people with suspected connections to terrorism but does not prevent them from flying internationally." BBC News (http://bit.ly/70fn5l)
In these two quotes one has the gist of why TIDE, the so called terrorist watch list, is a non-starter. Look at that number hard; the government is supposed to be watching half a million individuals. That is near the population of Portland, Oregon in 1998. (http://bit.ly/7mP1uh) Name one democratic institution that could accomplish such a herculean task with even an iota of competence. Name one democratic nation that would even attempt such a Sisyphean task other than the U.S.
After the 9/11 attacks, the conventional wisdom wanted an organization like DHS in the worst way; and that is exactly what we as a nation got. George W. Bush did not want DHS in the first place, so when forced to create the Department, he made it as dysfunctional as possible. Remember that Bernard Kerrick came within inches of being the first Head of DHS. In a way, it is a shame he did not get the nod. A mobbed-up incompetent at least would have a good excuse for his failure to deliver. As it was, the U.S. got Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff. Janet Napolitano continues in the fine tradition of political trivia quiz answers that run DHS.
The problems with DHS go deeper than the political mediocrities that run it. There is a fatal flaw in the very design of the Department; it is just too big. The shear mass of DHS, the multitude of agencies that it oversees, are too much for even the best of leaders. DHS is very much a remake of that 1958 cult movie classic The Blob. Under its purview are TSA, Customs and Border Protection, Immigration Customs Enforcement, The Secret Service, FEMA, and the Coast Guard. Thus DHS is less an organic whole than a metastatic cancer.
DHS is systemically unable to perform its multiple mandates. It cannot execute its deliverables. It is going in too many directions at once. As a governmental institution, DHS is very much like the old H.E.W. Health Education and Welfare workers used to describe their (dis)organization as Halls of Eternal Warfare. When Education was peeled off as its own department, Health and Human Services, as the new department was called, was a less unfocused and dysfunctional department.
Truth be told, it is a good thing that DHS is such an entropic mess; the Department, if it was ever functional, would be an existential threat to democracy. The very idea of the "homeland" has a creepy authoritarian feel to it. It carries a faint whiff of fascism, a slight flavor of Nazi toxin.
Take a good, long, hard look at the Continental United States. Look at the east, gulf and west coasts, look at the northern and southern borders, how do you defend it? How do you lock down the myriad Ports of Entry, the rivers, lakes and streams? How do you keep people from crossing the trackless desserts to the south or the deep woods to the north? How do you secure the Sea Ports, the Air Ports, the Bus Stations and the Rail Stations? How do you do this without shredding freedom of movement? You don't.
You certainly cannot do it with a laundry list of "persons of interests" that numbers more than half a million. Abdulmutallab was able to waltz onto a plane because our security apparatus was flooded with white noise. There is no way even the most vigilant of TSA employees could possibly be on the lookout for a list of names the size of Portland, Oregon. That is not a workable scenario; it is an absurdity that even Kafka could not dream up on one of his more depressive days.
The only way one makes an institution like DHS "work" is if you copy the writ, strategy and tactics of the NKVD or the Gestapo. You would have to toss our constitutional protections out the window. You would have to turn just about every U.S. citizen into a snitch like the East German Stasi used to do. Granted with Gitmo, FISA, Extraordinary Rendition, Sneak and Peek Warrants, and Military Tribunals the U.S. is well on its way to such a state, but is that really where we want to go? Are we really going to surrender our unalienable rights to a bunch of nere-do-well nihilists? Are we really going to submit our freedoms to the tender mercies of some modern day Visigoths who hide behind the religion of Islam? Will we really concede our freedoms to bunch of feckless bureaucrats for a mumbled promise of security? Remember the words of the third President of the United States "Those who surrender freedom for security will not have, nor do they deserve, either one." The system that really worked on that fateful flight was of an aware and proactive citizenry. Given a choice which would you prefer as your security DHS, or a sucker punch to a terrorist delivered by a pissed-off Missouri gal of Scotch-Irish ancestry? Go with the Missouri gal every day of the week and twice on Sunday.
Showing posts with label FISA. Show all posts
Showing posts with label FISA. Show all posts
Monday, December 28, 2009
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Big Brother is listening.
While the economy was melting down this week we had a quick and mostly unnoticed drive-by shooting of our Constitution. It was a small dispatch from ABC News reporting on the N.S.A. The N.S.A or more appropriately the NSA/CSS for National Security Agency/ Central Security Service is a super secret spy agency. It is supposed to collect the communications of foreign governments and independent hostile actors. In the post 9/11 era the NSA was trying to listen in on Osama’s cell phone conversations and other forms of “terrorist communications.
Thanks to FISA and Warrantless wiretapping the NSA could listen to and record any communication that it might interested in; no matter how peripheral. The unwashed masses were assured that the government would never abuse this authority. No Mr. and Mrs. American citizen, the government would only listen into those evil foreign terrorist plotting to do evil things. At least that was the talking point put out by the Administration and their water carriers on Fox News. It was surprise, surprise, a big fat lie.
