No one can explain this because the chimp is mentally unstable. He..is..insane. Impeach him before he invades another country and spends another 500 Billion and kills another 2000 of our soldiers.

How the mighty have fallen. I used to love McLaughlin when he was with Mahavishnu Orchestra. Fastest guitar player ever? Perhaps. Holdsworth and Fripp are up for the same award.

"...where terrorists call on one phone, dump it, pick up a new phone, dump it, and so on..."

I imagine that's how all vegans handle their terrorist lettuce.

I spoke tonight, after the show, with one of the producers of this segement.  We'll see what happens.

LJ

Bush mounted a vigorous defense of his order authorizing warrantless eavesdropping on overseas telephone calls and e-mail of U.S. citizens with suspected ties to terrorists. He contended that his inherent authority under the Constitution, as Commander-in-Chief, and "Constitutional obligation to protect citizens" against attack justified a circumvention of warrants.  

Where?  He is constitutional commander in chief of the Army and Navy, but congress gives him the army to command. Thats it!

U.S. Constitution

Article II The Presidency

Section 1. Presidential Power - The executive power shall be vested in a President of the United States of America.....

Before he enter on the execution of his office, he shall take the following oath or affirmation:--"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

Section 2. The President shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States; he may require the opinion, in writing, of the principal officer in each of the executive departments, upon any subject relating to the duties of their respective offices, and he shall have power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, except in cases of impeachment.

He shall have power, by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, to make treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur; and he shall nominate, and by and with the advice and consent of the Senate, shall appoint ambassadors, other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States, whose appointments are not herein otherwise provided for, and which shall be established by law: but the Congress may by law vest the appointment of such inferior officers, as they think proper, in the President alone, in the courts of law, or in the heads of departments.

The President shall have power to fill up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate, by granting commissions which shall expire at the end of their next session.

Section 3. He shall from time to time give to the Congress information of the state of the union, and recommend to their consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient; he may, on extraordinary occasions, convene both Houses, or either of them, and in case of disagreement between them, with respect to the time of adjournment, he may adjourn them to such time as he shall think proper; he shall receive ambassadors and other public ministers; he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed, and shall commission all the officers of the United States.

Article I The Legislative Branch

Section 8. The Congress shall have power...

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress;

I just got done watching Gwen Ifill allow this fool McLaughlin tell the nation that all these terrorist's laptop computers contain "terabytes of data", making it impossible to get through the FISA requirements because of that amount.

Give me a break.  I took my first basic programming class in 1983, punched cards well before that, and I would challenge anybody, anywhere to show me a laptop computer with terabytes of data!

The Cray supercomputer that used to be (and maybe still is) at the National Weather service required half a footbal field of other computers to feed it data so it can crunch way less than a terabyte of modeling data.  Who is this fool and why is he on the show?

"Why didn't they seek authority from Congress to deal with the threat?"

I know this is an honest question, but we're dealing with an administration that makes even Nixon look almost honest.

Conspiracy theory, yes. This thing is so damned big, secret, complex and ongoing that even most career members of Congress don't know what the hell is going on in their own government of which they are supposed to be its leaders!

This spying on Americans IS about establishing thought control of the American people because the American people don't share the ideals of "big business"  and don't give a damn about control of the entire planet and "big business" does.

And who is it that controls govenment?, "BIG BUSINESS". The only free speech left in this government is $$$.

Surely Mclaughlin is not asking us to believe that the intelligence community is too stupid to learn lessons from DEA?

I think it's because someone remembered The Man From UNCLE superspy attache case from their childhood, and they found out it actually works! In 2005! Annnd they have to get 'em all back before anyone finds out.

You know how it is with kids. Stuff just happens. "I don't know," is the reply to the inquiry about the overturned table lamp next to the plastic Light Sabre. In McLaughlin's case it's about laws being broken. Maybe. But even then he was only following best advice and counsel. We cannot escape the fact that  extra-constitutional governance still exists in this country- it's nothing new. The better question is, when is it going to stop?
 
