It's All Relative

The limits of executive power. From WaPo:

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales raised the possibility yesterday that New York Times journalists could be prosecuted for publishing classified information based on the outcome of the criminal investigation underway into leaks to the Times of data about the National Security Agency's surveillance of terrorist-related calls
between the United States and abroad.

It seems that the administration still thinks "terrorists" is the magic word. Michael Froomkin cited this:

A central question before the Committee is this: Should the United States criminally punish the press for publishing classified information? This inquiry poses a prospect unprecedented in American history. For more than 215 years, the United Stateshas managed to flourish in the absence of any federal legislation directly
prohibiting the press from publishing government secrets. The absence of such legislation is no accident. It clearly fulfills the promise of the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law . . . abridging the freedom . . . of the press."

The fuss is about the NSA spying on American citizens on American soil. Government spokesperson have repeatedly stressed that the agency is merely looking at patterns of usage and all identifying information is stripped from the records.

However, read this. (Here's a link to an html version at Wired):

In 2003 AT&T built "secret rooms" hidden deep in the bowels of its central offices in various cities, housing computer gear for a government spy operation which taps into the company's popular WorldNet service and the entire internet. These installations enable the government to look at every individual message on the internet and analyze exactly what people are doing. Documents showing the hardwire installation in San Francisco suggest that there are similar locations being installed in numerous other cities.

The physical arrangement, the timing of its construction, the government-imposed secrecy surrounding it and other factors all strongly suggest that its origins are rooted in the Defense Department's Total Information Awareness (TIA) program which brought forth vigorous protests from defenders of constitutionally protected civil liberties last year:

"As the director of the effort, Vice Adm. John M. Poindexter, has described the system in Pentagon documents and in speeches, it will provide intelligence analysts and law enforcement officials with instant access to information from internet mail and calling records to credit card and banking transactions and travel documents, without a search warrant." The New York Times, 9 November 2002

Strange how priorities can change: if it's a Congressman's office being raided, we get a somewhat stronger reaction from people like Dennis Hastert:

"Insofar as I am aware, since the founding of our Republic 219 years ago, the Justice Department has never found it necessary to do what it did Saturday night, crossing this Separation of Powers line, in order to successfully prosecute corruption by Members of Congress," he said. "Nothing I have learned in the last 48 hours leads me to believe that there was any necessity to change the precedent established over those 219 years."

To repeat a comment of my own made elsewhere, I guess you either 1) ignore corruption in Congress (to some people, I'm sure this is the preferred response), or 2) you find some way to investigate while maintaining Constitutional guarantees. For some people.


On the Lighter Side:

The things that scroll across my screen in the morning:

Even though many calls don't fall within what police normally do, officers still respond to complaints of loitering ducks and children who won't mind their parents.

Actually, if you will remember, we had a duck in Chicago recently that was not only loitering, but soliciting. I don't think anyone called the police, though.


It's all about balanced coverage.

Bye. . . .