Turns out that when there is no oversight by the courts or the legislature there really will be abuse after all. Technicians decided to listen in on the very private conversation of American citizens. It gets worse. Those citizens were the loved ones and spouses of military service members. The pillow talk of our men and women in uniform station overseas was recorded and shared as entertainment of jaded NSA staffers.
Very few Americans have any idea of the type of sacrifices a military life requires. Even fewer have had to deal with the stresses of an overseas posting. Still fewer know what it is like to serve in what the military terms isolated duty. Isolated duty, where the service member is deployed to a duty station without his or her family, is one of the hardest tours to endure. It only gets worse when the service member is in a combat zone. Each communication with a loved one is that much more intense and precious. It is a rare and special moment of intimacy and privacy in a life that has very little of either. To have those special moments passed around for the prurient entertainment of bored technicians who were not supposed to be listening in to tehm in the first place is appalling.
This is why we have, or should we say had the 4th Amendment in the first place. When you give people carte blanche to pry into people’s personal lives they will delve into places they have no business being. Our founders knew the extent an untrammeled executive would go if not curtailed. They placed the courts as a firebreak to the excesses of the executive. But that was before the FISA cave-in by our legislators.
It was not like the Congress did not know what the Bush Administration was up to. They had the story from James Comey of John Ashcroft’s hospital bed refusal to sign on to the secret surveillance / warrantless wire tap program that the Bush Administration was running. Somehow Congress never got an answer on exactly what this program was. We can only guess the full wretchedness and illegality of that program. It had to be hideous for a rock-ribbed conservative like John Ashcroft to object to it. Still the Congress gave Bush a get out of jail free card and retroactively approved the massive intrusion into our private lives on the oft chance that someone may be blowing kisses to Osama bin Laden via AT&T’s friends and family program.
With that approval the NSA was able to listen to anything they damn well pleased. No person or group was immune from the prying ears of the spooks at the “Puzzle Palace” not our servicemembers, not NGOs. Both Doctors without Borders and the I.R.C. were bugged. This rampant disregard for probity and rules of any kind has become a hallmark of the Bush / Cheney Administration. While sickening the disclosure of this behavior by the N.S.A. is hardly surprising. Older heads, those who recall the Church Committee hearings, remember this all too well. Those graying heads remember the abuses of the C.I.A., D.I.A., F.B.I., and other intelligence gathering agencies during the Vietnam War Protests. They remember the stomach churning abuses perpetrated by that old cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover. For them it is especially distressing that we are repeating that awful history. Back then the excuse was fighting Communists; now the excuse is fighting terrorism. The violations of the law, of common decency are distressingly similar.
If there is a silver lining in this dark cloud it is the fact that civil libertarians have not given up. There is a civil suite against Verizon challenging the warrantless wiretapping undertaken on government orders. There is a specific challenge to the retroactive immunity granted in the FISA bill as an unconstitutional ex post facto law. Will we get a 5-4 upholding of that proposition? It is the best we can hope for. If we had a sane Supreme Court, not one packed with Republican Ideologues from the Federalist Society, we would not have to worry if Justice Kennedy might slip over to Dark Side with Dick Cheney. Remember that the Kangaroo Court known as the Military Commission Tribunal in Gitmo was struck down by a slim 5-4 vote. Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia were just fine with shredding Habeas Corpus. Scalia was especially hideous in his comments, sounding like a candidate for the Republican presidential primaries instead of the sober justice of the highest court in the land.
While we wait for our government to return to us our Constitutional rights to us there we are not totally without options. If you have friends in foreign lands or family members deployed by the military overseas get them a pair of these gadgets for their stocking stuffers this Christmas. After all Osama has not only a nice secure land-line but probably one of these too.
Thanks to FISA and Warrantless wiretapping the NSA could listen to and record any communication that it might interested in; no matter how peripheral. The unwashed masses were assured that the government would never abuse this authority. No Mr. and Mrs. American citizen, the government would only listen into those evil foreign terrorist plotting to do evil things. At least that was the talking point put out by the Administration and their water carriers on Fox News. It was surprise, surprise, a big fat lie.
Turns out that when there is no oversight by the courts or the legislature there really will be abuse after all. Technicians decided to listen in on the very private conversation of American citizens. It gets worse. Those citizens were the loved ones and spouses of military service members. The pillow talk of our men and women in uniform station overseas was recorded and shared as entertainment of jaded NSA staffers.
Very few Americans have any idea of the type of sacrifices a military life requires. Even fewer have had to deal with the stresses of an overseas posting. Still fewer know what it is like to serve in what the military terms isolated duty. Isolated duty, where the service member is deployed to a duty station without his or her family, is one of the hardest tours to endure. It only gets worse when the service member is in a combat zone. Each communication with a loved one is that much more intense and precious. It is a rare and special moment of intimacy and privacy in a life that has very little of either. To have those special moments passed around for the prurient entertainment of bored technicians who were not supposed to be listening in to tehm in the first place is appalling.
