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NSA Had Domestic Call Monitoring Before 9/11?
MarkusQ writes "Bloomberg is reporting that, according to documents filed in the breach of privacy suit on behalf of Verizon and BellSouth, the NSA asked AT&T to set up its domestic call monitoring site seven months before the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks. Could it be that they were intending to monitor domestic calls (and internet traffic) all along, and the 'Global War on Terror' was just a convenient excuse when they got caught?" From the article: "...an unnamed former employee of the AT&T unit provided them with evidence that the NSA approached the carrier with the proposed plan. Afran said he has seen the worker's log book and independently confirmed the source's participation in the project. He declined to identify the employee."
James Bamford in his book Body of Secrets and in his numerous interviews with the press defended the NSA and said they really did change their ways after the scandals of the 1970s (telegram interception). Could it be that there never was a period of "gentlemanly spying" between then and September 11?
So you tell me that it wasn't about the terrorists? I can't believe it.
"Could it be that they were intending to monitor domestic calls (and internet traffic) all along, and the 'Global War on Terror' was just a convenient excuse when they got caught?"
Of course the so-called "War on Terror" is just an excuse! Before the illegal
invasion of Iraq, no terrorist groups were based there, but look now! This
was widely expected to happen. So the current Administration has increased, not
reduced, the risk of Americans to be victims of terrorists.
Don't tell me you are surprised by this... I am not.
After all Echelon has been around much longer so this was only to be expected to happen.
The scary thing however is that it took so long to get out. Makes you wonder what else they have in hiding...
"Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence" - Carl Sagan
Alright so besides the point that call monitoring is unconstitutional, if they had it 7 months before 9/11, then why did 9/11 still happen?
Idiot or not, you're still an idiot.
I have NO doubt that our government was just doing the prudent thing. 9/11 is proof that it was necessary. You guys are just too cynical.
> Illegal according to what law? You know that when they are attacking other countries they are not required to obey the laws in that country.
D =10038
Invading another country, when not in self-defense, is a war crime ("supreme crime"),
by the Geneva conventions, and USA has signed those and are bound by them. War crimes
carries the death penality in USA. As an invader you are also required to follow
local laws, with some exceptions. Of course, the invader may make new laws, but they
may be illegal as well. Instituting new laws in order to loot Iraq is not legal, and
you might have noticed oil companies reluctance to invest there...
Notice how the Bush Administration tries to avoid beeing persecuted for war crimes:
http://www.zmag.org/content/showarticle.cfm?ItemI
President Bush's major legal defense for the NSA call database was that the resolution passed by Congress on September 14, 2001 authorizing military force against those that caused 9/11 and organizations that aided those that caused 9/11 was a declaration of war. When the Democrats voted for that resolution, and then the resolution to go to war with Iraq, both times they enacted the President's war powers embedded by statute in FISA.
Check FISA at Cornell University and you see statutes giving the President to use pen registers and trap and trace devices. If you didn't know, those things constitute the technology used to record numbers a phone has been dialing, and numbers that have called a phone. They also give the President the power to search and seize without a warrant and to use electronic surveillance without a warrant. Here is the exact statute. There are three identical sections with "electronic surveillance," "pen register or trap and trace device," and "search and seizure" being replaced by the other in each one.
Notwithstanding any other provision of law, the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize the use of a pen register or trap and trace device without a court order under this subchapter to acquire foreign intelligence information for a period not to exceed 15 calendar days following a declaration of war by Congress.
Even then, the statute may be interpreted many ways. "for a period not to exceed 15 calendar days" could mean that the authorization must be repeated every 15 days, that individual authorizations may last no longer than 15 days, that the power lasts 15 days once the President has used it, that the power may only be used for 15 days after Congress has declared war, or any number of interpretations, many more plausible than others.
It depends on to what extent your judicial interpretation philosophy incorporates "originalism," thinking about what Congress intended, "starre decisis," looking at prior court decisions, and "strict constructionism," which limits judicial interpretation to the meanings of the actual words and phrases used in law, and not on other sources or inferences.
There was a huge debate over whether the authorizations of military force constituted declarations of war for the reasons given above. The Democrats, they say, did not mean to give the President war powers and thought that the authorizations did not constitute declarations of war because they had been used as a means of allowing deployment of armed forces without giving the president war powers since at least the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which allowed an "escalation of military forces" in the Vietnam War. The Republicans mock them for this, and the debate was even brought up in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld if you watch the oral arguements on C-SPAN like I did.