This latest thing exists because more than enough congressional and senate Democrats voted for a host of constitutional sinkholes in their 9/11 panic. Some of them played politics instead of standing for something, reiterating the lies and spicing up The National Mess with their senate floor vote speeches.  What I'm hoping for is a gutting of The Patriot Act.
The least these people owe us is a charade. 

Larry, I noticed you brought up the Bolton hearings in reference to all this. Have you heard any media outlets making that connection since this blew open on Friday? I sure haven't.
You'd think that Bolton receiving "summaries of intercepts between foreigners and "U.S. persons" and request(ing) that the spy agency tell him who those Americans were" would be significant to these new revelations as well. If you end up on the air, I hope you can make that point....

Larry,

This is not about call set up/email linkages for domestic use imo.  That could be easily dealt with in existing FISA statute.  The analogy to the phone dump by the cartels is missing the point.

We are not dealing with point to point communications here imo. What is involved is I suspect that the USSS (US SIGINT Service) which includes, but is not limited to NSA (and includes CIA), in whole or in part, deploying predictive vectoring and behavorial modelling.

So the soft triggers that Hayden speaks of may not mean just point to point linkage monitoring but actual leap frogging along vectors quickly unrelated to an initial target set (and not even linearly connected to them).

This would be beyond relational databases.  Think of the predictive PhD created mathematical models of the hedge funds on super steroids.  TIA plus.  Or the B-1B after the B1. (With all that that implies, btw).  

If this is so, McLaughlin's defending the CIA's participation in this activity is understandable.  He has every reason to obfuscate and pull a rhetorical version of his "magic tricks".  Complicity does that.   

I have more on this at http://stiftungleostrauss.com/bunker.php.

And as I say there, the extra-legal nature of this activity makes John Poindexter's involvement all the more appropriate in historical irony terms.

Best,

Leo 

P.S.  Why you expect more from McLaughlin remains a mystery to me, btw.  But that is for another thread perhaps. 

I'll check the transcript and get back.

Leo Strauss' #21 is a worthwhile bet since some new cyber stuff is certainly going on.

However, my money is on Bob Gorham #20 and they are fishing. This from reading the FISA court's response to the AG memo of March 6, 2002, in which Justice claimed the Act could now "be used primarily for a law enforcement purpose, so long as a significant foreign intelligence purpose remains."

The court rejects, on statutory grounds, altering the process. Looks like the the start of it. 

Doc at:

http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/doj/fisa/fisc051702.html

Thank you, Dee Dee!  Yes, it's an EMERGENCY!!!!
And in addition to contacting each of our representatives, which I did first thing Monday morning, join the movement to place little "IMPEACH" signs all over the place.  Be creative.  It's a small thing, yes, but at least you feel you are doing something to spread the word to your fellow citizens.

Yesss!! The Bolton story/issue casts doubt on their claims to have all these internal checks built in their system. If someone like Bolton can get acces to this stuff thn there sure as hell aren't enough of them. The just trust us crap is OUT OF CONTROL and needs to stop.

Which is the right office in Washington where I can apply for a letter of marque?

Whatever you post at websites and boards (such as TPM) is "open source" material, and as such does not require a warrant to be intercepted, stored, and turned into finished intelligence.

If you are a US person, however, your e-mail and phone calls are supposed to be private, and a US Government agency would require a Title III criminal warrant to retain it or use it in any way.  If you are a foreign person inside the US, the agency would have to obtain a FISA warrant, which is easier to get.  No warrants are required to intercept the communications of non-US persons outside the country.

That's the way it was supposed to work, anyway.

I am not aware that there's a legal distinction made between recording the material that appears on open source sites and tracing that back to its point of origin.

While US persons still enjoy greater legal protections under FISA, the Patriot Act in effect eliminated much of the distinction.  Here are some specifics about that:

http://www.slate.com/id/2088106/

Section 218 amends the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a "bargain" struck in 1978 wherein the usual requirements for a police search—probable cause to believe a criminal act had occurred and a warrant—would be unnecessary in a teeny, tiny number of cases. That teeny, tiny number of cases just expanded dramatically.
What it does: Secret searches can now be authorized by a secret court without public knowledge or Department of Justice accountability, so long as the government can allege there is any foreign intelligence basis for the search.

