G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
Bush's Secret Spying on Americans
By Robert Parry
Created Aug 3 2007 - 8:31am
The dispute over whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales committed perjury
when he parsed words about George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program
misses a larger point: the extraordinary secrecy surrounding these spying
operations is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.
There has never been a reasonable explanation for why a fuller discussion of
these operations would help al-Qaeda, although that claim often is used by
the Bush administration to challenge the patriotism of its critics or to
avoid tough questions.
On July 27, for instance, White House press secretary Tony Snow fended off
reporters who asked about apparent contradictions in Gonzales's testimony by
saying:
"This gets us back into the situation that I understand is unsatisfactory
because there are lots of questions raised and the vast majority of those
we're
not going to be in a position to answer, simply because they do involve
matters of classification that we cannot and will not discuss publicly."
Discussion closed.
But al-Qaeda terrorists always have assumed that their electronic
communications were vulnerable to interception, which is why 9/11 attackers
like Mohamed Atta traveled overseas for face-to-face meetings with their
handlers. They limited their phone calls to mostly routine conversations.
The terrorists also had no reason to know or to care that the U.S.
government was or wasn't getting wiretap approval from the secret court
created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They simply took for
granted that their communications could be intercepted and acted
accordingly.
It never made sense to think that al-Qaeda terrorists suddenly would get
loose-lipped just because the FISA court was or wasn't in the mix. The FISA
court rubber-stamps almost all wiretap requests from the Executive Branch
for domestic spying, and overseas calls don't require a warrant.
Can anyone really imagine a conversation like "Gee, Osama, since Bush has to
get FISA approval, we can now call our sleeper agents and plan the next
attack."
Similarly, there's no reason to think terrorists would change their behavior
significantly if they knew that the U.S. government was engaged in massive
data-mining operations, poring through electronic records of citizens and
non-citizens alike.
The 9/11 attackers mostly stayed off the grid and many of their
transactions, such as renting housing, would not alone have raised
suspicions. Indeed, the patterns that deserved more attention, such as
enrollment in flight-training classes and the arrival of known al-Qaeda
operatives, were detected by alert FBI agents in the field but ignored by
FBI officials in Washington - and by Bush while on a month-long vacation in
Texas.
The 9/11 attacks were less a failure of intelligence than a failure of
political attention by Bush's national security team.
Americans in the Dark
So what's the real explanation for all the secrecy about the overall
structure of the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program?
The chief reason, especially for the excessive secrecy around the
data-mining operations, appears to be Bush's political need to prevent a
full debate inside the United States about the security value of these Big
Brother-type procedures when weighed against invasions of Americans'
privacy.
Bush knows he could run into trouble if he doesn't keep the American people
in the dark. In 2002, for instance, when the Bush administration launched a
project seeking "total information awareness" on virtually everyone on earth
involved in the modern economy, the disclosure was met with public alarm.
The administration cited the terrorist threat to justify the program which
involved applying advanced computer technology to analyze trillions of bytes
of data on electronic transactions and communications. The goal was to study
the electronic footprints left by every person in the developed world during
the course of their everyday lives - from the innocuous to the embarrassing
to the potentially significant.
The government could cross-check books borrowed from a library, fertilizer
bought at a farm-supply outlet, X-rated movies rented at a video store,
prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets
reserved for a plane, borders crossed while traveling, rooms rented at a
motel, and countless other examples.
Bush's aides argued that their access to this electronic data might help
detect terrorists, but the data could prove even more useful in building
dossiers on anti-war activists or blackmailing political opponents. A
targeted individual would have almost no privacy in the face of an
all-knowing government.
Despite the administration's assurance that political abuses wouldn't
happen, the capability would be a huge temptation for political strategists
like Karl Rove who have made clear that they view anyone not supporting
Bush's
war on terror as a terrorist ally.
In 2002, the technological blueprint for this Orwellian-style project was on
the drawing board at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the
Pentagon's top research and development arm. DARPA commissioned a
comprehensive plan for this electronic spying - and did so publicly.
"Transactional data" was to be gleaned from electronic data on every kind of
activity - "financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country
entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources,
government, communications," according to the Web site for DARPA's
Information Awareness Office.
The program would then cross-reference this data with the "biometric
signatures of humans," data collected on individuals' faces, fingerprints,
gaits and irises. With this knowledge at its fingertips, the government
would have what it called "total information awareness" about pretty much
everyone.
Masonic Eye
The Information Awareness Office even boasted a logo that looked like some
kind of clip art from George Orwell's 1984. The logo showed the Masonic
symbol of an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid peering over the globe, with the
slogan, "scientia est potentia," Latin for "knowledge is power."
