U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of Internet, phone metadata(washingtonpost.com)
washingtonpost.com
U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of Internet, phone metadata
http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-surveillance-architecture-includes-collection-of-revealing-internet-phone-metadata/2013/06/15/e9bf004a-d511-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_print.html
2 comments
It was all for naught though, if I interpret this passage correctly:
"Then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden was not among them. According to the inspector general’s classified report, Cheney’s lawyer, Addington, placed a phone call and “General Hayden had to decide whether NSA would execute the Authorization without the Attorney General’s signature.” He decided to go along.
The following morning, when Mueller told Bush that he and Comey intended to resign, the president reversed himself.
Three months later, on July 15, the secret surveillance court allowed the NSA to resume bulk collection under the court’s own authority. The opinion, which remains highly classified, was based on a provision of electronic surveillance law, known as “pen register, trap and trace,” that was written to allow law enforcement officers to obtain the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls from a single telephone line."
"Then-NSA Director Michael V. Hayden was not among them. According to the inspector general’s classified report, Cheney’s lawyer, Addington, placed a phone call and “General Hayden had to decide whether NSA would execute the Authorization without the Attorney General’s signature.” He decided to go along.
The following morning, when Mueller told Bush that he and Comey intended to resign, the president reversed himself.
Three months later, on July 15, the secret surveillance court allowed the NSA to resume bulk collection under the court’s own authority. The opinion, which remains highly classified, was based on a provision of electronic surveillance law, known as “pen register, trap and trace,” that was written to allow law enforcement officers to obtain the phone numbers of incoming and outgoing calls from a single telephone line."
It might be a small nuance here, but I think they were prepared to resign because the law required the AG to approve of the actions, Comey did not, and the President ordered the NSA to continue anyway. I think it is less that they disagreed with the surveillance action and more that they could not serve in an Administration that was going to ignore and overrule legal officials like that.
Well this is the same Mueller who was testifying in Congress just the other day, right? So it does seem the program itself was less of a crisis to them as opposed to the lengths Bush was prepared to in order to implement with Executive authority alone.
An aspect of the NSA call monitoring in the first Bush administration that I hadn't realized until now was how immediately it was set up. If allegations in court filings are true [1], it was initiated in February 2001, barely a month after Bush was sworn in, and not in response to 9/11. So it really does seem like something the administration wanted, not a hasty overreaction.
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=abIV0...
[1] http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=newsarchive&sid=abIV0...
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It is really hard to fathom just how bad the first Bush administration --- really, the Cheney shadow administration, which is what it was in the first term --- was.
And Obama did what exactly? Expanded it or at least kept it the same. Let's not get into partisan politics, this monster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_com... seems to be unstoppable, it's on autorun.
And Obama did what exactly? Expanded it or at least kept it the same. Let's not get into partisan politics, this monster http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_com... seems to be unstoppable, it's on autorun.
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I shudder to think what a modern day McCarthy or Hoover could do with all this information at his disposal.
[deleted]
Maybe he (or she) is already doing it.
Gellman's underselling the drama here a bit, but he captured it in _Angler_. Comey and Mueller didn't just threaten to resign. First, Comey simply refused to authorize the program. Comey was acting AG at the time because John Ashcroft --- a punching bag figure for civil libertarians (like myself) --- was hospitalized with appendicitis, doped up, and incapacitated. When Comey pushed back on the Addington order, future AG Alberto Gonzalez went to hospital to try to get Ashcroft to override Comey. Ashcroft, who Gellman (IIRC) reported was barely lucid, refused to override Comey. Comey and Mueller threatened to resign. The rest is history.
It is really hard to fathom just how bad the first Bush administration --- really, the Cheney shadow administration, which is what it was in the first term --- was. The last time mass senior resignations were a tool of influence in Washington was Watergate.
Incidentally: Comey and Mueller were both Republicans. From everything else we know about NSA surveillance post 9/11, we have every reason to believe that Addington's plan was stupid, but not much reason to believe its goal was to target anything other than foreign terrorists. Both Comey and Mueller were prepared to resign, from a Republican administration, over what most Americans would consider a legal technicality --- in a program whose goal they supported, and whose harm to the American people was abstract. This squares with my experience talking to judges and law enforcement people: their belief in the rule of law and in the importance of the law is profound.
Comey's been tapped to run the FBI for Obama.