Immunity would kill the lawsuits that might expose the extent of domestic spying that Bush and his Adminstration had been engaged in. Lichtblau covers none of this. Instead we get spin. There were problems, now there are negotiations, both sides “have given some ground in the talks.” Yeah, right.

Thanks for this. FISA is a tough issue to explain or get people to act on, like calling Congress. I am so grateful to the FISA watchers like Greenwald, mcjoan, you … thanks. Makes me pick up the phone one more time and leave after hour messages for the dems in both houses.

Is Obama reluctant to get near this? Lose nervous nelly Dems in Congress who don’t want to look weak on security? Or get populace who can get hopped up over homeland security at the price of privacy … and not care about grotesque inefficiency and stupidity and greed and abuse of power in the hands of our leadership and surveillance forces. Spying is sexy and an easy sell… macho connotations.

Europeans aren’t bothering to protest Bush on his trip. But he still has power and we can’t afford to look away waiting for these months to go by. That is when sociopathic-narcissists do ANYTHING to have attention paid to them like start a war Iran as a last touch.

And also though it is nauseating to see the concreteness of their depths of corruption, dizzying, to fathom it, it must be done to turn this battered ship of state around.

Hugh where does Congress stand in processing the current FISA bill in question? I called my rep last week to give a hearty hell no to telecom immunity and a hell yeah to right of privacy. where are we now aside from bellyaching from the right? if you know. maybe I should check EW before asking…

Further Adventures in Reading the New York Times

Eric Lichtblau is often considered a hero reporter because he broke the story on the NSA warrantless wiretapping program. Lost in the shuffle is that Lichtblau and the Times sat on the story for 14 months through the 2004 elections and the Times only decided to publish the story after Lichtblau learned that James Risen with whom he had done the original investigation was going to use this material in a book he was writing.

In today’s Times (June 10, 2008) Lichtblau has an article Return to Old Spy Rules Is Seen as Deadline Nears:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06…..tml?ref=us

It is a piece that Michael Gordon would be proud of it since uses one of his signature devices, the needlessly anonymous source:

With Congress at an impasse over the government’s spy powers, Congressional and intelligence officials are bracing for the possibility that the government might have to revert to the old rules of terrorist surveillance, a situation that some officials predict could leave worrisome gaps in intelligence.

Snip

But those orders are growing staler by the day, officials said, and will begin to expire this August if nothing is done. (Wiretaps intended for Americans already require individual warrants issued by a secret court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court, or FISA court.)

As the last sentence indicates, this article is a hopeless, White House spinning botch. The revision that has been under consideration in Congress is precisely to FISA. Surveillance that is strictly foreign was never covered under FISA and has always been considered to be completely legitimate and not to require any legislative authorization. So right away, you see that Lichtblau is involved in a bait and switch.

A return to the old rules, they said, would mean that government lawyers, analysts and linguists would once again have to prepare individual warrants, potentially thousands of them, for surveillance of terrorism targets overseas.

Again this is just a straightforward lie. FISA covers cases where there is an American angle to the surveillance, i.e. if one end of a communication originates in this country or if the target is an American overseas. As I said above, FISA has nothing to do with foreign on foreign communication although this is a favorite talking point of right wingers.

Lichtblau does give some idea about what the Bush Administration is having fits about though:

the broad orders given to the companies starting last August cover tens of thousands of overseas phone numbers and e-mail addresses at one time, people with knowledge of the orders said.

In other words, blanket wiretaps. So say a resident of Dearborn, Michigan where 1/3 of the population is of Arab descent calls someone in the Middle East then very likely he/she and the person they called were “targets” and got hoovered up.

As to the politics of this, Lichtblau blows through them. Democrats caved last year and voted for a 6 month extension the Protect America Act (PAA) before the August recess. They did so in part because DNI Mike McConnell lied to them, reneged on a deal he had made with them, and then fabricated threats to pressure them. When the issue was taken up at the end of last year, the spirited opposition of Chris Todd forced the enabling Harry Reid to back off. Then the Republicans, you know the party of National Security, began to play political games with the issue. Despite this, Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller successfully caved and the Senate passed an amended FISA Act on February 12. Boehner and Republicans in the House tried a similar tactic but when they voted against the House bill, to the surprise of both Republicans and Democratic leaders, a group of Democratic progressives joined them and voted the bill down. As a result, the PAA expired. It did not die completely, however. Wiretaps begun under it could run for a year, meaning that these would start to expire in August. The principal snag in this for Bush was the issue of immunity for the telecoms. The telecoms didn’t need immunity because they were covered under existing law. They certainly didn’t deserve it, but that wasn’t the point. Immunity would kill the lawsuits that might expose the extent of domestic spying that Bush and his Adminstration had been engaged in. Lichtblau covers none of this. Instead we get spin. There were problems, now there are negotiations, both sides “have given some ground in the talks.” Yeah, right.

As for the FISA court (FISC), Lichtblau raises the scary possibility noted above that “individual warrants, potentially thousands of them” might have to be prepared for approval by the FISC and notes:

A senior intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the administration was concerned that reverting to the older standards and requiring individual warrants for each wiretap would create a severe gap in overseas intelligence by raising the bar for foreign surveillance collection.

So the FISC is portrayed as this insuperable obstacle to foreign surveillance. Yet of some 25,000 FISA requests from 1979 through 2007, the FISC has turned down a total of 9.
http://epic.org/privacy/wireta…..stats.html

Lichtblau also raises the issue of foreign communications going through American switches. Again this is a diversion. All sides have signaled that they would be willing to sign off on this and if Bush and the Republicans wanted a bill on this and they could have had it 10 months ago. Lichtblau even uses the old line that the Democrats want to get this over and done with by the convention because by caving in to the Republicans and a deeply unpopular President at the end of his term they will appear strong on national security.

Perhaps the most disingenuous flourish in the whole article Lichtblau saves for the end when he accords the last word finally to a real critic Caroline Fredrickson of the ACLU. “Why not just kick it down the road” through a short-term extension, she asked. “If there’s a need to do something, they should do the least harm possible.” This is the traditional media’s idea of balance: write a whole article full of spin and distortion, throw in a final comment by someone with an opposing view and voilà you have achieved fairness and balance.