Uncovering the crimes may be the easier part of this. This synopsis reminded me of how powerless good vs. evil is when evil gets all dressed up in good.

Excerpts from “law.jrank.org/pages/7785/Iran-Contra-Affair.html”

[Soon, a more serious obstacle hampered Walsh's prosecution: the Justice Department and the White House refused to release classified information crucial to the case on the grounds that it was vital to national security. Without this information, much of Walsh's case collapsed. He was forced to dismiss the broader charges of conspiracy and diversion—the crux of the Iran-Contra Affair's illegality—and to pursue instead the less serious charges remaining in the indictments.]
[Then, in 1992, Walsh brought an indictment against the highest-ranking Reagan administration official to be charged in the Iran-Contra Affair: Caspar W. Weinberger, former defense secretary. Weinberger was indicted on June 16, 1992, on five felony counts: one count of obstructing the congressional committees' investigations; two counts of making false statements to investigators working for Walsh and Congress; and two counts of perjury related to his congressional testimony. Penalties for each count were a maximum of five years in prison and up to $250,000 in fines]
[In a surprise reprieve on Christmas Eve, 1992, President Bush pardoned Weinberger and five others implicated in the Iran-Contra Affair. The pardon cited Weinberger's record of public and military service, his recent ill health, and a desire to put Iran-Contra to rest. Bush also pardoned former assistant Secretary of State Elliot Abrams; former CIA officials Clair George, Duane Clarridge, and Alan Fiers; and former national security adviser McFarlane. Bush deemed all six men patriots and said their prosecution represented not law enforcement but the "criminalization of policy differences,"]

Sorry for the length of the post. The whole piece is worth reading, this trap needs to be avoided .

sue every internet company, and phone company for invasion of privacy rights. go to the courts decision during bush 1 with ATT with invasion of privacy with out notification. 1987-88

oops...meant to add the word "out"

So the vast machine is really out there mining our very words, thoughts etc -- read The Traveller - John Twelve Hawkes -- so where's the Outrage ? - I guess we've just become as stupid as they always thought we were.

...does that secret NSA closet installed in AT&T out in San Fran have anything to do with any of this??? or perhaps everything!

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060412-6585.html

If I correctly understand the description of the initial screening, I wouldn't necessarily object to it so long as responsible people were monitoring which communications were pulled for further analysis. Clearly that level of trust is impossible with the current admin and structure.

This is one reason I have discussed sending fake terror messages with friends-- muck up their system, cause so many false positives as to make the system useless. But for that to work, THOUSANDS of US citizens would have to also be sending false terror messages to each other: "The grooms are ready for their weddings", "I understand", "the materials are in place for the operation", "we shall proceed", or similar nonsense that sounds suspicious to a spy. Unfortunately that would also mean our apartments might get searched without our knowing (thanks a lot Patriot Act, not that they'll actually find anything, still I don't want spies sniffing my dirty underwear looking for traces of C4 or whatever). But ultimately I don't want to be interfering with attempts to catch terrorists, I just want them to do it LEGALLY, and without poking around through our private phone calls (which brings up another question: if it's being done by a computer, and not a human, is that really "invading our privacy"? I guess only if our own phone call is singled out and scrutinized by human ears. But again, it's illegal either way.)

illlich

I suspect they would try a conspiracy charge for trying to outwit them. Having said that:

It was the chalice from the palace that held the brew that was true. We had reservations for 0315 zulu, dined 10 days after the full moon on 15th street parkway.

I went to a legal seminar on FISA recently and there was "informed speculation" on the part of a former FBI agent of a program very much like what Tice describes, where certain key words and phrases are "filtered out" of the mass of communications. Those communications that don't meet the parameters flow through the filter and never get "intercepted" -- they don't remain in the program's database. But those that do get caught in the filter remain in the database, even if they are not read, listened to or analyzed for a very long time.