Though apparently unintentional, DARPA's choice of a giant white pyramid
eerily recalled Orwell's Ministry of Truth, "an enormous pyramidal structure
of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres
into the air." The all-seeing Masonic eye could be read as "Big Brother Is
Watching."
Former Vice President Al Gore and some civil libertarians noted these
strange similarities both in style and substance to Orwell's totalitarian
world.
"We have always held out the shibboleth of Big Brother as a nightmare vision
of the future that we're going to avoid at all costs," Gore said. "They have
now taken the most fateful step in the direction of that Big Brother
nightmare that any president has ever allowed to occur."
Besides the parallels to 1984, the administration's assurances about
respecting constitutional boundaries were undercut by its provocative choice
of director for the Information Awareness Office. The project was headed by
President Reagan's former national security adviser John Poindexter, who was
caught flouting constitutional safeguards and federal laws in the
Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s.
Poindexter was the White House official who approved the transfer of profits
from the sale of missiles to Iran's Islamic fundamentalist government to
Nicaraguan contra rebels for the purchase of weapons, thus circumventing the
Constitution's grant of war-making power to Congress. Under U.S. law at the
time, military aid was banned to both Iran and the contras.
In 1990, Poindexter was convicted of five felonies in connection with the
Iran-Contra scheme and the cover-up. But his case was overturned by a
conservative-dominated three-judge appeals court panel, which voted 2-1 that
the conviction was tainted by congressional immunity given to Poindexter to
compel his testimony to Congress in 1987.
Though Poindexter's Iran-Contra excesses in the 1980s might have been viewed
by some as disqualifying for a sensitive job overseeing the collection of
information about nearly everyone on earth, DARPA said it sought out such
committed characters to run its projects.
"The best DARPA program managers have always been freewheeling zealots in
pursuit of their goals," the agency's Web site said. [For more details on
this and other Bush administration authoritarian-style projects, see our new
book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush [1].]
'Scrapped' Program
When the "total information awareness" project was disclosed, public outrage
forced the Bush administration into retreat, ousting Poindexter and
supposedly scrapping the massive data-mining program.
What is now apparent, however, is that the Bush administration simply took
many of these data-mining features and put them under the rubric of what's
known generally as the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or as administration
insiders call it, "the TSP."
The data-mining component of the operation is considered so sensitive that
in December 2005 when Bush acknowledged the TSP's warrantless wiretapping,
he continued his silence about the data-mining aspect.
That distinction is at the heart of the dispute about Gonzales's testimony.
The Attorney General told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was no
significant internal disagreement about the legality of the surveillance
program undertaken by the National Security Agency, which is responsible for
high-tech electronic spying.
However, senior senators - after noting that former Deputy Attorney General
James Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller recounted high-level threats to
resign over the project's legality - raised questions about whether Gonzales
had committed perjury.
In a letter to senior members of the Judiciary Committee on Aug. 1, Gonzales
acknowledged that he had parsed his words narrowly.
"I recognize that the use of the term Terrorist Surveillance Program and my
shorthand reference to the 'program' publicly 'described by the president'
may have created confusion, particularly for those who are knowledgeable
about the N.S.A. activities authorized by the presidential order," the
Attorney General wrote.
A day earlier, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell made a
similar point in a letter to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania. McConnell
wrote that after the 9/11 attacks, Bush signed a single executive order
which authorized "a number of . intelligence activities."
Defending Gonzales's from perjury accusations, McConnell revealed that, in
administration jargon, the Terrorist Surveillance Program is only "one
particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more." [Washington Post,
Aug. 1, 2007 [2]]
Real Reasons
Yet, whether Gonzales's legalistic parsing crossed the line into perjury or
not, the larger question is why the Congress and the American people have
been kept so ignorant of these programs that the administration feels it can
get away with playing word games.
Since al-Qaeda already assumes it's under tight scrutiny - and since
technical secrets of the surveillance program could still be legitimately
classified - there appears to be no compelling operational reason for
blocking a more informed public debate that would weigh the proper balance
between liberty and security in a democratic society.
Yet, because of the secrecy that Bush has pulled down around these
operations, neither Congress nor the people can evaluate whether the
trade-offs of liberty for security are worth it. Leading senators can't even
make an informed judgment about whether Gonzales lied to them.
But that, of course, might be exactly the point. The real purpose of all the
secrecy appears to be to enable the Bush administration to construct an
authoritarian framework - similar to the "total information awareness"
concept - without the American people knowing that their liberties are
facing a draconian threat from intrusive government spying.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Robert Parry
Created Aug 3 2007 - 8:31am
The dispute over whether Attorney General Alberto Gonzales committed perjury
when he parsed words about George W. Bush's warrantless surveillance program
misses a larger point: the extraordinary secrecy surrounding these spying
operations is not aimed at al-Qaeda, but at the American people.
