Total Information Awareness
On Thursday, February 14, 2002, John Poindexter (former National Security Advisor and Iran-Contra Ringleader) was appointed by President George W. Bush to lead the Information Assurance Office at the Department of Defense's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.It was here that he conceived of Total Information Awareness (TIA). This is germaine today because there is speculation from the uber-nerds at Ars Technica that the NYT decision to print the Wiretap story results from a technical perspective. TIA is a massive electronic intelligence gathering program designed to mechanically sift through phone calls, emails, and other electronic communications in order to track possible Terrorist activity. Soon after Congress was made aware of this program in 2003, Senator Feingold successfully introduced and passed legislation to suspend the program. It was about that time when the secret Executive Order was signed. The logistics of achieving a FISA court approval could not keep up with the process of recording everything and filtering the results with certain keyword, location, context and other factors. Its a tremendous investment in technology today in order to sift through all this data. If this speculation turns out to be true, then, in fact the NSA is wiretapping everyone all the time.
Conspiracy theorists have postulated for years about this practice. The Will Smith/Gene Hackman movie, Enemy of the State, may have seemed fanciful at the time, but there were some amazing similarities in the technology the NSA was employing. So, we're back to the original question of "How much privacy are you willing to forfeit for security." Indeed, it is understandable that GW Bush secretly allowed this program to survive Congressional death. It was a brave choice which, I personally eventually endorse because I believe that Patrick Henry's infamous quotation, "Give Me Liberty or Give Me Death" is a tad bit extreme in today's geo-political environment. Unfortunately for Mr. Bush, the Administrative Branch is required to make its case to the Legislative Branch before they proceed with such a program. Ultimately, as a nation, we must decide what measures we are willing to accept before the Government proceeds as it sees fit.
posted by eshock at 10:41 PM
Read 3 Comments
3 Comments:
The most interesting part of this discussion, to me, is why the FISA (FISO?) authorization was not pursued. all points i've heard seem to think the approval would have been granted easily...so why was it not pursued? mere arrogance, or did the administration doubt they'd receive authorization?
By
Anonymous, at
10:49 PM
Well, the original technical explanation given by Ars Technica was that since the NSA is wiretapping everything and everyone that it is technically impossible to get a Court Order. However, I have learned from Russ Baker on HuffPo that the FISA authorization could be applied 72 hours retroactively to the surveillance taking place. Data packets are flying around the world's internet. What we are reminded of in this story, is that for about 10 years, the FBI and NSA has had the ability to remotely wiretap the switches. This makes US control of the Internet, which narrowly was approved last month, all the more interesting and important.
The BradBlog adroitly addresses te issue of FISA feasability,"UPDATE: Additional info on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court in response to those Bush apologists suggesting he had no time to go to the court (Rush Limbaugh told his listeners today that it could take "10 to 12 days" to get approval back from the court which frequently gives appropral to such requests in hours, if not minutes). This from an Op/Ed by Anthony Wade yesterday:
From 1979 through 2002 there were 15,264 surveillance warrants issued by the FISA court, clearly displaying that the process is quite favorable to the government seeking such wiretaps. Further supporting this is the amount of surveillance warrants which were rejected during that same 23 year period, ZERO. That is right; in a 23 year period not one request was denied.
But then Wade adds this:
From 2002 until now, only four such requests were denied.
Interesting. So from the time the act was established until 2002, nobody seeking a warrant was denied. Then, the Bush Admin was turned down four times. Why? And could that be why they simply decided to go around the FISA court? "
By
eshock, at
11:07 PM
Judge James Robertson is actually considered a liberal, appointed by Clinton, however he was assigned to FISA by Rehnquist. If one is to speculate, since there were 15,264 requests made to the FISA court and zero denials until 2002. Then all of a sudden, 4 denials out of 900 since. One may surmize that Robertson may have denied those requests, and GWB, in a huge error, decided to end-around the judge and deal with consequences later (now).
By
eshock, at
1:08 AM
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