For all this, how much has this of President Bush's arguements been brought up in the mainstream media? I have seen 2 paragraphs in an Associated Press article and nothing more. Regardless of the debate being all worthless now that he is discovered perhaps to have begun the program before 9/11, the debate is something I feel needs to be known. Just don't berate the Democrats for wanting to debate whether the Iraq War's a war. If the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution had been a declaration of war giving Richard Nixon wiretapping powers, the Supreme Court would not have ruled against him in East District of Michigan v. Nixon.
A statute in FISA does not make a difference in constitutional law. President Bush wants the statutes to make legal what he does with no regard to the Constitution, but when statutes prohibit his actions, he can cite constitutional authority. If it's legally a war, he'd say it's the first case, and if it's not he'd say it's the other.
This apparent legal paradox has arisen in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld---if he's a POW he's under the Geneva Convention, and if not he's a criminal entitled to a trial. The Bush administration argues he's not a POW because he was not fighting for an organized g
I like how people keep saying "in the months before 9/11". As if these programs were instituted by der furher the day he was inaugurated. The truth is that these programs have been going on for years but none of you cared.
1. Carnivore first hit slashdot during the Clinton Administration. The oldest reference I found on slashdot is about Earthlink refusing to install it in 2000 - which means it had been in development for several years before that.
2. The legendary "Echelon" - the NSA program for monitoring all telecom traffic has been bandied about for many years - Slashdot posted several articles about it in May of 1999 but the news about it first broke in 1998. The program itself is probably 50 years old.
Clear, Dark Skies
Evidence has to be weighed in context. For example, having a book on bomb making is very weak evidence of having terrorist intent. There are many more people in the world with a fascination with making things go boom than there are people with a fascination with making people go boom. However if there are extremist political tracts and plans for local infrastructure like dams or bridges, it becomes a matter of concern even though any one of these in isolation is harmless.
In a sense, there is no such thing as a strong piece of evidence. Only a strong pattern of evidence. It bugs me when people talk about "confirmation bias" as if it is some kind of logical fallacy. It's not. At least in part it is not: it's the inevitable consequence of living in a world of uncertainty and contradictory evidence.
The thing about the MIHOP people is that they start with the strong belief that Bush is evil. Given that, it's easy to believe he knew about 9/11 but let it happen so that he could use it as an excuse for all the evil things he wanted to do. Things that would strike the neutral observer as ordinary incompetence become part of a sinister plan. The same thing happened a few years ago with the Republicans who were sure that Clinton arranged murders and other outrageous pieces of skullduggery.
The thing is, if this particular piece of information is confirmed, it will actually provide strong support one of the MIHOP standpoints central assumptions: the Bush Administration needed an excuse to justify things it wanted to do. Maybe not enough for the mythical unbiased observer to buy the whole MIHOP package, but enough to buy several signigifant pieces of it.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
> Do you honestly think that the Hague would indict an American for war crimes?
They may very well do so.
> And even if Bush were indicted, do you really think that anyone would try
> arresting him when the Marines would immediately be sent in to kick ass and
> retrieve the president?
It's unlikely that they'll indict while Bush and his croonies while he is in
office, but hey, there is no limit of stature for War Crimes. Note that the Bush
Administration has bullied many states into agreements of not delivering US citizens
(officials only?) to the International Court in Hague. This is an attempt to protect
themselves from persecution of their war crimes.
Presumably under international law.
Strictly speaking, President Bush was authorized by the Congress of the United States to invade Iraq, so it was not illegal under US law. Furthermore, a case can be made that, although hostilities were ceased, we were still effectively in a state of war. Iraq was still shooting at aircraft in the non-fly zone for example. If we presented evidence that Iraq had violated the terms under which hostilities ceased, then arguably the invasion was was legal under international law.
But...
If it turns out the "evidence" presented was faulty, or unreliable and the Bush administration knew it, then the legal basis for the war evaporates.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
google for United Nations veto America United States. no wait, i know you require that life be made easier for you so here is the direct link: http://www.google.com.eg/search?hs=WQL&hl=en&safe= off&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aen-US%3Aoff icial&q=United+Nations+veto+America+United+States& btnG=Search&meta=
now do some work and search for america vetoing the war was illegal, maybe you should also read up on different cultures to find out what is going on in the world around you
_ In Egypt Networks: Network Solutions with a Twist
I hope you do feel safe while the last of your freedoms is taken from you. Freedom of speach this is. The real reason for such monitoring is to supress political dissent. You see a monitored populace is a complient one.
davecb5620@gmail.com
One is assumed innocent until proven guilty. Jack the Ripper was never found either. But since he was never indicted, did he break the law?
