Big Brother: More Fallout

Well the big story of the week is already starting the slow drop off the radar of media coverage (mainstream media attention span is slightly less than that of the average four year old), but that doesn't mean there haven't been some new revelations and analyses.

[UPDATE: President Bush repeats his Thursday remarks in his radio address; Newsweek poll shows concern.]

First up, the NY Time has a timeline of this scandal. Click the thumbnail for the full graphic-



USA Today follow up on their revelations with a new story exploring the legality- or lack thereof- of this type of activity. It states, "The U.S. government's secret collection of Americans' phone records may not breach the Fourth Amendment's privacy guarantee, legal analysts said Thursday, but it could violate federal surveillance and telecommunication laws." That this activity is illegal should be no surprise to anyone who has followed this administration. Think Progress has a more detailed look at the specific laws violated here. Marty Lederman does the same.

Meanwhile, the telecommunication companies involved in the story are also making headlines. Verizon is being sued for turning over customer records to the NSA. The lawsuit could cost them $5 billion. Elsewhere, Qwest- who refused to participate in the program- said they were "deeply troubled" by the program's implications. In addition, the former CEO said he made his decision because "he learned that no such authority had been granted and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process". My guess is that Qwest has been getting a lot of new customers this week.

Digby looks at how a similar program of collecting records was tried during the Ford administration and also met with congressional resistance. Two men in the administration in particular tried to fight that resistance. Those two men? Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, natch.

Not surprisingly, we now learn Cheney unsuccessfully pushed for wider surveillance on domestic calls and emails.

I also wanted to highlight this- Matthew Yglesias has a look at the legal ramifications of prosecuting terrorists in the wake of this program-

Perhaps this is obvious, but the thing about the big NSA phone records dragnet is that this gives us the previously missing explanation as to why the administration thought it was so important to illegally wiretap people without warrants. That used to be a bit mysterious -- if the idea was to spy on people with al-Qaeda connections, getting a warrant should have been easy. The problem is that the evidentiary basis for believing the people in question had al-Qaeda connections now turns out to have been illegally obtained evidence from the broader NSA program. And then the problem reiterates itself -- if the listening-in stage of the program reveals anything interesting, you can't use that in a court either. You can't use it to get further warrants, you can't use it as the basis of a prosecution, basically you can't use it at all. So if you want to act, you're going to need to do one of these detention-without-trials deals or maybe a "rendition" or a military tribunal or what have you. And then, once the guy's in custody, if he tells you anything you can't use that either. So the whole process starts again and soon enough there's an entire parallel justice system operating entirely in secret without any oversight or real rules.

And that's the optimistic scenario in which all of the relevant people are maximally honest, honorable, and competent. Leaving aside the reality that nobody with a single shred of honesty or basic human dignity would be working for George W. Bush at this point, that's simply not a realistic picture of any large-scale enterprise. Things are bound to go wrong -- badly wrong -- when you have all these people operating outside the law without any checks or scrutiny.

He's right. There are already numerous stories of how the administration's illegal behavior has hampered their ability to prosecute many of the high-profile terrorists they have caught. In their rush to embrace inherent powers and do things the easy way- instead of the right way- they failed to see how their actions would backfire.

Finally, NSA whistleblower Russell Tice says this all just the tip of the iceberg. Stay tuned.