There has never been a reasonable explanation for why a fuller discussion of
these operations would help al-Qaeda, although that claim often is used by
the Bush administration to challenge the patriotism of its critics or to
avoid tough questions.
On July 27, for instance, White House press secretary Tony Snow fended off
reporters who asked about apparent contradictions in Gonzales's testimony by
saying:
"This gets us back into the situation that I understand is unsatisfactory
because there are lots of questions raised and the vast majority of those
we're
not going to be in a position to answer, simply because they do involve
matters of classification that we cannot and will not discuss publicly."
Discussion closed.
But al-Qaeda terrorists always have assumed that their electronic
communications were vulnerable to interception, which is why 9/11 attackers
like Mohamed Atta traveled overseas for face-to-face meetings with their
handlers. They limited their phone calls to mostly routine conversations.
The terrorists also had no reason to know or to care that the U.S.
government was or wasn't getting wiretap approval from the secret court
created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. They simply took for
granted that their communications could be intercepted and acted
accordingly.
It never made sense to think that al-Qaeda terrorists suddenly would get
loose-lipped just because the FISA court was or wasn't in the mix. The FISA
court rubber-stamps almost all wiretap requests from the Executive Branch
for domestic spying, and overseas calls don't require a warrant.
Can anyone really imagine a conversation like "Gee, Osama, since Bush has to
get FISA approval, we can now call our sleeper agents and plan the next
attack."
Similarly, there's no reason to think terrorists would change their behavior
significantly if they knew that the U.S. government was engaged in massive
data-mining operations, poring through electronic records of citizens and
non-citizens alike.
The 9/11 attackers mostly stayed off the grid and many of their
transactions, such as renting housing, would not alone have raised
suspicions. Indeed, the patterns that deserved more attention, such as
enrollment in flight-training classes and the arrival of known al-Qaeda
operatives, were detected by alert FBI agents in the field but ignored by
FBI officials in Washington - and by Bush while on a month-long vacation in
Texas.
The 9/11 attacks were less a failure of intelligence than a failure of
political attention by Bush's national security team.
Americans in the Dark
So what's the real explanation for all the secrecy about the overall
structure of the so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program?
The chief reason, especially for the excessive secrecy around the
data-mining operations, appears to be Bush's political need to prevent a
full debate inside the United States about the security value of these Big
Brother-type procedures when weighed against invasions of Americans'
privacy.
Bush knows he could run into trouble if he doesn't keep the American people
in the dark. In 2002, for instance, when the Bush administration launched a
project seeking "total information awareness" on virtually everyone on earth
involved in the modern economy, the disclosure was met with public alarm.
The administration cited the terrorist threat to justify the program which
involved applying advanced computer technology to analyze trillions of bytes
of data on electronic transactions and communications. The goal was to study
the electronic footprints left by every person in the developed world during
the course of their everyday lives - from the innocuous to the embarrassing
to the potentially significant.
The government could cross-check books borrowed from a library, fertilizer
bought at a farm-supply outlet, X-rated movies rented at a video store,
prescriptions filled at a pharmacy, sites visited on the Internet, tickets
reserved for a plane, borders crossed while traveling, rooms rented at a
motel, and countless other examples.
Bush's aides argued that their access to this electronic data might help
detect terrorists, but the data could prove even more useful in building
dossiers on anti-war activists or blackmailing political opponents. A
targeted individual would have almost no privacy in the face of an
all-knowing government.
Despite the administration's assurance that political abuses wouldn't
happen, the capability would be a huge temptation for political strategists
like Karl Rove who have made clear that they view anyone not supporting
Bush's
war on terror as a terrorist ally.
In 2002, the technological blueprint for this Orwellian-style project was on
the drawing board at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the
Pentagon's top research and development arm. DARPA commissioned a
comprehensive plan for this electronic spying - and did so publicly.
"Transactional data" was to be gleaned from electronic data on every kind of
activity - "financial, education, travel, medical, veterinary, country
entry, place/event entry, transportation, housing, critical resources,
government, communications," according to the Web site for DARPA's
Information Awareness Office.
The program would then cross-reference this data with the "biometric
signatures of humans," data collected on individuals' faces, fingerprints,
gaits and irises. With this knowledge at its fingertips, the government
would have what it called "total information awareness" about pretty much
everyone.
Masonic Eye
The Information Awareness Office even boasted a logo that looked like some
kind of clip art from George Orwell's 1984. The logo showed the Masonic
symbol of an all-seeing eye atop a pyramid peering over the globe, with the
slogan, "scientia est potentia," Latin for "knowledge is power."
