yourdomain.com

[pbrauer]

What Bush said on the campaign trail seems differ what he is saying now.

[Orin]

Isn't that what the FISA court is for?
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Voodoo Economics with Zeb

"Now, if you're so stupid as to think we didn't have a surplus, you're not going to believe the GAO figures either.... " as he tries and pass off PBGC budget as the national budget. Twice and in Red nonetheless.

[pbrauer]

[gary]

Listen up guys. If it uses the airwave and you can build a device to listen to it you can listen to it. So the NSA routinely listens to every phone call that uses a satalite up and down link. They do not need a warrant because the air waves are public. It is the same thing as if you were talking in the public square. There is no restriction on anyone using a parabolic mic to here what you say.

The next thing is the undersea cable. It is all about calls that are sent out of the country. There is no legal expectation of privacy when the call leaves our shores. The law is very very clear.

There is one thing about all of this. You can listen but you can't play the tape in court. The warrant is for the use of the information in a court of law inside the US. These are not just little bitty differences. There is a huge difference between criminal investigation and intelligence gathering.

Let's begin with some basics. The 1st through 8th amenedments to the constitution are not about simply what the government can and can't do. They are also about what can and can't be used in court. The innumerated rights are not absolute. These are truths that we often forget. We can't cry fire in a crowded theater. We can't carry arms into a court room. There are many others. The thing is that we have these enumerated rights for our people. The do not extend to non citizens outside the US.

When we look at criminal investigations we look at them with an intention of bringing someone to court and charging them with a crime. Here all the rules of evidence have to be followed. These rules are constructed in order to bring people to court and to try them for their crimes.

Intel is a different game. It is all about information and not at all about criminal prosicution. It is also all about things that happen outside the US and that changes lots of things. None of the procedural due process rules of evidence apply to people who are not citizens and who are outside the 50 United States and our very few territories.

What has been done is gather intel. The rules still apply. If in the gathering of intel the NSA finds your stash then that can not be used against you in court. Neither can they turn this over to the locals. It is called fruit of the poisioned tree.

Now for the war thing. My first question to all of you who say "There was no decaration of war so we are not at war", was the nation at war between 1861 and 1865? If yes then the formal declaration of war arguement is moot. If no then the northern states owe reparations to the 11 secessionist states. It really is that simple. The constituion does not tell us how to declare war only that we need to do it. Congress authorizing the president to use force is enough to qualify. Not my thinking it is what SCOTUS says.

This thing has ruined some very good data collection. It may even open us up to a new attack. The NY Times, in order for a reporter to sell books, has left us with a huge hole in our intel defenses. If that hole allows any of my family to be killed I will be very upset. It really is that simple too. I also know some very very good lawyers.

gary

[WBR]

[rachel]

[gary]

Quote:
If no then the northern states owe reparations to the 11 secessionist states.

On what basis?

[Orin]

Hee Hee, the Civil War wasn't a war because Congress didn't declare war, and there was no formal declaration made by congress? I like that. Them thar Yankees better pay up. Lincoln Lied and people died!!!!! Blood For Cotton!!!!!!
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Voodoo Economics with Zeb

"Now, if you're so stupid as to think we didn't have a surplus, you're not going to believe the GAO figures either.... " as he tries and pass off PBGC budget as the national budget. Twice and in Red nonetheless.

[WBR]

[Orin]

So, let me get this straight. Because there was no state of war between the CSA and USA, the extraordinary, extraconstitutional measures taken by Lincoln in the prosecution of the "insurrection thingy" would be a bad thing then?
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Voodoo Economics with Zeb

"Now, if you're so stupid as to think we didn't have a surplus, you're not going to believe the GAO figures either.... " as he tries and pass off PBGC budget as the national budget. Twice and in Red nonetheless.

