Eavesdropping Didn't Help Uncover Terrorist Plot

crymeph0 writes "Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell asserted that the 'Protect America Act,' which frees the intelligence community from pesky things like judicial oversight while they eavesdrop on international conversations, was used to good effect in exposing the recently foiled terrorist plot to bomb US military facilities in Germany. Not so, according to other, anonymous, intelligence community officials. McConnell was forced to admit his errors in a phone call to Sen. Joe Lieberman. Turns out the military got wise to the bad guys months before the law was passed, simply due to alert military guards noticing odd behavior by some passers-by, a.k.a. good old fashioned police work."

Comments

Another deceptive political operative

[denissmith]

This government (and not just this administration) has gotten very good at gaming the news cycle to mislead the citizenry into supporting some pretty vile stuff. The frustrating thing is that none of the things we have been led to do (warrantless wiretapping, waterboarding and Guantanamo) have been the least bit effective at actually solving crimes, preventing terrorist attacks or bringing the a guilty to justice. Every expert knows this, anybody who reads the experts knows this and a large segment of the population, the majority of the GOP presidential candidates, as well as Congressmen of both parties and 10% of the Slashdot community, won't believe the truth. The most effective solutions to the problem were already in place before 9-11. The failures were HUMAN failures, we already knew all the parts, we didn't connect the dots. Keeping a man in sensory deprivation for a month will break a man - it won't connect the dots. Filtering the internet traffic for keywords makes more dots, but it doesn't connect any. Over the last 6 years we haven't made ourselves any safer - only more depraved.

Re:Another deceptive political operative

[Opportunist]

There's more to that. When you look at the development of domestic spying of governments on its people, you can trace a very sharp rise in the whole plot right after the riots in Paris. That's pretty much what it's about, governments (and people in power in general) are scared of its own people. Especially the have-nots who become more and more by the day, and are pushed more and more into ghetto areas. These riots (and others in other towns in Europe) have been a wakeup call that there are those that are the big losers of the current social and economic development, and that sooner or later they will explode violently. Especially since the gap between rich and poor grows, and the number of the people on the poor side is on the rise.

In the past century, we shipped poverty to some backwater country in Africa or Asia. If people wanna riot there, who cares? We got cheap coffee, tea, metal, and everyone was happy here. The problem is that we now have to pay the price. Because of course jobs there are cheaper as well. And more and more jobs are shipped there now too, reimporting poverty.

I don't want to say that we're on the verge of a revolution not unlike the one in France of 1789, but I have a gut feeling that this won't go on that way much longer.

And that's where the total surveillance comes in. It does keep unrest manageable. For reference, see the GDR and its Stasi. You could tell by 1960 that the GDR is only held afloat by the suppression of its people. It managed to survive another 30 years until even the last person didn't care anymore whether he was imprisoned for being against the government.

And once this point is reached, when nobody cares anymore whether he's going to jail, a government has lost. You can't sustain a country only by your military and police. In other words, the whole surveillance crap will tide you over for a few years, when people actually still fear being seen doing something "illegal".

And that's what it's all about.

Told You So

[Doc Ruby]

I told you so:

Those German wiretaps didn't need to go around the FISA law that protected us from them without warrants. They didn't need the FISA law weakened last month by Congress the way Bush wanted. McConnel is lying, and the NY Times knows it, though it didn't report that.

Now I want to know why, though the NY Times knew McConnell was lying, it didn't report that in that important original story.

And what will Lieberman, the Republican pretending to be a Democrat, do to a lying spook like McConnell? There's got to be a punishment for being a bad liar, even if we expect spooks like McConnell to lie. We expect them to do it competently. This clown is just another Bush chump who can't even lie straight.

Re:It's called "behavioural profiling".

[BadAnalogyGuy]

So here's what you are suggesting.

1) That it is impossible to judge the menace of any particular person at any particular time because they may not give signs of their badness at the moment they are monitored
2) That bad people associate with bad people
3) That it is possible to decide who is bad by monitoring them and monitoring those who associate with them.

I hope you see the circular reasoning in step 3. Likewise, I hope you understand that bad people also interact with good people, especially with the knowledge spelled out in 1.

How can you behaviorally profile everyone without first monitoring everyone?

The answer is that you either make selections based on non-behavioral traits or you randomly pick someone to monitor until they do something bad (aha! a bad guy) or you give up any chance of catching them do something bad (bummer! probably a good guy).

Do you think that the random harassment of a few citizens is better than constant monitoring of all the citizens?

John dean and other conservatives from the 60's

[WindBourne]

Mr Dean worked for Nixon and was part of the watergate consperacy. He is a tried and true conservative. Yet, he believes that most of today's "republicans" have more in common with Nazi's than they do with republican ideals. Considering that even Nazi's could balance the budget, I would say that they have more in common with the Soviets. Even the gulag, the deficits, the invasions because of resources, the lies, the spying, etc. is much more soviet than Nazis.

Re:So what are you trying to say?

[richieb]

They wanted to spy on him, but it was mostly hunch, not enough for a warrant. If they had been able to eavesdrop, they very likely could have gotten enough of a heads-up to stop it.

Actually the FBI and the CIA had a pretty good idea who the suspected terrorists were (this was part of the investigation of the Cole bombing). The CIA had bugged some of their conversations while they were in the Philippines (I think). Unfortunately the CIA did not tell the FBI that some of those suspected terrorists were in the US. If they did FBI would have no problems obtaining proper warrants.