Though apparently unintentional, DARPA's choice of a giant white pyramid
eerily recalled Orwell's Ministry of Truth, "an enormous pyramidal structure
of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres
into the air." The all-seeing Masonic eye could be read as "Big Brother Is
Watching."
Former Vice President Al Gore and some civil libertarians noted these
strange similarities both in style and substance to Orwell's totalitarian
world.
"We have always held out the shibboleth of Big Brother as a nightmare vision
of the future that we're going to avoid at all costs," Gore said. "They have
now taken the most fateful step in the direction of that Big Brother
nightmare that any president has ever allowed to occur."
Besides the parallels to 1984, the administration's assurances about
respecting constitutional boundaries were undercut by its provocative choice
of director for the Information Awareness Office. The project was headed by
President Reagan's former national security adviser John Poindexter, who was
caught flouting constitutional safeguards and federal laws in the
Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s.
Poindexter was the White House official who approved the transfer of profits
from the sale of missiles to Iran's Islamic fundamentalist government to
Nicaraguan contra rebels for the purchase of weapons, thus circumventing the
Constitution's grant of war-making power to Congress. Under U.S. law at the
time, military aid was banned to both Iran and the contras.
In 1990, Poindexter was convicted of five felonies in connection with the
Iran-Contra scheme and the cover-up. But his case was overturned by a
conservative-dominated three-judge appeals court panel, which voted 2-1 that
the conviction was tainted by congressional immunity given to Poindexter to
compel his testimony to Congress in 1987.
Though Poindexter's Iran-Contra excesses in the 1980s might have been viewed
by some as disqualifying for a sensitive job overseeing the collection of
information about nearly everyone on earth, DARPA said it sought out such
committed characters to run its projects.
"The best DARPA program managers have always been freewheeling zealots in
pursuit of their goals," the agency's Web site said. [For more details on
this and other Bush administration authoritarian-style projects, see our new
book, Neck Deep: The Disastrous Presidency of George W. Bush [1].]
'Scrapped' Program
When the "total information awareness" project was disclosed, public outrage
forced the Bush administration into retreat, ousting Poindexter and
supposedly scrapping the massive data-mining program.
What is now apparent, however, is that the Bush administration simply took
many of these data-mining features and put them under the rubric of what's
known generally as the Terrorist Surveillance Program, or as administration
insiders call it, "the TSP."
The data-mining component of the operation is considered so sensitive that
in December 2005 when Bush acknowledged the TSP's warrantless wiretapping,
he continued his silence about the data-mining aspect.
That distinction is at the heart of the dispute about Gonzales's testimony.
The Attorney General told the Senate Judiciary Committee that there was no
significant internal disagreement about the legality of the surveillance
program undertaken by the National Security Agency, which is responsible for
high-tech electronic spying.
However, senior senators - after noting that former Deputy Attorney General
James Comey and FBI Director Robert Mueller recounted high-level threats to
resign over the project's legality - raised questions about whether Gonzales
had committed perjury.
In a letter to senior members of the Judiciary Committee on Aug. 1, Gonzales
acknowledged that he had parsed his words narrowly.
"I recognize that the use of the term Terrorist Surveillance Program and my
shorthand reference to the 'program' publicly 'described by the president'
may have created confusion, particularly for those who are knowledgeable
about the N.S.A. activities authorized by the presidential order," the
Attorney General wrote.
A day earlier, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell made a
similar point in a letter to Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania. McConnell
wrote that after the 9/11 attacks, Bush signed a single executive order
which authorized "a number of . intelligence activities."
Defending Gonzales's from perjury accusations, McConnell revealed that, in
administration jargon, the Terrorist Surveillance Program is only "one
particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more." [Washington Post,
Aug. 1, 2007 [2]]
Real Reasons
Yet, whether Gonzales's legalistic parsing crossed the line into perjury or
not, the larger question is why the Congress and the American people have
been kept so ignorant of these programs that the administration feels it can
get away with playing word games.
Since al-Qaeda already assumes it's under tight scrutiny - and since
technical secrets of the surveillance program could still be legitimately
classified - there appears to be no compelling operational reason for
blocking a more informed public debate that would weigh the proper balance
between liberty and security in a democratic society.
Yet, because of the secrecy that Bush has pulled down around these
operations, neither Congress nor the people can evaluate whether the
trade-offs of liberty for security are worth it. Leading senators can't even
make an informed judgment about whether Gonzales lied to them.
But that, of course, might be exactly the point. The real purpose of all the
secrecy appears to be to enable the Bush administration to construct an
authoritarian framework - similar to the "total information awareness"
concept - without the American people knowing that their liberties are
facing a draconian threat from intrusive government spying.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson