Tuesday, December 20, 2005

Why Circumvent FISA?

One of the questions floating around the domestic spying story is why Bush and his cronies felt the need to go around FISA and the secret intelligence court. In reviewing decisions of the court it's clear that the number of times it's disallowed a wire-tap or other intelligence gathering operations can be counted on one hand. Additionally, the Attorney General is allowed to get retroactive approval from the court for domestic wire-taps. If approval from the court is so generous, what exactly would prompt Bush to need to get around even those resrictions? Kevin Drum at the Washington Monthly blog has an interesting theory:

After all, the FISA court would have approved taps of domestic-to-international calls as quickly and easily as they do with normal domestic wiretaps. What's more, Congress wouldn't have had any objection to supporting a routine program expansion; George Bush wouldn't have explained it with gobbledegook about the difference between monitoring and detecting; Jay Rockefeller wouldn't have been reminded of TIA; and the Times wouldn't have had any issues over divulging sensitive technology.

It seems clear that there's something involved here that goes far beyond ordinary wiretaps, regardless of the technology used. Perhaps some kind of massive data mining, which makes it impossible to get individual warrants? Stay tuned.

It's an interesting question, and an intriguing theory. I don't really know if some massive data mining is going on, but it sure seems that it's something more then ordinary intelligence gathering. I'm sure in the coming weeks will get a better idea of what exactly the NSA has been up to.

2 comments:

adam said...

On the other hand, I'm not sure there needs to be another explanation than the adminstration's unbridled arrogance in assuming executive power.

Nat-Wu said...

Well, we can assume the administration's arrogance safely, but that doesn't mean they don't have other reasons for doing something like this without seeking Congressional approval.

I can see how they'd be overstepping their bounds if they were simply sitting their gathering information on everyone and everything connected in any way to a terrorist. I can see this situation: let's say Al-Quaeda was reading our blog (not that our readership is that big) because we mentioned them. An captured computer shows our web address, so the investigators look it up. From there, they investigate the three contributors to the blog and start gathering info on us (and I know this is hyperbole). They're not going to want to go get warrants for that (and they wouldn't be able to anyway). It's that type of thing that civil liberty watchdogs are looking out for, and it may be that kind of thing that they're trying to avoid being caught doing. Therefore they wouldn't want to go talking about it to Congress.

Of course I have no way of knowing if it really is that type of intelligence gathering, but if it's anything like that we have good reason to be worried about government agencies violating our privacy.