Sorry about repeating myself in the above post but I only have a few mins to sit down and can’t really go thru my mind’s thesaurus ;-)

1st draft and all

Siun and John – I am not saying it makes their argument valid, far from it, but you should be aware that the issue purportedly arises because, while those calls may have both callers overseas, they travel on fiber optic cable that passes through switches in the US, and the intercept point desired is within the US. If true, this means it is not “radio waves” collected “overseas”. For several reasons, I don’t think this mandates that FISA prohibits the desired intercept, but I don’t think it is as simple as you were discussing.

Hi bmaz,

I’m probably going to unintelligeable again but here goes … I’m looking at this from a different set of laws than you are; you’re looking at this thru the prism of US Title 18 and as a lawyer (which I’m not smart enough for) – I’m looking at this thru the laws of physics (Watt, Ohm, Farraday, Tesla … etc) and what I would do if I were on the ground “in country”

From what I read to be the point of this report is that the wiretapping needs to continue because of the switching stations being in the US and as such they need an ok from the lawyers.

My point which I wasn’t very clear about, is that from a technological standpoint they don’t need to wait for the intercept to take place at a switching station in the US – from a technological standpoint they could intercept these phone calls from right down the street – and they don’t need a proverbial van out on the street to do it. As I tried (not very well) to point out was that if they have a suspected target in Iraq (which they obviously did) all they would have to do is intercept his or her messages from “down the street” or better yet at the cellphone tower – which incidentally were installed by US telcos and are still (?) being run by the same telcos (remember that independent contractor that was killed a few years ago who was held by the Iraqis and his family tried to get him released thru the State Dept? and he was killed mysteriously? He was a contractor who worked on the Iraqi phone system)

See, I’m looking at this thru the prism of the guys on the ground and what I would do if in the same situation. I would go ahead and intercept the calls and save my guys and worry about the consequences later.

And, another thing: this administration has had absolutely no compunction about doing things extralegally before (rendition, torture, collateral damage [civilian deaths]).

Why would they stop at intercepting a phone call in Iraq, when they have plenty of smart guys (Signal Corps) with the know how to do it?

Just my two cents

PS thanks so much for all the insight you give to those of us neophytes out here who would not be able to understand half of what the criminals Bush Administration does.

There have been published reports about the intelligence and law enforcement communities having telecommunications companies assist in the analysis of the ‘‘social networks’’ with data about suspects’ patterns of communication. Like ripples in a pond, network analysis can lead to new subjects whose communications can then be targeted.27 Following such leads is an important and legitimate investigative tool, and the RESTORE Act does not prohibit this activity. The bill mandates safeguards to prevent abuses stemming from such use, by requiring that a warrant once a substantial purpose of the acquisition is to acquire the communications of a United States person. This requirement is fully consistent with Director of National Intelligence McConnell’s insistence that NSA will not target an American in the United States without a FISA warrant. The FISA Court will approve the guidelines if it concludes that they are reasonably designed to ensure such an outcome.

[Footnote #27 references the USA TODAY article of May, 2006 and the 9/7/07 New York Times article by Eric Lichtblau about FBI Data Mining.]

http://www.rules.house.gov/110…..iciary.pdf

Explains a lot about that ‘basket warrant’ provision in Section 3 of RESTORE. The Democrats knew full well what the underlying operation they were authorizing was, in August. They just didn’t bother to insist on passing their own bill about it, and took ‘on faith’ the PAA language devised by the likes of Addington. But they can’t wait to rubberstamp the new era of corporate government “social networking” software analysis of our stored communications, all the same, from the looks of the RESTORE Act.

pow wow, have you posted any of your analysis on this with marcy at tnh?

The Intelligence Committee (presumably Rush Holt, et al) is still managing to nibble away at the corners of RESTORE to tighten it up and improve it – and that committee seems to be the source of the Amendment in Part B of the Rules Committee Report, which successfully attached several changes to the merged Judiciary/Intelligence Committee version of the bill, on Tuesday. One key change is to lengthen the statute of limitations for violations of FISA from five years to ten…

For the record, here is how the final ‘foreign to foreign on a U.S. wire’ language in RESTORE reads (this provision is completely separate and apart from the data-mining basket/blanket order provisions in RESTORE):

“SEC. 105A. (a) FOREIGN TO FOREIGN COMMUNICATIONS.—

(1) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, a court order is not required for electronic surveillance directed at the acquisition of the contents of any communication between persons that are not known to be United States persons and are reasonably believed to be located outside the United States for the purpose of collecting foreign intelligence information, without respect to whether the communication passes through the United States or the surveillance device is located within the United States.