This is why we have, or should we say had the 4th Amendment in the first place. When you give people carte blanche to pry into people’s personal lives they will delve into places they have no business being. Our founders knew the extent an untrammeled executive would go if not curtailed. They placed the courts as a firebreak to the excesses of the executive. But that was before the FISA cave-in by our legislators.
It was not like the Congress did not know what the Bush Administration was up to. They had the story from James Comey of John Ashcroft’s hospital bed refusal to sign on to the secret surveillance / warrantless wire tap program that the Bush Administration was running. Somehow Congress never got an answer on exactly what this program was. We can only guess the full wretchedness and illegality of that program. It had to be hideous for a rock-ribbed conservative like John Ashcroft to object to it. Still the Congress gave Bush a get out of jail free card and retroactively approved the massive intrusion into our private lives on the oft chance that someone may be blowing kisses to Osama bin Laden via AT&T’s friends and family program.
With that approval the NSA was able to listen to anything they damn well pleased. No person or group was immune from the prying ears of the spooks at the “Puzzle Palace” not our servicemembers, not NGOs. Both Doctors without Borders and the I.R.C. were bugged. This rampant disregard for probity and rules of any kind has become a hallmark of the Bush / Cheney Administration. While sickening the disclosure of this behavior by the N.S.A. is hardly surprising. Older heads, those who recall the Church Committee hearings, remember this all too well. Those graying heads remember the abuses of the C.I.A., D.I.A., F.B.I., and other intelligence gathering agencies during the Vietnam War Protests. They remember the stomach churning abuses perpetrated by that old cross-dresser J. Edgar Hoover. For them it is especially distressing that we are repeating that awful history. Back then the excuse was fighting Communists; now the excuse is fighting terrorism. The violations of the law, of common decency are distressingly similar.
If there is a silver lining in this dark cloud it is the fact that civil libertarians have not given up. There is a civil suite against Verizon challenging the warrantless wiretapping undertaken on government orders. There is a specific challenge to the retroactive immunity granted in the FISA bill as an unconstitutional ex post facto law. Will we get a 5-4 upholding of that proposition? It is the best we can hope for. If we had a sane Supreme Court, not one packed with Republican Ideologues from the Federalist Society, we would not have to worry if Justice Kennedy might slip over to Dark Side with Dick Cheney. Remember that the Kangaroo Court known as the Military Commission Tribunal in Gitmo was struck down by a slim 5-4 vote. Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and Scalia were just fine with shredding Habeas Corpus. Scalia was especially hideous in his comments, sounding like a candidate for the Republican presidential primaries instead of the sober justice of the highest court in the land.
While we wait for our government to return to us our Constitutional rights to us there we are not totally without options. If you have friends in foreign lands or family members deployed by the military overseas get them a pair of these gadgets for their stocking stuffers this Christmas. After all Osama has not only a nice secure land-line but probably one of these too.
Thursday, October 9, 2008
This Is Why The Fourth Amendemenr Was Written
U.S. Officers' "Phone Sex" Intercepted; Senate Demanding Answers
[Intercept operator, former Navy Arab linguist, David Murfee Faulk] says he and others in his section of the NSA facility at Fort Gordon routinely shared salacious or tantalizing phone calls that had been intercepted, alerting office mates to certain time codes of "cuts" that were available on each operator's computer."Hey, check this out," Faulk says he would be told, "there's good phone sex or there's some pillow talk, pull up this call, it's really funny, go check it out. It would be some colonel making pillow talk and we would say, 'Wow, this was crazy'," Faulk told ABC News.
Faulk said he joined in to listen, and talk about it during breaks in Back Hall's "smoke pit," but ended up feeling badly about his actions.
"I feel that it was something that the people should not have done. Including me," he said.
Asked for comment about the ABC News report and accounts of intimate and private phone calls of military officers being passed around, a US intelligence official said "all employees of the US government" should expect that their telephone conversations could be monitored as part of an effort to safeguard security and "information assurance."
"They certainly didn't consent to having interceptions of their telephone sex conversations being passed around like some type of fraternity game," said Jonathon Turley, a constitutional law professor at George Washington University who has testified before Congress on the country's warrantless surveillance program.
"This story is to surveillance law what Abu Ghraib was to prison law," Turley said.
Snip
But wait there is more! ABC News also has a whistle-blower claim that the NSA was snooping on NGOs like the IRC and Doctors Without Borders.
"We knew they were working for these aid organizations," Kinne {Adrienne Kinne a NSA operative who allegedly listened in on the conversations} told ABC News. "They were identified in our systems as 'belongs to International Red Cross' and all these other organizations. And yet, instead of blocking these phone numbers we continued to collect on them," she told ABC News.
Sunday, June 22, 2008
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