Hey, I’ve tapped my own phone!
ABC News: Hayden Insists NSA Surveillance Is Legal — There is something massively reassuring about guys like this in high places. He would have fit right in with Stalin. Hell with the Constitution and unreasonable search and seizure and the rest of all that bullshit. It’s about the terrorists. And golly, they still can’t find Bin Laden. And why would they actually want to find Bin Laden if they can keep piling up this nonsense the longer they don’t find him. J. Edgar Hoover would be proud. Make book on everyone.
WASHINGTON May 18, 2006 (AP)— CIA nominee Michael Hayden acknowledged concerns about civil liberties even as he vigorously defended the Bush administration’s warrantless eavesdropping program as a legal spy tool needed to ensnare terrorists.
Peppered with tough questions at a daylong confirmation hearing Thursday, the four-star Air Force general portrayed himself as an independent thinker, capable of taking over the CIA as it struggles with issues ranging from nuclear threats to its own place among 15 other spy agencies.
Hayden spoke of his own concerns about the no-warrant surveillance program and other eavesdropping operations he oversaw as National Security Agency chief from 1999 until last year.
Hey, yeah so those FISA judges are appointed by John Roberts and the FISA court also seems to have a FISA 3 judge oversight court. The problem is there is no public supervision of the court. How can we know what’s going on in that area?
p
Something to make you go Hmm:
Has anyone leaked whether or not these spy programs have gone through the proper legal channels? Whether FISA or otherwise. In all that has been reported I don’t recall anything, pro or con, about whether or not these programs were legally approved by someone. Only that they exist.The mere existence of a spy program does not necessarily mean it violates the constitution.
It makes me wounder how much the leaker’s really know. Were they high enough in the loop to know about the legal authorization? Or just lackeys who worked within the program? And if they are only lackeys, what was/is their motivation for violating national security in the way that they did?
Seriously, I would like to know if these leaker’s told anyone whether these programs did or did not go through legal channels before they began? And if that has been reported and I missed it, please link your sources.
It doesn’t look very good for Hayden to be defending something almost every legal scholar has condemned and so very few have endorsed. The best thing about these hearings are they are under oath and Hayden will have to answer them, even if in-camera.
Let’s look at the 4th in light of our current administration:
4th: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,
Administration: It is reasanable for us to do whatever we feel like as everything we do is to protect the people who put us here and trust that we are reasonable.
4th: and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
Administration: It doesn’t say we need a warrent to search, Just we need certin things to get one. Since some believe that “possible terorist info” isn’t probable cause, and that “everything and anything” isn’t particular enough, we just won’t go through the hassle and paper trail to get a warrent and just search wherever and whenever we want as we beleive anything we do is reasonable, and if we tell no one what we do, how can anyone argue that it was unreasonable?
Someday I hope we have a goverment that is truly “for the people” but until that day I guess I have no privacy and no one else does… but of course if we have nothing to hide then why do we need privacy? (because we do!)
You know there is a resemblance to Kruschev. I’ve seen a photo of Kruschev in uniform at about Hayden’s age. You should find it and do a split screen.
One sidelight of naming Haden to the CIA post is these Senate confirmation hearings. It’s a rare chance to get sworn testimony from someone who knows these programs inside out. Most answers we get these days are not obtained under oath.
what other databases is the nsa creating that has not seen the light of day. credit card/debit card transactions, motel stays, airline bookings, bank records, etc. to my mind, these and others are needed to do real database searches for terrorists. the more info, the better the search.
what is worse, is that the bigger the databases, and the longer the period that they cover, the greater the urge to misuse them.
this also puts a new spin on the dept. of justice’s request for a weeks worth of search data from google, yahoo, msn. it really, really scares me!
Jim W: If these programs did go through the proper process then the administration would simply say so.
Way to kitchen-sink your arguement and make it worthless.
The mere existence of a spy program does not necessarily mean it violates the constitution.
No, it doesn’t. The question is, who decides what is constitutional? Answer: [normally] “the courts”.
From the story: Hayden said he decided to go ahead with the terrorist surveillance program in October 2001 after internal discussions about what more his NSA could do to detect potential attacks. He believed the work to be legal and necessary an assertion Democrats and civil liberties groups have aggressively questioned.
When does “mere existence” stop making sense as a defence? Answer: When the “program” has been in operation for 4+ years, with no documented oversight – because the people running the program decided they didn’t need oversight from anyone else.
…what was/is their motivation for violating national security in the way that they did?
Must be a lot of Democrats and civil liberties group members infiltrating the NSA. Who else would question the General’s belief that it was legal?
Didn’t I see that guy at the top of the page starring in WWII
Hayden looks more than a little bit like Sgt. Schultz from Hogans Heros.
I swear this site gets more and more liberal every day I visit.
I swear this site gets more and more liberal every day I visit. Bryan, you need to learn the difference between “liberal” and “libertarian”.
“It’s about the terrorists. And golly, they still can’t find Bin Laden.”
Nobody calls Bush on this. Almost 5 years since 9/11 and ALL his efforts including illegal wire-tapping, wars, threats and fear-mongering, Bush has still not caught the #1 guy who was the origin, the founder, THE GOD of TERRORISM!
Osama bin Laden is FREE.
Nobody calls Bush on this. We let Bush off the hook. What ever happen to his boast about catching him “Dead or Alive”, “smoking him out of his hole”…
No, but Bush gets on an aircraft carrier in military uniform to declare “Mission Accomplished”. Acomplished what?!? you faggot for a president. Where the fuck is bin Laden? Up your ass?
