The Constitution is just so much toilet paper if lame brained left wingers are going to worry more about Achmed talking to Abdul about his mother – in – law, then they are about catching terrorists getting ready to blow up their homes.

Are you hoping that the next terrorist attack is against the White House, so you’ll have something to celebrate?

Ooooh! If the government can spy on terrorists, then they’ve already won!

And unlike the dhimmicrats, we conservatives don’t need talking points. Our opinions are based on solid principles. We don’t need a “Media Matters” to help homogenize our thoughts, but thanks anyway….

Back to the actual topic of this blog entry, what goal of OBL’s has not been achieved by how Bush has prosecuted the “war”?

So where exactly in your verbose post do you show that ECHELON was not listening to overseas communications of american citizens?

Top 12 media myths and falsehoods on the Bush administration’s spying scandal
http://mediamatters.org/items/200512240002
10: Clinton administration conducted domestic spying

Conservative media figures have claimed that during the Clinton administration, the NSA used a program known as Echelon to monitor the domestic communications of United States citizens without a warrant. While most have offered no evidence to support this assertion, NewsMax, a right-wing news website, cited a February 27, 2000, CBS News 60 Minutes report that correspondent Steve Kroft introduced by asserting: “If you made a phone call today or sent an email to a friend, there’s a good chance what you said or wrote was captured and screened by the country’s largest intelligence agency. The top-secret Global Surveillance Network is called Echelon, and it’s run by the National Security Agency.” NewsMax used the 60 Minutes segment to call into question The New York Times’ December 16 report that Bush’s “decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad.”

On December 19, Limbaugh read the NewsMax article on his nationally syndicated radio show. Limbaugh told listeners that Bush’s surveillance program “started in previous administrations. You’ve heard of the NSA massive computer-gathering program called Echelon. 60 Minutes did a story on this in February of 2000. Bill Clinton still in office.” The Echelon claim has also been repeated by Wall Street Journal columnist John Fund and radio host G. Gordon Liddy.

The program works as follows:

NSA taps main switches of major telecommunications companies, these switches are the gatekeepers of traffic flowing in and ot of the country.

This is why bush and current NSA chief claims that one end of the communication must be foreign. What they don’t mention or do not understand, is that due to outsourcing and foreign cell phones used by american citizens there is no simple way to distinguish whether one of the end is truly a foreign agent in a foreign land or not. For example, when you call the help desk of a major company that has outsourced the call center to say india. Your call is now going over seas and goes thru the NSA eavesdropper.

Now for the next step, the NSA eavesdropper has the ability currently to tap a few percent of this traffic at a time, so they scan thru the traffic on a rotating basis. Even at a few percent at atime there is no way humans are there to listen to everyone of them, so they employ computer programs to scan all this traffic for key words. This process narrows the search some more. A message over some threashhold would then be passed on to human listeners, who further figures out which conversation is worth listening to. The human listeners flag the “interesting” conversations and notify the shift supervisor. The shift supervisor after reviewing the flaged conversations then decides which ones merrit further taping. And uses those to further train the software.

A cautionary point to be added here is that most training of software requires examples both what you want and what you don’t want. So it is essential from a technical point of view for any such massive program to be trained not only on terrorist conversations but also mundain ones as control samples. So some “inoocent” conversations must be tapped just to train the program.

So far I described the program operationally, now moving on to administratively. The secret presidential order aparent gives blanket authorization to NSA at 45 day intervals, at the end of every 45 days, the signature of president, white house legal counsel (sp?), and attorney general, is needed to extend the program. (Since both of these people are political appointees their signatures are just rubber stamps.) There is no way to trly calculate how many taps are made, since you have to define what is tapping. If the being listened in by a computer is defined as tapping, then there is millions of taps going on every second. If youbelieve it is tapping if the tapping is sustained over long periods of time by a human, then ther is probably 100s every day (depending on howmany supervisors there are, and how many in depth taps they approave each day)

And despite such a massive program, my opinion is that it probably isn’t very effective one. Al Queda’s main attribute is that it is very loosely organized, with many affliates that may at one time in the past or in the future at against the interest of Al Queda. Such a loose organization act more like the general poppulation than a well organized one. The lack of diffrentiation makes patternmatching difficult. And Al Queda can change fasterwe can keep track, just as spam can change faster than filters.

let’s extend the metaphor of spam filters a bit more so it match more to the situation. Catching Al Queda by this NSA program is like trying to find the messages in a torrent of spam, where the messages are at every point in time trying to be more spam like. Moreover never under-estimate human’s ability to code talk. For example:

A “I heard your twins are nine month old”
B: “well actually they are eleven days older than that now.”

could stand for: twin towers, on sept. 11th.

So ultimately it is only the confluence of details that can catch a terriost, massive eaves dropping puts too much emphasis on one of the details, and makes it more likely we miss others. So it is counter-productive in the end.

And remember you, I and anyone on this planet is less than or equal to six degree of separation from a terrorist.

Here it is again, see no mention of clenis or carter or what they may have done.

”  electronic surveillance is defined to exclude interception outside the U.S., as done by the NSA………”with the caveats about US citizens etc as the two previous posts above.

Here we are weeks after the leak, and still, no blanket condemnation by Pelosi, Dean, Reid etc. Why do you think that is? Hmmmm, maybe it’s all legal……

Just a thought

You mean, like a law-interpreting guy?

I suspect that the judge is looking at like a judge,

You mean, like a law-interpreting guy?

The term  electronic surveillance is defined to exclude interception outside the U.S., as done by the NSA, unless there is interception of a communication  sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person (a U.S. citizen or permanent resident) and the communication is intercepted by  intentionally targeting that United States person.

I like your idea of simple, direct leftist talking points…but they need to have some factual basis if you want them to make sense. Just repeating “they don’t get to make up the law” over and over again, when the law is clearly in place and allows it, won’t cut it.

I m sure there s a valid point somewhere in this post. But the politically rabid association of Bush and bin Laden vitiates it completely.

I’ll have to remember that comment next time some dittohead says things like, “the left is doing exactly what bin Laden wants.”

Quaker , Where do you think the NSA got the phone numbers to tap? Barney Fife?

According to the article in the NYT that broke this story, the information came from a source which a FISA court judge warned was inadmissible as probable cause for seeking warrants.

I’m a novice at these things and perhaps you can educate me. Why would the judge have any qualms if the information came from battlefield intelligence?

Last time I checked, that was 30 times the program was authorized. Not 30 wiretaps, but 30 times the program was ‘reviewed’ and approved

 I ve authorized this program more than 30 times since the Sept. 11 attacks and I intend to do so for so long as the nation faces the continuing threat of an enemy that wants to kill our American citizens.

sounds like this threat will never end.
you can defeat terrorists, not terrorism