Please, for the good of Humanity, vote Obama.
I can't believe it's 2006 and there are still people who believe that in 2003:
1. Iraq posed a threat to the coalition
2. Iraq had functional weapons of mass destruction
3. Iraq had anything to do with Al Qaeda, terrorists or terror suspects
Of all the evil this war has caused, I think the worst is the new American Culture of Willful Ignorance that its backers have advocated since before the opening shots were fired.
Do you remember Admiral Poindexter's Total Information Awareness proposal that came out shortly after 9/11? A gigantic database that aggregated all available electronic information on US citizens -- financial and credit card records, grocery store shopper cards, movie rentals, library books, maybe even medical records? And how people raised such a stink that congress cut off funding for it?
Well, guess what. It's still up and running.. It simply moved over to the pentagon, that's all.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
In some parts of the world, leaders lead from a position of moral authority, not from the threat of force.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
ok, so since that was entirely domestic this program wouldn't have helped there, but you get the point).
/. I'm too lazy to RTFA, but the headline says "domestic call monitoring". Why would you then conclude that it would be ineffective against domestic terrorism but effective against international terrorism?
Well, since this is
Anyway, 'terrorism' (both domestic and Islamic) weren't a significant problem before 9-11 and they aren't a significant problem today, despite what the 6 o'clock news wants you to believe. Murder takes the lives of many more people (as in several orders of magnitude) per year. Suicide takes 4x more than murder, and car accidents take over 5x more. Heart disease, stroke, diabetes, cancer, and smoking-related respitory diseases together claim over 200x the lives that murder claims (which is itself claims several orders of magnitude more lives than terrorism.)
In terms of human lives, terrorism in America isn't even a blip on the radar. It certainly doesn't justify the expenditure of trillions of dollars on wars and "Homeland Security", nor does it justify the wholesale slaughter of our freedoms and even if it did a domestic call tracking program would do jack shit. Despite what the pundits want you to believe, there is no vast centralized network of terrorists. They have no need to keep in constant contact with each other over long distances, and ruthlessly and indiscriminately monitoring law-abiding American citizens (incidentally, none of the 9-11 terrorists were American citizens) will give us nothing but another step towards a police state.
If you're referring to the cache Hoekstra and Santorum have been parading in front of the news services, they were known about and listed on intelligence reports back in 2003. They were degraded beyond the possibility of use even back then.
rawstory
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
And the answer is "no". Any system will have "false positives", "false negatives", "true positives" and "true negatives".
The "false negatives" mean you miss a plot. As long as the false negative rate is above a certain percentage of the actual plots, it will work.
More problematic is the "false positive" rate. This is when a non-plot is identified as a plot. Innocent people are investigated. This takes time / money / effort.
Given that there is an upper limit on the time / money / effort available, the government will waste resources chasing false leads.
People who do not understand that will look at the extreme rarity of "terrorist attacks" in the US (try to name 5 attacks in the US in the last 100 years without using Google) and conclude that the time / money / effort spent was successful.
However, looking at the budget, you will see that our government is BORROWING the money.
We are going bankrupt in an attempt to chase down a threat that kills fewer people every year than car accidents.
And we are surrending the Rights that our forefathers were willing to give THEIR lives for.
What is this international law that you speak of?
Exactly the one we invoke when, for example, claim the right to navigate certain waters. Or the rights of our uniformed soldiers to certain standards of treatment when captured by the enemy. The same international law that says we can retaliate when our territory is violated, but then enter another country's territory in hot pursuit. The same international law that says it's a crime for a country to harbor terrorist organizations and facilitate their financial and other dealings.
Exactly what body is going to prosecute, convict, and punish a superpower like the United States of America?
International law is for small states violating it partly enforced by the UN security council.
But for states large and small, it is enforced by mutual exchange and recognition of rights. I do not molest your ships on the high seas or press their crews into servitude, and you don't do mine. I don't parade your soliders stripped naked through the streets, nor do I subject them to summary executions. Likewise, you do not do those things to my soliders.
The entire phrase of "international law" is a trite thing. Let's not kid ourselves, international norms and laws only apply to weak countries.