(2) TREATMENT OF INADVERTENT INTERCEPTIONS.—If electronic surveillance referred to in paragraph (1) inadvertently collects a communication in which at least one party to the communication is located inside the United States or is a United States person, the contents of such communication shall be handled in accordance with minimization procedures adopted by the Attorney General that require that no contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party shall be disclosed, disseminated, or used for any purpose or retained for longer than 7 days unless a court order under section 105 is obtained or unless the Attorney General determines that the information indicates a threat of death or serious bodily harm to any person.”

http://www.rules.house.gov/110….._partb.pdf

I have to say that these revisions seem to me to broaden this “foreign-to-foreign” FISA exclusion to include and to address the (domestic-to-foreign collected inside the U.S.) area of surveillance that is seemingly behind the “need” for the basket program warrant (i.e., the annual FISA court order intended to authorize the data-mining “procedure”) provisions authorized elsewhere in RESTORE (Section 3, amending PAA’s Section 105B).

That annual ‘program procedure’ FISCourt approval seems to be aimed at the problem of U.S.-to-foreign (and vice versa) communications being intermingled in a stream of data that is intercepted in the U.S. even though the surveillance involved is (more or less) “directed” abroad (and which in other eras presumably would have been intercepted abroad with very little incursion on the communications of U.S. persons). The previous foreign-to-foreign language (before this Rules Committee-accepted amendment) left out the “not known to be” language – it said simply “…communication between persons that are not United States persons and are not located within the United States….” And stricter minimization rules were added in this amendment [see Paragraph (2) above] to account for the fact that the communications of some U.S. persons will in fact be captured in said “foreign to foreign” U.S.-intercepted surveillance.

So what the blazes is the basket program warrant provision really all about? That is the $24,000 question that we are left in the dark about. Whatever the answer, Pelosi, Conyers and Reyes seem to ‘have their orders’ to keep that provision intact and unchanged at its core.

The alleged “foreign to foreign in U.S.” problem is absolutely, and separately, addressed in RESTORE, and yet another whole section of sweeping and novel surveillance based inside the U.S. is also defined and authorized, as well (along with absolute – prospective – immunity for the government’s corporate partners) by way of this basket/blanket/program warrant provision in Section 3. A whole new section of FISA surveillance that is only very nominally checked [as to “procedure” - meaning how “reasonably designed” is the choice of categories and subsets of communications that will be selected and programmed for collection by interception within the U.S.] by the secret FISA court (and by a variety of after-the-fact reporting by the Executive Branch to Congress).

So what the government does with our private communications is “secret,” while the corporations that we pay, (personally for their service and through our taxes for their spying) to use the mediums they provide for our private communications, are “immune” from the results of any access to our data they provide the government. This is enforcement of an unjustified right to privacy for our government at the expense of the right to privacy guaranteed to all Americans by the Fourth Amendment. Congress, this is Soviet-style work. Get real.

McCain singing a war on Iran song on tweety …
he loved the Israeli mystery attack on Syria

But he prays every day against having to go to war against Iran…that’s why he easily breaks out into the ditty he created “Bomb…Bomb…Bomb Iran”.

I’d cringe when he gets to the falsetto part…he’d reveal just how pathetically insane he has become! Too bad it isn’t on YouTube, though.

It was Tim F. who said it, not John Cole, although it was on John Cole’s Balloon Juice blog. See the July 31, 2007 post titled Spectering IV.

Siun and John – I am not saying it makes their argument valid, far from it, but you should be aware that the issue purportedly arises because, while those calls may have both callers overseas, they travel on fiber optic cable that passes through switches in the US, and the intercept point desired is within the US. If true, this means it is not “radio waves” collected “overseas”. For several reasons, I don’t think this mandates that FISA prohibits the desired intercept, but I don’t think it is as simple as you were discussing.

One thing is sure from this admin. … it never is as simple as it seems … please keep doing what you do to educate us, it’s always very appreciated even if we don’t say so often enough !