If I had to hazard a guess, it's probably terribly illegal but will be swallowed by the media noise and GOP corruption and generations of historians will puzzle over how we let this happen.  But that's just a guess.

Ahh ... the "who is the leaker" question :)

The most likely answer is the professional staff at the CIA, which has been a source of antagonism for the administration for a while. They have seen a mass exodus of high-level employees due to frustration with Porter Goss's tenure. They were definitely trying to destroy Bush's chance for re-election, which is the start of the leak that the Times sat on. And they probably had access to the NSA intercepts themselves, so therefore had to know something about the policy.

Where the story is going depends on two things. First, how prepared the leakers are to have Bush loyalists from Defense, Justice, the NSA, and the CIA hunt them down.  Second, how well-equipped the leakers are to produce a drip-drip-drip of daily stories. And we don't have enough information on that front.

I think we may be headed to a "Justice Roberts has made his decision. Now let him enforce it" moment pretty soon. 

I think your reader's suggestion that this is all about retrospective universal email mining is dead on.  It fits every aspect of this otherwise extremely peculiar situation.  It also fits with George Bush's vainglorious self-image as bold and daring and willing to be (politically) martyred in defense of the American people.

Like many, I wonder what's the point of being "safe" if this is what we turn into.  Assuming this kind of tactic actually accomplishes anything (which I have doubts about, given this administration's past history), we're saving lives at the expense of everything this country is supposed to stand for and what the Founding Fathers labored to hard to forestall.

God help us.  The Bush/Cheney axis is bad enough, but imagine if these tools and the precedent to use them without consequence falls into the hands of some future Pat Robertson or Rick Santorum.  I can only hope I'm too senile to be aware of what's going on when that happens.

Jay Rockefeller's a good-hearted old dude.  What he should have done, instead of sending a pathetic handwritten note, was make one hell of a public stink about this, take the consequences, and go down in American history as a hero.

I'm literally sick to my stomach. 

Doubtless the Bushies are hoping the story will be lost in the holidays.

But then there's buzz, like this recent commentary by Jonathan Alter on the Newsweek website:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10536559/site/newsweek/

So, will we just be talking amongst ourselves?  Or will the butterfly wing of this revelation flutter along growing ever bigger?  Speak up, speak out.  Make demands on the media, make demands on your elected representatives.  Seize the opportunity.  Reclaiming democracy starts with an informed electorate.

I was listening to Feinstein tonight say that Rockefeller couldn't tell her what he knew.  How did we get to this place?  They've allowed representative government to turn into farce.  All they are allowed to debate is how many holes Stevens can drill in Alaska.

Last week Chris Matthews said Bush should be on Mt. Rushmore if Iraq pans out. Geologically speaking it's a great metaphor, the only rock left is "rotten granite".

My guess is that they are very worried that it will come out that Rove has been reading Matthews e-mails, and the Kerry campainge's e-mails as well.

He's not the king......
He's not Ceaser either.....

COLORADO BOB

It's a technology story.  NSA is probably using high-end language processing technology to indescriminantly process email looking for key words, phrases, names, entity descriptions, relations, etc.  They may be doing the same with phone conversations.  This is why the administration could not go to FISA.  At issue is not tapping the communication of a small number of individuals, but broadly monitoring all traffic bound for certain countries, servers, mailing lists, etc.  Or maybe all the traffic they can grab.  Google offers service at this scale.  I'm sure the NSA can as well.

For those of you who are attorneys, tell me this: if a person leaks information about an illegal activity that is being done by someone in government (as is most likely the case here), can the leaker be prosecuted for the leak?

I agree with gyrfalcon's comments, but thought that it is important to note at least a few things that only make sense if you think that there's something more here than just normal wiretaps.

 1) Bush has said that this revelation tells the terrorists what we are doing, so that they will change their actions.  Clearly, if these were just standard targeted wiretaps, the terrorists would have to know that targeted wiretaps are possible under FISA.  Therefore, this must be something qualitatively different.

