Listening in

What will Tice say? Rusell Tice, the former officer of the NSA, has been trying to disclose still more questionable NSA practices. "It's angle you haven’t heard about yet," he told one reporter. Elsewhere, we learn that

"What [the American people] know about is Hiroshima," he says. "What I’m going to tell you about is Nagasaki. I'm going to tell you about three Nagasakis" He is gagged, however, by the non-disclosure agreement he signed before becoming privy to top-secret government activities.

Laura Rozen believes that the matter involves the use of military satellites to spy on Americans. My own suspicion is that the Tice revelations may touch on the growing concern over the claimed use of the NSA to spy on Bush's political opponents.

Tice eventually will have his say. How will the NSA and the administration respond? This paragraph from In These Times gives us a clue:

In 2001, he suspected a co-worker at the Defense Intelligence Agency of being a double agent. He discreetly notified a DIA counter-intelligence officer, who told him that the FBI had investigated and there was nothing to his concerns. He still had his doubts, but when he brought up the matter again in 2003, the NSA’s security office called him in for an emergency psychological evaluation. Despite having cleared him for duty after a routine examination nine months earlier, they declared him to be suffering from paranoia, and downgraded his clearance to "red badge" status. (An independent psychological evaluation has refuted this diagnosis.) He was reassigned to do odd jobs at the NSA motor pool, where he began to talk to other demoted red badge employees, and his supervisor accused him of trying to form a union.

I suspect we'll hear a great deal about that psychological evaluation in the future...

Spinning it. Rove seems to think that the warrantless wiretap scandal will work to the administration's advantage. They certainly did not seem surprised by the latest flurries of scandal. Indeed, Bush's attitude appears to have been "Bring it on."

I've said previously that after Big Wedding II, the administration will probably use intercepted communications to "prove" Iran's complicity. At that time, warrant-free wiretapping will suddenly become an awfully popular idea. No-one will dare oppose it. Every Democrat who now speaks out against these programs will suddenly seem foolish.

And that's how we will enter a brave new world.

A brief message from the Department of Moral Complexity: As you can see from the Buzzflash headline to your left, Brian Ross and Richard Esposito of ABC News learned from a government source that federal investigators had checked their cell phone records in an effort to learn the reporters' sources.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

Ross and Esposito also surmise that their reporting on secret CIA prisons may have prompted the spying.

Let us presume, for the sake of argument, that this crime -- and it is a crime, morally if not in law -- was motivated by the investigation of Plame-gate. What then? How do we react if, in furtherance of a just investigation, someone crossed an ethical boundary?

First, the nation permits warrant-free eavesdropping on terrorists, and now this. Logicians call the "slippery slope" argument fallacious. Maybe so, but this particular slope looks awful damn dangerous to me.