Continue Article <img src="http://img.slate.com/images/msn9/down-caret.gif" border="0"><hr><hr>
The law before and how it changed: In 1978 the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act  created an exception to the Fourth Amendment's "probable cause requirement" for physical searches, wiretaps, and subpoenas of business records. FISA created a secret court that granted search warrants so long as a pleading before a closed court asserted that the "primary purpose" of the search or wire tap was to gather foreign intelligence. The warrant needn't be based on a suspicion of criminal behavior. But the target had to be "linked to foreign espionage." In theory, American citizens were safe unless they were suspected "agents of a foreign power." A good indicator of the objectivity of the FISA court: It rejected only five of the 14,000 warrant applications it received before 2001, although it recently became clear that many of those warrants were based on false allegations. The FISA court is not supposed to second-guess the government. These are not adversarial proceedings. Nor does the FISA court maintain ongoing oversight over the surveillance. Patriot amends FISA to allow searches when "a significant purpose" is intelligence-gathering. Not "primary," but significant. Now you can be subject to secret searches authorized by a secret court so long as there is any foreign intelligence component (and increasingly, drug-related offenses are deemed to have a terrorist component). Moreover, the party to be searched need not be connected to foreign espionage anymore. It's enough that the government may merely learn something about a terror investigation. Section 207 of the act lengthens the durations of FISA warrants to as long as 120 days in some cases. Finally, under the pre-Patriot FISA and Title III, fruits of FISA search warrants could be used only for information-gathering, not for prosecution. But now intelligence information obtained using FISA's lower standards for probable cause can be passed along for prosecution purposes.
How it's been implemented: Since Patriot expanded the small number of cases in which a FISA court might authorize a search warrant, the number of warrants issued has, unsurprisingly, risen slightly. The FISA court approved 1,228 applications for warrants in 2002, up from 934 in 2001 and 1,012 in 2000. (The number of warrants issued was consistently below 1,000 throughout the '90s.) When asked by the House Judiciary Committee in 2002 how many of these warrants met the "significant purpose" standard but would have failed to meet the "primary purpose" standard, the DOJ hedged, saying they'd kept no statistics on the distinction.
But the DOJ consistently argues that the principal impact of Section 218 lies not in the expanded applicability of the warrants, but in the way it has facilitated intelligence sharing. As the DOJ paints it, the pre-Patriot era was an icy one; criminal prosecutors and intelligence experts toiled away, rarely communicating with one another. There were protocols for sharing some information, but for the most part, "the metaphorical 'wall' between the intelligence community and federal law enforcement often precluded effective and indeed vital information sharing, perversely creating higher barriers in the most serious cases," as the DOJ told the House Judiciary Committee in May. Making no mention of the possible benefits of this divide—such as prohibiting prosecutors from building their case on warrantless searches—the DOJ crowed in the May report that Sections 218 and 504(a) brought this "artificial dichotomy" to an end, citing the February indictment of Sami Al-Arian—the University of South Florida professor alleged to be a leader of a Palestinian Islamic Jihad cell—as a prime example of what can be achieved when intelligence types and law enforcement officials log a few hours on a ropes course and really start working together. The allegations in the Al-Arian indictment were based on information collected pursuant to FISA but before the passage of Patriot. In those days, FISA protocols allowed for some information sharing. But criminal prosecutors and investigators were denied "full access to information obtained through FISA," according to the DOJ, and criminal and intelligence personnel were prevented "from coordinating their parallel investigations." Post-Patriot, once the wall was down, the Tampa prosecutors accessed information "which existed in the FBI's intelligence—but not criminal—files" and used it "to document the decade-long conspiracy that is alleged."
Eager to find similar prosecutorial applications for information gleaned in terrorism and intelligence investigations, Attorney General John Ashcroft asked U.S. Attorneys after Sept. 11 to review almost 4,500 intelligence files, and the DOJ reported to the House Judiciary Committee in May that "evidence or information from this review has been incorporated in numerous cases." Again, this allows prosecutors free range over materials obtained without a traditional warrant.
Would you know if Section 218 had been used on you? Only if you were later prosecuted using information gathered pursuant to a FISA warrant. Then you'd have the opportunity to try to suppress that evidence in a regular court proceeding.