The Goal of Wholesale Surveillance

[Octafish]

75. ''J Edgar Hoover with Supercomputers'' is how Ray McGovern put it in 2006...

From when Gonzo was a squirt.

J. Edgar Hoover With Supercomputers

by Ray McGovern
AntiWar.com, Jan. 6, 2006

EXCERPT...

The most cynical and, I fear, the most direct answer can be gleaned from Vice President Cheney's bizarre assertion – supported, no doubt, by a stack of in-house legal opinion – that in wartime, the president "needs to have his powers unimpaired." As noted above, on Dec. 19, Gonzales invoked the "inherent authority under the Constitution" of the commander in chief, as well as the equally ludicrous claim that Congress' authorization of war after 9/11 trumps FISA – a claim that even the Washington Post has termed "impossible to believe."

These extreme views are the same ones that underpin the president's decision to flout international and U.S. criminal law by approving practices like torture, until now almost universally rejected by civilized societies. The answer may be simple – "imperial hubris," one might call it. And if – as seems to be the case – senior leaders like Colin Powell acquiesce in torture and Gen. Mike Hayden in illegal eavesdropping, shame on them. This would merely show, once again, that absolute power truly does corrupt absolutely – indeed, that even closeness to absolute power can.

A more nuanced explanation may lie in the physics of the challenges faced by the NSA and the availability of sophisticated technologies not foreseen when the FISA law was passed in 1978. At the press conference, the attorney general issued a pointed reminder that there have been "tremendous advances in technology" since 1978. Recent press reports on the number of communications being monitored by the NSA suggest that the number may be so large as to be technically or practically impossible to take to the attorney general for approval as individual FISA "emergencies." Consistently high numbers of monitored communications could have trouble passing muster at the FISA court as "emergencies," for the exceptions would quickly swallow the rule.

A recent article by Charles Fried in the Boston Globe suggests that communications are now selected for monitoring based on highly sophisticated algorithm programs and that "at the first, broadest stages of the scan, no human being is involved – only computers." This, and the high numbers involved, would make it impossible to obtain "emergency" AG approval on an individual basis, as required by FISA.

As Gonzales has indicated, initial soundings were taken with Congress and the prognosis was deemed poor for obtaining NSA vacuum-cleaner-type authority to suck up communications – including those to or from Americans – from wires and the ether. But is that not what government lawyers are for; i.e., to devise ways to make such things legal and possible at the same time? There is no sign of any serious effort on the administration's part toward that end. Rather, administration officials preferred to fall back on the "anyway" rationalization; i.e., the notion pushed by top administration lawyers that the president has the power to authorize eavesdropping anyway.

CONTINUED...

http://www.antiwar.com/mcgovern/?articleid=8349

Certainly, when pretzeldent Jebthro puts his feet up on JFK's desk, everyone on DU now thinking NSA tracking is somebody else's problem will be OK with it.