Spy Lies

Some more articles/editorials on the NSA scandal...

NY Times story: Files Say Agency Initiated Growth of Spying Effort

The National Security Agency acted on its own authority, without a formal directive from President Bush, to expand its domestic surveillance operations in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to declassified documents released Tuesday...

Slate: Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy- Why the NSA's snooping is unprecedented in scale and scope.

Adm. John Poindexter, [Total Information Awareness]'s creator, believed in the potential intelligence benefits of data-mining broadband communications, but he was also well aware of the potential for excess... Poindexter envisioned a "privacy appliance," a device that would strip any identifiers from the information—such as names or addresses—so that government miners could see only patterns. Then if there was reason to believe that the information belonged to a group that was planning an attack, the government could seek a warrant and disable the privacy control for that specific data... "The idea is that this device, cryptographically protected to prevent tampering, would ensure that no one could abuse private information without an immutable digital record of their misdeeds," according to a 2003 government report to Congress about TIA. "The details of the operation of the appliance would be available to the public."

The NSA's domestic eavesdropping program, however, appears to have none of these safeguards....

Congress might also ask why in the rush to begin data-mining, the NSA has abandoned the privacy controls planned for the TIA. As Adm. Poindexter himself noted in his resignation letter from the program in 2003, "it would be no good to solve the security problem and give up the privacy and civil liberties that make our country great."

Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Bob Barr): Presidents all the same when scandal strikes

Two of the most powerful moments of political déjà vu I have ever experienced took place recently in the context of the Bush administration's defense of presidentially ordered electronic spying on American citizens.

First, in the best tradition of former President Bill Clinton's classic, "it-all-depends-on-what-the-meaning-of-is-is" defense, President Bush responded to a question at a White House news conference about what now appears to be a clear violation of federal electronic monitoring laws by trying to argue that he had not ordered the National Security Agency to "monitor" phone and e-mail communications of American citizens without court order; he had merely ordered them to "detect" improper communications...