 2) The New York Times has said explicitly that they are holding information back.

 3) Bush said in his press conference today "We use FISA still -- you're referring to the FISA court in your question -- of course, we use FISAs. But FISA is for long-term monitoring. What is needed in order to protect the American people is the ability to move quickly to detect.".  Detect. Hmm.  And something that FISA can't do.

4) Finally, Rockefeller's letter noted above points to new technical means, not just warrantless wiretapping. 

 It's my guess that Bush et al might not understand just how limited the NY Times article was -- they seem to be incredibly upset about an article that just pointed to illegality by the Bush White House -- it didn't reveal any new capabilities at all.  Perhaps they are just trying to cow the press into not revealing the true scope of the program at some future time.  Hopefully very near future.

Thad Beier

Josh,

This story "fits a narrative" as one commenter noted. But, not if the Dems melt and there is no drip, drip, drip.

Let me say as one Dem who is not melting, we have a drip here in Texas where Total Information Awareness has been revived and is being implemented one state at a time under the pretext of "helping america vote".

Both Drudge and Raw Story claim the Times will have more revelations about this issue in tomorrow's edition.  Any thoughts on what that might entail?

We see in Sen. Rockefeller's sealed letter how Cheney created a kind of omerta by "consulting" with leaders in Congress: he told them about Bush's "highly classified project" and simultaneously cut out their tongues.

I don't think that this is limited to "a few" individuals with "terrorist links."  I think they did not want this to leak because they fear this bs line will be blown out of the water with the truth.  And what I think the truth is that this was a new technology used indiscriminately.  Completely listening in on the communications of entire communities - that's right, like Dearborn, MI and other heavily Arabic/Muslim communities.

In order to "keep us safe" maybe King George will consider ignoring that other part of the constitution about the quartering of soldiers.  Wouldn't it just be easier to put a fed in the home of every American?

At first, I thought this was off base, because the leaks started so long ago, before things really started to go south for the Republicans.

The I dimly recalled a distant time when it wasn't clear who was going to win the upcoming presidential election, a time that seems to be about synchronous with someone starting to talk to the Times about this stuff.  And then I thought, well, yeah.  Dave is probably right.

I don't understand this Rockefeller information.  How could the administration have silenced him on this?  I know nothing about classified clearances or any of that, but this just seems incredible to me.

Why could he not publicly reveal what was happening?  Why could he not discuss it with other Senators with the same clearance as his?

Should I have any sympathy for him here?  Because I'm not feeling any.  

Interesting stuff.  At first I though Rockerfeller's handwritten note was kind of sad...you know, a "that poor old guy is really behind the times" sort of thing.  But having read your post and others on this thread, I wonder if he was worried about there being an electronic record of his communication.  

Here are my predictions, ranging from reasonable to paranoid - but where the line between them falls, I myself cannot say:

1. A steady dribble of revelations will ooze from the executive branch over the next several months, about the current story and related domestic espionage programs;

2. Some of these revelations will reveal that some fairly well-known antiwar figures and administration critics were targets - including journalists;

3. One or several of these figures will sue the federal government for violations of their civil rights; the case will wend its way through the federal court system over the course of a year or two;

4. Judge Alito will win confirmation, while managing to avoid direct answers to questions bearing on the limits of presidential power, on the theory that he should not answer questions about matters pending before the court;

5. More leaks and exposes will come forward, as executive branch officials seek to protect themselvesby establishing a public record showing that they personally resisted the Presidential power grab;

6. It will be revealed that Bush chose the secret wiretaps route because of paranoid fears inside the White House, and particularly in the Vice President's office, about leaks from the FISA magistrates themselves, and about "Arabists" in the permanent government;

7. A second round of investigations and prosecutions will be started to investigate efforts to destroy evidence relating to the primary civil rights case;

8. Somewhere along the line, it will emerge that the executive branch and the Pentagon conducted an organized disinformation campaign against its own citizens; the President will claim that the right to run such a psy-ops campaign is included among his Constitutional war powers;