This is all described in the book "The Looming Tower" - I strongly recomend it. Even though the end is heartbreaking.

You Love Lies

[Doc Ruby]

"Imagine" the opposing viewpoint to my own? I've been watching it ravage my liberties, and my neighbors', for at least 6 long years. Don't try to pretend that you're starting out this conflict of rights vs liberty in you long attempts to frame the debate the way you'd like everyone to see it.

There are two issues here, not just the one you'd like to compartmentalize into.

One is indeed whether the government can wiretap people. There is a very clear law, that has been regularly updated to keep pace with both technology and threats, the FISA. It is already an exception to the Constitutional requirement for any wiretap to be allowed by a warrant after evaluation by a judge under Congress' laws, to ensure the Executive doesn't just wiretap whoever it wants. Any wiretap without a warrant is by definition not reasonable. The FISA makes an exception to the usual requirement that the evidence on which the warrant is based be subject to argument, making the court hearing it and the proceedings secret.Then it makes another exception, a really extraordinary one, that allows warrants to be obtained even after the wiretap, for 72 hours. In other words, legalizing warrantless wiretaps to accommodate emergencies, after which the wiretappers can get a warrant on evidence they already had, or, if they really took a gamble without evidence but on a "hunch" that proved correct, with the contents of the 72 hours of the tap. The Executive even gets to assign the secret members of the FISA court, and its chief judge.

That court issued something like 18,000 authorizations, and rejected something like 20, in the year before Bush started ignoring it. But there weren't really 18,000 emergency terrorist threats, or anywhere near the number of wiretaps the FISA court has issued in its 30 years of operation. It's easy to convince that court. Too easy already, given that its procedures are unconstitutional, but there are emergencies and we tend to err on the side of caution when "national security" is invoked. At least the FISA is a way to track the circumventions of the Constitution - and therefore, the abuse of our rights by our government we create to protect them. So we can try for overall oversight down the road, even if "a few eggs are broken to make the omlet" along the way.

Of course, there's a bigger issue: these rights are inalienable, not given by the Constitution or any other feature of being American (or just living here). So violating those rights abroad, for US citizens or foreigners, also violates the rights that are America's basic ideology. But we make the exception to protect ourselves more easily, quickly and cheaply, rationalized on the grounds that we create our government here to protect our rights; foreigners can create their own governments to protect their rights if they want. But of course the accumulated rights abuses abroad have made it that much easier for our enemies to recruit allies and attack us. The tradeoff is probably a losing one, when our greatest threats are terrorists, and we're alienating even our allies.

The undeniable issue here is that Bush has ignored even the easy FISA court. So there's no oversight. Instead, there's lawbreaking by the Executive, as has been found even after due process in binding Federal court with proper jurisdiction. Violating the Constitution, and then breaking the FISA. Even the 4th Amendment that's being broken is itself an extra statement of what's already implicit in the Constitution, just like the rest of the Bill of Rights. That's how important our right to privacy is. And how likely is an abusive ruler to violate it.

The other issue is that Bush cannot be trusted with this power. The FBI, for example, lied to Congress when reporting that there were no reported examples of their abusing the Patriot Acts, but there were indeed hundreds. The guy running these wiretaps, Alberto Gonzales, led a career of lying to Congress, hounded out j

How to identify a Conservative Post

[GameboyRMH]

1. Poor punctuation - Periods where question marks should be, and nothing where commas should be, resulting in run-on sentences. Run-on sentences and absent question marks both encourage you to keep reading without stopping to think, which is important when a conservative is trying to get their point across.

2. Poor spelling - Spelling errors are a fact of life, nobody's perfect. But strategic use of syntax errors can distract you from logical problems in the post.

3. An Ultimatum - A choice between the idea the conservative doesn't like and something unthinkable, or socially unacceptable. Would you like (premise A) or would you like people to die/the communists/terrorists to win!?!?!?

3. Blame-shifting - Shift the blame for a problem to a liberal group, again a distraction tactic. People will be caught up in the ensuing correctional argument instead of criticizing the original post. No factual basis is needed, but an easy way to confuse the reader is to shift the blame to the past actions of a liberal group. This also increases the amount of research needed to make an informed rebuttal and therefore reduces the chance of such a reply being made.

Re:So what are you trying to say?

[Scudsucker]

This is bit of 20/20 hindsight.

Hardly; it's more like a bit of a lazy, incompetent president. Taking Bush to task for not doing anything in the face of point-blank warnings is no more "20/20 hindsight" than asking him why he decided to keep reading My Pet Goat rather than getting on the phone when planes started hitting buildings. This wasn't a fluke: the exact same thing happened four years later, when he received point-blank warnings on Katrina and ignored those as well. Bush doesn't care about what he doesn't know about. And he doesn't know about much. At least Reagan could delegate.

The particulars of the attack were not known (I know there was speculation).

Insofar as alerting the FBI, the FAA, and NORAD, yes they were: Bin Laddin determined to strike the U.S., and that he might use planes to do so. It would have taken minutes for an FAA official to write a memo telling staff to report suspicious activity, and a few minutes for a NORAD commander to prepare a plan to force down planes over probable target cities, which would certainly include DC and NYC. The morning of 911, the FAA notices that three large planes are missing, which certainly counts as "suspicous", and calls the SOD, who calls NORAD, who starts tracking planes and scrambles a few fighter jets. We might not have been able to prevent the hijackings, but we certainally could have prevented them from hitting the WTC and the Pentagon.