There is some truth in what you say. The same can be said domestically: if a man is rich enough, he is beyond laws that bind poor men. But there are limits. Even the United States depends on the mutual recognition of its rights by other countries. And while we have for many years spent far more money on defense than the rest of the world put together, yet it is not within an order of magnitude of what we would need to enforce our will on the rest of the world.
Don't be to proud of the technological terror we have created. Right now, we can't even really handle Iraq and Afghanistan at the same time. North Korea, in our present circumstances, is completely beyond our ability to handle useing "superpower" tools. Absent Iraq, Afghanistan and possibly Iran on the horizon, it might be possible. Military officers I've talked to think that the biggest issue in a military solution, the presence of artillery batteries so close to Seoul, could be managed with our military technology. But we can't do that and Iraq at the same time.
In reality military might only takes you so far in the world. There are other dimensions on which a country can be a superpower, particularly political and economic, that are key to sustaining military superpower status. We have lost our political standing in the world, and our position of economic leadership is very shaky.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
And no, you cannot argue that old, non-functioning weapons are the same as functional weapons. That is just inane. Did you even read the linked article?
The naturally occuring "false positives" would eat up the budget for the program (under any sane spending plan).
With almost 300 million people
1% false positives mean 3 million people investigated (and the people they know)
0.1% means 300,000 people investigated (and the people they know).
0.01% means 30,000 people investigated (and the people they know).
Now, even if you limit each investigation to just that person and the 5 closest people to him/her
Spying does not work randomly.
We will now see Bush's media flacks spinning his bottomless hunger for spying on Americans by saying that "if we had gotten this program before 9/11/2001, we would have had what we needed to stop those terrorists".
Even though we of course had more than enough info and spying programs to catch and stop them. The FBI tried to stop the hijackers in flight school, but the FBI refused to act. One FBI whistleblower has been gagged for years because she's tried to tell too much about how badly broken is our counterterrorism system. Amidst mountains of intelligence, Bush has been unable to even find Bin Laden for longer than it took FDR and Truman to beat Germany and Japan in WWII.
We don't need more mountains of intelligence, especially spying on every American's every transaction. We need regime change to one that will actually protect us, the way we elected them and pay them to do. Every threat we've faced - terrorists, recession, hurricane, and smaller - has been bungled or worse by the Bush regime. Giving them more power is like giving the school bully a gun. They'll just pistol whip everyone to make stealing our lunch money that much more efficient.
--
make install -not war
"Secrecy is the keystone of all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy ... [sic] censorship. When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, 'This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,' the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything --you can't conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him."
-- Robert A. Heinlein
First of all, russia is the other power, still. It has ever been. Yes it might have 20 million less men/women ready for service, but over and over again in the course of history they have mobilized innumerable masses to meet the foe. The last being 2nd ww, which they started with great disadvantage, both in experience, technology and numbers, and they have stormed all the way to berlin, and half of europe.
This is because their concept is 'durable, fast, many'. And it has proven to be the most effective for concept of war.
A Grumman f14 tomcat, in its abundant version, can track 12 enemies, and can direct 6 missiles to 6 of them at any given time.
However a grumman f14 tomcat is expensive and difficult to manufacture, operate, maintain. Any loss is a big loss. On the other hand, whatever is in russian hands is expendable, and replacable by around 10 in short time. this is what they did in ww2, this is what they were gonna do in ww3, and this is what they can do now.
As for electronics, simulations, battle tests, deployment en masse against technologically inferior enemies (iraq, vietnam) is one thing, meeting a foe in match is another.
The match of a-10 in russian air force can use anything from cologne to a multidude of petroleum distillates for fuel. It can fly with severe punishment.
And in the deployments against vietnam, afghanistan and iraq, we have seen that, even ragtag guerillas with negligible weapons can deal good damage to their foes. A galaxy was almost shot down in iraq. How many galaxies are there in strategic airlift command ? 12 ? How many awacs are there in sac ? What if russians spend 12 flankers apiece and get 10-15 existing awacs one by one ?
An analogy from history : germans had excellent technology, experience and perfect training to go with it, they favored extreme quality against quantity. Russians, favoring acceptable quality to go with enormous quantity had set them right. Same was the concept of u.s. in ww2, and this concept proved right. But from 45 to today, u.s. uk and west allies took to the mistake of germans "they have high numbers, we can match them in quality" - no you cant.
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