9. The plaintiffs in the civil rights case will be dragged through the wringer with a smear campaign exposing various alleged overseas communications with dubious characters, alleged association with Holocaust deniers, and other tropes in the long-running right-wing campaign to establish connections between the left and militant Islam;

10. Justices Alito and Roberts will cast the deciding votes in the Supreme Court in favor of the Yoo interpretation of Presidential power;

11. In response the Supreme Court decision, a majority in Congress introduces legislation for a constitutional amendment, to return the balance of power between the branches back to where most of us thought it was in the first place;

12. The White House will go to the Supreme Court to seek a heretofore unheard of injuntion to prevent the amendment from going forward, on the novel theory that the President's wartime powers extend even to the power to block Congressional legislation that might interfere with the prosecution of the war, in a manner seen fit by the Executive;

13. A shockingly high number of Republicans, and even a couple of Democrats like Joe Lieberman, will express admiration for this new theory of executive branch power;

14. Republicans in Congress will introduce legislation to re-constitute the Committee on un-American activities, and will begin to call various academics, journalists and entertainers to testify;

15. Several of these academics, journalists and entertainers will name names, and denounce colleagues as America-hating Islamist fellow-travelers.

16. Some high-profile terrorist apprehension will hit the newspapers.  A target of the wiretapping will be arrested for plotting to build a dirty bomb; or for running guns and money to the Iraqi insurgency; or for attempting to buy chemical or nuclear weapons from Russian scientists.  The White House will argue that the apprehension would have been impossible without the secret wiretaps program, because there was nothing approaching probable cause or reasonable suspicion before a random fishing expedition turned up the plot;

17. A well-known leftist will be arrested for organizing events in conjunction with foreign agents with "known al-Qaeda" connections, and charged with treason;

18. A hot topic of discussion on Fox news will be the plot to replace Christmas and other celebrations with the celebration of Ramadan.  Many prominent figures will be asked whether they have ever read the Koran.  Conservatives will answer that they have never read it, but have it on good authority that it is a vile and Satanic text.  Liberals will answer that they too have not read the evil and vile Koran, but they defend the rights of others to do so, just as they defend the rights of the lecherous to read pornography;

19. An actual terrorist event will occur, one that the White House will claim it was unable to stop due to Congressional and especially Democratic meddling with its surveillance programs;

20. Several information technology gurus will appear on television and before Congress to defend the theory that we will have all achieved the pinnacle of freedom when we are all equally free to spy on each other, and equally capable of doing so.  They will demonstrate that the technology is available to turn this utopian dream into a reality;

21. Many people will at first criticize government surveillance; but almost all will claim that they themselves have "nothing to hide."  Soon they will change their position to the view that only those who do have something to hide would bother criticizing the surveillance in the first place.  Eventually they will volunteer to be placed on a list of patriotic Americans who willingly subject themselves to around-the-clock surveillance, and argue that all Patriotic Americans should be willing to be placed on such a list;

22. The Vice President will finally succumb to long-anticipated heart failure, following an episode in which his hatred and paranoia, grown to an absurd and grotesque pitch, leads him to attempt to insert his head into his asshole, in order to spy on his own brain from the inside.

Warrantless tapping is a requirement for broadly monitoring all traffic to data mine for information about terrorists.......

Associated Press
February 23, 2004

Pentagon's terrorism research lives on at other agencies
By Michael J. Sniffen

WASHINGTON (AP) Despite an outcry over privacy implications, the government is pressing ahead with research to create ultrapowerful tools to mine millions of public and private records for information about terrorists.

Congress eliminated a Pentagon office that had been developing this terrorist-tracking technology because of fears it might ensnare innocent Americans.

Still, some projects from retired Adm. John Poindexter's Total Information Awareness effort were transferred to U.S. intelligence offices, congressional, federal and research officials told The Associated Press.

In addition, Congress left undisturbed a separate but similar $64 million research program run by a little-known office called the Advanced Research and Development Activity, or ARDA, that has used some of the same researchers as Poindexter's program.

