The Daily Background
| SPYGATE Roundup
by Arlen Parsa
It’s the Holiday Season, and I’m with the family- so posting will mostly be limited to blog and news roundups concentrated on one or two topics each.
The Alito Angle:
Summary via Mercury News:
Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito defended the right of government officials to order domestic wiretaps for national security when he worked at the Reagan Justice Department, an echo of President Bush’s rationale for spying on U.S. residents in the war on terror.
This story will be back in January, no doubt, reports AP:
Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Philadelphia, said Monday he would ask Alito about the president’s authority [specifically on wiretapping sans warrants] at confirmation hearings beginning Jan. 9.
The NSA Angle:
NSA Web site says it’s a violation of the 4th Amendment to spy on Americans writes AMERICAblog:
Well, they say it on their own Web site, so I guess that issue is settled. It’s a violation of the 4th Amendment to the Constitution for the NSA to spy on Americans. End of discussion. Bush violated the constitutional rights of every single American.
On the Future of the NSA, Knight Rider (a Newspaper Syndicate) has this to say, in an article titled “Some fear eavesdropping could undermine work of spy agency“:
The White House decision to order surveillance of international phone calls by U.S. citizens without a warrant violated longstanding practices and could undermine a key U.S. intelligence agency that’s critical in the struggle against terrorists, former senior intelligence officials and other experts said this week.
The super-secret National Security Agency, which eavesdropped on the Soviet Union’s leaders and scored other intelligence coups during the Cold War, has spent three decades recovering from domestic spying scandals in the 1970s.
Now, with its electronic ears and vast computer banks turned primarily to intercepting suspecting terrorists, the officials said they fear that the NSA once again will bear the brunt of congressional scrutiny and public outrage, complicating its mission.
“The damage it’s done to NSA’s reputation is almost irreversible in my view,” said a longtime top intelligence official with intimate knowledge of the agency’s workings.
The Latest:
And finally- the latest. Original Spygate reporters Lichtblau and Risen are back with a new NYT report entitled “Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report,” choicequote:
The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.
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