Of course, it doesn’t make any sense at all that Hayden might actually be telling the truth under oath. That would make too much sense. After all if he is wearing stars on his shoulders he must, of necessity, be lying. After all if George Bush reccommends him for the job then he MUST be a practiced liar. Gimme a break.
Kent,
He has repeatdly stated different things on the NSA spying programs. For example, he was for FISA warrents before he was against them.
There there is the issue that he repeatedly stated that he had brifed congress, while technically true, he did not brief congress to the extent that the law requires.
Finally, except for actual terrorists, everybody supports the govt spying on terrorists. However, this isn’t about that. This is about a pattern of this administration of, lying about something, then “coming clean” then finding out a couple of weeks later that they were lying again. Over and over again, like a top 40 single.
So is he telling the truth this time? I would say, for our lives and liberties sake, just assume this administration is lying, then make them prove they are telling the truth. After all, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, to quote Rumsfeld.
#16 “Of course, it doesn’t make any sense at all that Hayden might actually be telling the truth under oath. That would make too much sense.”
How can we know he is telling the truth, when the Justice Department isn’t allowed to investigate – because the people to be investigated won’t grant a security clearance to the investigators??
What really bothers me is when his answer is “I can’t answer that in open session.”
We can never be told what he says in closed session, because we don’t have a clearance. Our elected representatives can’t publicly complain about details of the program they think might be illegal – because they would be violating secrecy laws.
They can only complain about their belief that it is illegal – without going into specifics – because that would be illegal.
We are asked to trust them, and then someone lets us know they are doing things we might object to…
When we do object, the administration doesn’t complain that the facts are wrong – but that we never should have been given the facts in the first place…
“I am the great and powerful OZ !!!, …pay no attention to the man behind the curtain…”
So angry, and yet so unable to prove your point… either here or in the cage.
#18 Mike, excellent expression of our frustrations with secret surveillance programs, and let me just add something. I got to see some of the hearing yesterday, and Senator Feinstein (and possibly others) mentioned that work is being done in an attempt to amend FISA to account for updated technologies and conditions. That’s a great idea, but it doesn’t address an even more important issue. The Administration still claims, and some of these NSA programs are based on their claim, that they are not bound by FISA and that the President’s Article II role as Commander-in-Chief supercedes any act of Congress to regulate his surveillance powers in a time of war.
Until the war on terror is over, we have a Commander-in-Chief not subject to Congressional checks on his power. Can anyone give me an update on when we expect the war on terror to end?
Hayden’s oath as an officer will conflict with his job at the CIA. Does it conflict with the oath he’s under before Congress?
Milo,
His oath as an officer (to protect and defend America from enemies foreign and domestic) will conflict with his job at the CIA. Exactly how is that? Why is the fact that he is an officer in the military an automatic disqualifier to be director of the CIA. He is only like the fifth or sixth military head of the CIA (several of whom were placed there by Democrat administrations, by the way). Why is it suddenly a problem this time?
I have seen plenty of Democrat accusations that the administration is lying about numerous topics. However, I have yet to see ANY substantive proof of even one lie. Being accused of lying is not the same as being convicted of lying…
What does the NSA mean by “calling patterns?” And what information do they really extract, and how? The answer(s) are things you just won’t see in a newspaper, though there isn’t any reason a decent science or technical editor couldn’t do it. Calling patterns is an informal name for a whole range of things–some well understood by mathematicians, and other things peculiar to the folks at the NSA. It may start with “Hi, Mom,” but it quickly becomes, down at the NSA:
“let xi denote the score of the ith node. Let Ai,j be the adjacency matrix of the network. Hence Ai,j = 1 if the ith node is connected to the jth node, and Ai,j = 0 otherwise.” \
Thanks to Wikipedia for the excerpt. And by the way, “nodes” can mean you. Or not. It depends on what the National Security Agency really means when it refers to calling patterns, and just what part of calling patterns it is working on. Where’s the information, you ask: What happened when I swore on the phone and told my friend to nuke Tehran, and he called his friend in that suburb outside of Moscow and repeated the conversation?
The idea may be that if such specific info during the conversation is there (and not just the pattern of calls), privacy is preserved because the calls themselves are encrypted. Well, if encryption is used that suggests that the content of the calls is preserved. But the NSA is being more than a bit disingenuous on this point. Of course the calls are encrypted–it would be impractical if not impossible to store huge volumes of information without compression and similar techniques, and encrption would certainly figure into that. Possibly something like “sampling” is used, where only some pieces of the caller’s conversation is preserved.
What else does “calling patterns” mean? I’m no expert, but a quick check on Wikipedia redirected me to “link analysis,” which is another name for “network theory,” and this is used by many disciplines–most interestly, the networks can be social. Linking calling patterns (or calling networks, where each call is a node) to social networks, then flagging interesting nodes and patterns and drilling down using network analysis algorthims.
Whew! This is part of what they do, but you just don’t get a clear explanation or even a reference to it from the news. Why? Any decent science editor could take the subject and explain it clear language to readers.
As I said in a previous post on my blog, the threat to our privacy in this manner is profound and new. Given that, extraordinary inquiry into the subject is necessary, but you can’t do that without specific technical information. Much of that is secret, but much is out there in the public domain.
We need to know more.