"The whole congressional action looks like a shell game," said Steve Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists, which tracks work by U.S. intelligence agencies. "There may be enough of a difference for them to claim TIA was terminated while for all practical purposes the identical work is continuing."

Poindexter aimed to predict terrorist attacks by identifying telltale patterns of activity in arrests, passport applications, visas, work permits, driver's licenses, car rentals and airline ticket buys as well as credit transactions and education, medical and housing records.

The research created a political uproar because such reviews of millions of transactions could put innocent Americans under suspicion. One of Poindexter's own researchers, David D. Jensen at the University of Massachusetts, acknowledged that "high numbers of false positives can result."

Disturbed by the privacy implications, Congress last fall closed Poindexter's office, part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and barred the agency from continuing most of his research. Poindexter quit the government and complained that his work had been misunderstood.

The work, however, did not die.

In killing Poindexter's office, Congress quietly agreed to continue paying to develop highly specialized software to gather foreign intelligence on terrorists.

In a classified section summarized publicly, Congress added money for this software research to the "National Foreign Intelligence Program," without identifying openly which intelligence agency would do the work.

It said, for the time being, products of this research could only be used overseas or against non-U.S. citizens in this country, not against Americans on U.S. soil.

Congressional officials would not say which Poindexter programs were killed and which were transferred. People with direct knowledge of the contracts told the AP that the surviving programs included some of 18 data-mining projects known in Poindexter's research as Evidence Extraction and Link Discovery.

Poindexter's office described that research as "technology not only for `connecting the dots' that enable the U.S. to predict and pre-empt attacks but also for deciding which dots to connect." It was among the most contentious research programs.

Ted Senator, who managed that research for Poindexter, told government contractors that mining data to identify terrorists "is much harder than simply finding needles in a haystack."

"Our task is akin to finding dangerous groups of needles hidden in stacks of needle pieces," he said. "We must track all the needle pieces all of the time."

Among Senator's 18 projects, the work by researcher Jensen shows how flexible such powerful software can be. Jensen used two online databases, the Physics Preprint Archive and the Internet Movie Database, to develop tools that would identify authoritative physics authors and would predict whether a movie would gross more than $2 million its opening weekend.

Jensen said in an interview that Poindexter's staff liked his research because the data involved "people and organizations and events ... like the data in counterterrorism."

At the University of Southern California, professor Craig Knoblauch said he developed software that automatically extracted information from travel Web sites and telephone books and tracked changes over time.

Privacy advocates feared that if such powerful tools were developed without limits from Congress, government agents could use them on any database.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., who fought to restrict Poindexter's office, is trying to force the executive branch to tell Congress about all its data-mining projects. He recently pleaded with a Pentagon advisory panel to propose rules on reviewing data that Congress could turn into laws.

ARDA, the research and development office, sponsors corporate and university research on information technology for U.S. intelligence agencies. It is developing computer software that can extract information from databases as well as text, voices, other audio, video, graphs, images, maps, equations and chemical formulas. It calls its effort "Novel Intelligence from Massive Data."

The office said it has given researchers no government or private data and obeys privacy laws.

The project is part of its effort "to help the nation avoid strategic surprise ... events critical to national security ... such as those of Sept. 11, 2001," the office said.

Poindexter had envisioned software that could quickly analyze "multiple petabytes" of data. The Library of Congress has space for 18 million books, and one petabyte of data would fill it more than 50 times. One petabyte could hold 40 pages of text for each of the world's more than 6.2 billion people.

ARDA said its software would have to deal with "typically a petabyte or more" of data. It noted that some intelligence data sources "grow at the rate of four petabytes per month." Experts said those probably are files with satellite surveillance images and electronic eavesdropping results.

The Poindexter and ARDA projects are vastly more powerful than other data-mining projects such as the Homeland Security Department's CAPPS II program to classify air travelers or the six-state, Matrix anti-crime system financed by the Justice Department. They use commercial data-mining technology that Poindexter's office said would "take decades" to build "the new databases we need to combat terrorism."