[WBR]

[gary]

OK here are the only wars that the US has ever been in. The War of 1812, The Mexican War of 1845, The Spanish American War, The First World War, and the Second World War. That is it. In every other military action we were not at war. Also since we attacked France, Belgium, Luxemburg, The Netherlands and several other countries that we did not declare war on we were waging agressive war and are still subject to trial as war criminals.

The thought that a formal declaration of war is necessary to be at war is not only wrong, it is stupid. Besides that the courts have repeatedly ruled that a state of war can exist without a formal declaration. The very idea that a specificly worded declaration is nevessary is way past foolish.

Besides all of that Al-Qaeda has declared war on us. That puts us in a legal state of war without ous responding.

gary

[boedark]

[David R Gold]

Foiled again
Powerline
SOURCE
Near the end of President Bush's press conference yesterday, a reporter asked this question:

Q. In 2004, when you were doing an event about the Patriot Act, in your remarks you had said that any wiretapping required a court order, and that nothing had changed. Given that we now know you had prior approval for this NSA program, were you in any way misleading?

The reporter may have been reading left-wing web sites, many of which are buzzing about this latest "Bush lied!" claim. President Bush began his answer as follows:

I was talking about roving wire taps, I believe, involved in the Patriot Act. This is different from the NSA program.

I looked up the quote that the lefties are howling about; it's from a speech in Buffalo on April 20, 2004. Bush's description of the speech is accurate; its subject was the Patriot Act. Here is the section of the speech where the relevant quote occurs:

Secondly, there are such things as roving wiretaps. Now, by the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so. It's important for our fellow citizens to understand, when you think Patriot Act, constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution.

But a roving wiretap means -- it was primarily used for drug lords. A guy, a pretty intelligen[t] drug lord would have a phone, and in old days they could just get a tap on that phone. So guess what he'd do? He'd get him another phone, particularly with the advent of the cell phones. And so he'd start changing cell phones, which made it hard for our DEA types to listen, to run down these guys polluting our streets. And that changed, the law changed on -- roving wiretaps were available for chasing down drug lords. They weren't available for chasing down terrorists, see? And that didn't make any sense in the post-9/11 era. If we couldn't use a tool that we're using against mobsters on terrorists, something needed to happen.

The Patriot Act changed that. So with court order, law enforcement officials can now use what's called roving wiretaps, which will prevent a terrorist from switching cell phones in order to get a message out to one of his buddies.

So what Bush told the reporter was correct. He was talking about the Patriot Act's authorization of roving wiretaps. A roving wiretap, by definition, requires a warrant; "roving" actually refers to a type of warrant, not to a kind of wiretap. More broadly, when Bush said, "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so," the context was obviously domestic law enforcement, not international intelligence-gathering on terrorists. As far as is publicly known, the statement he made in Buffalo is true in that context.

Partisan sniping aside, the President's key statement in his press conference yesterday was this one:

This is a limited program designed to prevent attacks on the United States of America. And I repeat, limited. And it's limited to calls from outside the United States to calls within the United States. But they are of known -- numbers of known al Qaeda members or affiliates.

If this description of the NSA program is correct--and, to my knowledge, despite a lot of innuendo, there is nothing in the published leaks to contradict it--it's hard to see what the fuss is about. Indeed, it might be grounds for impeachment if the administration were not surveilling terrorists overseas, and following up on their calls into the U.S.

What I still don't understand is how the limited program described by the President relates to the NSA's long-time practice of scooping up vast numbers of communications, world-wide, and subjecting them to computer analysis to look for patterns suggesting, among other things, terrorist activity. During the Clinton administration the NSA's surveillance (warrantless, of course) apparently included baby monitors. Is the Echelon program, or something like it, still going on? Has it been expanded and improved in the aftermath of September 11? I hope so.

UPDATE: The White House clarified today that Bush "meant to say calls going to and originating from the U.S. were being monitored." Assuming that this merely means that calls coming into al Qaeda numbers were monitored as well as calls coming from those numbers, this makes no difference to any constitutional or statutory analysis.

[Zebediah]