"State Secrets": Obama and the NSA

Well, you probably already know by now that President Hopeful has blocked legal challenges to government wiretapping by invoking the mantra "state secrets." Sounds awfully Bushian, does it not?

I wondered how the die-hard Obama fan squad would rationalize this behavior. As I've often said, strained rationalization is my favorite form of humor.

Actually, if you visit Obotland, you'll find that most commenters do not engage in rationalization. Most progs seem pissed off. However, some O-fans valiantly try to maintain faith in the Lightbringer. Check out the action on D.U.:

I am just hoping he's doing this to have the court strike this use of secrecy Because I'd say there's a good chance the court will. 70-30 percent I'd say.

Obama needs to be able to tap the phones of right wing conspiracy nutjobs The Birthers, the anti-abortion militants, the "Tea Party" crowds and nutjobs who propound nonsense like that cop killer in Pittsburgh and last year's Knoxville church shooter. These people have shown themselves to be dangerous and unhinged.

He should use the wiretapping to investigate right-wing hate groups, skin-heads, and KKK folks. It would help his own safety.

I wonder if having this program declared illegal would jeopardize prosecutions in the works.

I just think I will let the President make some decisions without asking us first. I think he has his reasons and you make a point that some of us "non-lawyers" may not be aware of or even considered.

I want an explanation before I jump to conclusions

There is no right to privacy on a public line... You can still have secret private communication with others in private.

Obama has not beaten, tortured or killed anyone with wiretapping... The greatest threats are real but Obama wiretapping should not be a problem.

Give Obama a break... Just because he is wrong in one issue doesn't mean he is equal to Bush.

Personally i think he wants to get it into the supreme court... The only way to permanently shut this down after all would be for them to rule against this. And in all seriousness, what do people think would happen if Obama announced that he would be 'protecting' warrantless wiretaps for the purpose of having the supreme court close the door on him?

It's not the man, it's the damn machine they put the POTUS into

As noted earlier, most of the D.U.-ers are outraged at this "state secrets" tactic. But only one of the geniuses contributing to that thread has managed to dope out the real reason behind Obama's move.

The big secret -- which isn't all that secret, what with it being discussed in the New York Times and all -- has to do with the nature of the NSA's new technology:

Hard to do when you're tapping 120 million domestic phone calls, e-mails, and Internet surfs at any one moment.

Certainly, every international communication gets intercepted and stored. It all gets vacuumed up and fed through NSA computers that rank-order it for a number of criteria.

If there are any red-flags, the "hit" goes to secondary analysis, where somebody may actually read or listen to bits and pieces, and then move it along to another analyst. This is supposed to be done anonymously. If the NSA analyst (or contractor) determines the communication is among "persons of interest", then it will be forwarded to another agency, likely FBI or CIA, depending upon whether it's domestic or foreign. If a warrant is required, this only happens after three-four-five intermediate levels of review. Any intercepted data of any potential interest or value gets warehoused.

That's what they don't want you to know.

They're unlikely to close this thing down. Ever.

Maybe the person who wrote those words used to read Cannonfire.

In previous posts, we have discussed the case of Russell Tice, the only former NSA employee to discuss the NSA's mind-bending current capabilities. Here's what Tice told the NYT about what I have called the Mother of All Eavesdropping Programs:

I've thought about this for a while, and as I said, I can't tell you how things are done, but I can foresee it, especially with what we've seen now. We're finding out that NSA conducted surveillance on U.S. citizens. And FISA could have been used but wasn't, was sidestepped. No one even made the attempt to see if they had a problem they could have fixed through FISA.

That would lead one to ask the question: "Why did they omit the FISA court?"

I would think one reason that is possible is that perhaps a system already existed that you could do this with, and all you had to do is change the venue. And if that's the case, and this system was a broad brush system, a vacuum cleaner that just sucks things up, this huge systematic approach to monitoring these calls, processing them, and filtering them—then ultimately a machine does 98.8 percent of your work. What you come out with from a haystack is a shoebox full of straw. Once you have that, you have people that can look at it.

Now here's an interesting question: If this approach was used, and hundreds of thousands if not millions of communications were processed in that manner, and then if and when the truth ever came out, a lawyer—and I think lawyers are going to be arguing semantics in this case—the argument could be made, well, if a machine was doing the looking and the sucking in, it doesn't matter because that's not monitoring until a human looks at it.

And this was my response:

Now, when Tice talks about "foreseeing" something, he really means "I need to use a semantic dodge in order to stay out of trouble."

What we are talking about is, I believe, an already-existent system which sucks in everything: All landline phone calls, all cell phone calls (although many argue that VOIP is still secure), all email, all driver's license information, all transaction records, all credit histories. Everything. From everyone.

The MAEP scoops it all up. Data-mining techniques winnow it down.

That's the "state secret" Obama will not discuss in public. No, I'm not rationalizing his move: An explanation is not an excuse. We need to have candid public debate over the NSA's new capabilities.