In September 2002, ARDA awarded $64 million in contracts covering 3½ years. The contracts went to more than a dozen companies and university researchers, including at least six who also had worked on Poindexter's program.

Congress threw these researchers into turmoil. Doug Lenat, the president of Cycorp Corp. in Austin, Texas, will not discuss his work but said he had an "enormous seven-figure deficit in our budget" because Congress shut down Poindexter's office.

Like many critics, James Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology sees a role for properly regulated data-mining in evaluating the vast, underanalyzed data the government already collects.

Expansions of data mining, however, increase "the risk of an innocent person being in the wrong place at the wrong time, of having rented the wrong apartment ... or having a name similar to the name of some bad guy," he said.

==========================

      Associated Press
      February 23, 2004

      ARDA, researcher for the spies: No listings, but a Web site
      By Michael J. Sniffen

      WASHINGTON (AP) _ The Advanced Research and Development Activity is not a secret federal office, but it might as well be.

      It isn't listed in the U.S. Government Manual, the 684-page official compilation of federal departments, agencies and offices. It isn't listed in major commercial directories of government agencies.

      Appropriately for an outfit that sponsors computer research, however, ARDA has a Web site.

      CIA Director George Tenet founded the office in 1998, when some experts were questioning the capabilities of the National Security Agency. They worried the United States' electronic spy service, which breaks and makes codes, might lag behind private companies in the information technology industry.

      The new office researches and develops computer software and equipment to intercept and analyze foreign intelligence that is transmitted electronically _ and to protect the U.S. methods used to obtain and communicate it.

      ARDA's director, Dean Collins, oversees offices inside the National Security Agency's heavily guarded headquarters at Fort Meade, Md. Collins' agency uses the NSA for administrative support.

      It works for all the nation's intelligence services, including the CIA, FBI, Defense Intelligence Agency and parts of dozens of other departments. Its budget is part of the National Foreign Intelligence Program and is secret, although at least some of its research, particularly at universities, is unclassified.

      The office was modeled after the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to subsidize corporate and university research considered too speculative for private financiers to risk their money on. But even more than DARPA, which has 240 employees, ARDA shuns bureaucracy: It employs only eight technologists.

      

23.  The Democrats, needing a military presence on the 2008 ticket to prove they are tough on national security, will nominate Sergeant Schultz who will run with the campaign slogan:  "I know nothing! Nothing!" and "I see nothing! Nothing!"

I deeply hope you are correct.  I fear that many  Americans will say they are only torturing bad guys and so it is alright and they are not tapping "our" phones just those of terrorists.  We live in a time in which comfort and safety is paramount for many of us, rather than that of protecting our liberty.

The second article of impeachment against Richard M Nixon pertained exclusively to wiretapping fourteen people without warrants. Mr. Bush's directive has apparently led to literally thousands of violations of the law.

I have been disinclined to call for this president's impeachment in the past, but this looks to be an egregious abuse of power, with serious violations of law, and possibly even violations of the fourth amendment rights of American citizens.

I'm inclined to think that impeachment though is not enough. The case for not prosecuting Mr. Nixon rested mostly on preserving what remained of the post-war consensus.

There is nothing left of that consensus today, and Nixon's punishment - historical humiliation - was apparently not enough to prevent serious future abuses of power by the executive branch. Perhaps some time in Leavenworth for Mr. Bush would focus the minds of future elites on their oath to uphold the law and constitution.

At least the Soviet people got free health care , free housing, free education, guaranteed jobs, and good public transportation in exchange for knuckling under to the ideological dictates of the regime.

As soon as this broke, I e-mailed Sen. Feingold, as he's going on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

I begged him that if this continued, to please not be meek and subservient (like Rockefeller) but, in the spirit of voting against the Patriot Act, to publicly spill the beans on this ASAP.

His oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution trumps any and all Senate Intelligence Committee oaths.

The technology: http://www.optimizemag.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=166403982

Some individual points that I think bear out the TIA/Echelon direction:

1. bush and Gonzalez talk about it as a "program." That implies an ongoing structure and set of procedures, not merely individual acts of surveillance.

2.  Gonzalez was sure he wouldn't get approval for it from Congress, even in a revised FISA.

3.  They had doubts that even the FISA court would approve it. This is the only objection to FISA that could possibly make any sense, because it's a secret court that never notifies targets that they're being surveilled and as far as I've read produces no public records. Yet they didn't even risk mentioning it to the court.

4. Rockefeller's reference to technology.

5. It had to be something that they already were able to do with communications not forbidden under FISA, something they're presumably already doing with foreign-to-foreign communication.

6. The often-mentioned need for speedy action/reaction. This could mean something like coming up with new filtering search terms on the fly, a scenario like in all those computer-geek movies. By itself this would not present FISA problems unless it's a data-mining kind of operation, and if it were okay with the court, it would be hard to keep track of the development of these terms even with stenographers in the rooms.

So I think the discussion here is headed in the right direction and it helps to explain bush's almighty rage about it.

The only thing in what they've said that doesn't fit is why even mere mention of it would weaken anti-terrorism. Don't they know that most foreigners who spend any time in this country assume (unlike most Americans) that they're constantly being watched? The only safe path to invisibility is to get lost in the underclass of hourly low-wage labor, which is where most of the hijackers hid out. That's the group they want to get access to.

BTW, I don't share many people's contempt for Rockefeller and the others who didn't say anything. First, they weren't told much at all-- Rockefeller might have been in the first batch and his reaction told them to make these sessions short, sweet, and one-sided-- and second, the bush people would not hesitate to prosecute members of Congress for leaking that kind of material. They were really hot about it in '02 and '03 especially. 

they will never impeach bush over this.  think about it.  who would be president?  cheney?  condi rice?  go down the line and it doesn't get any better, even if those likely to succeed couldn't be counted upon to continue the same "program".  (like it's a sitcom.  the characters might change but the jokes and punchlines will continue from season to season.)

the public will see this as simply an excess in a time of war.  like a little waterboarding here and there.  it is up to our present congressional leaders to ultimately make sure this thing is handled correctly.  congressional republicans will begin to ask themselves if they trust this president or not.  i am less than encouraged at the likelihood of these buffoons to recognize the significance of the issue at hand or to allow us to exit from this constitutional crisis with anything resembling the constitution we once had.

all the false piousness and hypocricy that undermined clinton will be turned to the purposes of assuring the populace that the government is their friend.  business as usual.  the party of lies and deceit will undertake a major sales campaign.  the consumer has no choice but to yield, and the brand is well known: republicans can protect us and democrats aren't willing to go the extra mile.  i can hear it already.  the torture and the illegal actions  forming a sort of machismo template for the spin.  good, bad or indifferent.  count on the sale.

change isn't imminent.  the elections are rigged anyway.

this isn't a big story unless big brother wants it to be, and obviously, judging from the half-hearted reporting of the leaks themselves, big brother wants us counting sheep.  so count them will will.  period. end of story.  amen.

WilliamR63,

   If the information is leaked, rather than reported to a Congressman, Senator, or internal whistle blower channels. Then the leaker has commited a crime in violation of their security clearance agreement they signed when they agreed to their their background check. So they could be tried. for that or treason, if the leak was serious enough, by a jury of there peers depending on how sensitive the leak was.  It is a gray area, with not many prosecutions. I speak as a former government employee who had a csecurity clearance over 20 years ago.
 

Yes, your "reverse data mining" theory sounds not only reasonable, but sounds like the kind of thing that a geek would come up with (having been a geek myself for many years....).  This method is used in many commercial applications and would work very well for the problem presented here.  Of course, it is illegal as h*ll, but when did that ever stop this administration?

  After reading the Rockefeller letter, I think those concerned about a TIA type operation, are on the right track. If Google can cache the entire Interent, retaining all email information and IM would be rather simple. The issue of the Privacy act of 1974 is the problem in an operation of this scope.

&n