However, it is not the reading or listening that constitutes an "interception" that is supposed to be authorized by a warrant -- its the initial capture and retention of the communication in the database. Hence the "lack of flexibility" in FISA that the Bushies are always complaining about.

Sherpa sherpa. Muhammed jihad. (From "Team America")

I guess this explains the impracticality of going to FISA. How could they explain the need for a warrant or warrants to simultaneously spy on every communication of every American citizen 24 x 7?

This is the program so secret none dare speak it's name? The one so outrageous that the top levels of the DOJ were about to resign if it was not stopped? This is the iceberg?

I say bullshit!

This is not what they are trying so hard to hide.

What they are trying to hide is not the program but the purpose to which the program is put. The program is used to pick up the plans of those domestic "terrorist sympathizers" who "threaten our nation's security" and "wish to do us harm."

"Terrorist sympathizers" = Democrats and the ACLU

"threaten our nation's security" = the nation that we control, that is, OUR nation, which is threatened by political activity to support non-cabal elected officials

"wish to do us harm" = wish to remove us from the Oval office and take our hands off the Treasury-draining spigot

The use of the subjunctive in this headline ***might have been*** wishful thinking.

Since the public at large gives not one whit about this monitoring, I keep asking myself what is it that Bush is working so hard to conceal. It has to be something more than just generalized wiretapping.

It has to be something very specific and the only thing I can come up with is deliberately spying on political opponents. I'm still not convinced that the public will care about that either, but is there something else I'm missing? What is worse than wholesale wiretapping of everyone?

And what will get people upset about this so they will react? How about publicizing that the government now has a list of all the porn sites everyone has surfed, and that they plan to publish it?

I will point out the standard technique in using intel like this is to create a scenario by which the information could plausibly be explained as coincidence....Not saying that's the case with the Fort Dix incident, but that is how it would be played if competency was involved in the operation.

Competency certainly wasn't involved as far as the pizza plotters were concerned. (And that's my impression *after* the plot passed through the Bush hype & media hype filters).

For the pizza plot, as well as the bootless cultists in Miami, Occam's razor still applies.

These "programs" have been around for some time. "Echelon" ring any bells?

The primary difference is that, ostensibly, "Echelon" was used to snoop on non US persons. However, the Brit or New Zealander or Canadian that WAS snooping on US persons would simply turn the information over to Unk.

These bastards have been snooping and eavesdropping for years.

It's well past time to shut them down, and try the perpetrators.

Imagine the bastard child of Eschelon and Carnivore..........

Now imagine it on steroids..

"Tice did tell me last year that NSA officials weren't particularly concerned about the risk of abuse after the administration told it in 2001 not to bother with FISA warrants."

What is the source of this? Is there a longer article that talks about exactly when in 2001 FISA began being ignored? Prior to or after 9-11? Did the FBI have to let the future hijackers go free because they could not get a warrant due to illegal evidence gathering? Did the hijackers go free in order to conceal the NSA illegal wiretapping of innocent citizens from Congress?

Did the Bush administration policy that it is above the law allow 9-11 to occur?

Did a similar program exist under Clinton, such that Hillary knows a bit more than others and that is why she is so confident in her vote for war?

[1] The NSA surveillance program and the main legal/technical problem with it in regards to FISA are in essence very simple. More even than the Bush administration, all you people are ignorant, cluelessly ideological idiots if you can't figure it out and yet rant on like you do above.

[2] Keyword search via technologies like Semantic Forests and SilentRunner (Echelon and Carnivore are ancient tech) are a very small part of NSA surveillance. Also, the "wiretapping" you rant on about is in many cases not even possible in 2007 (see below). It's more useful to think of what NSA is doing as a cross between a global-sized pen register and Google. Here's the essence ....

[3] Starting in the 1990s, most telco companies moved to fiber-optic cable (much greater spead and bandwidth) which, consequently, meant a concomitant move to internet packet mode for voice messages. Remember that the Internet (formerly the ARPAnet) was designed to survive a nuclear war: communications get broken up into packets and travel any old way to reach their destination. Globally in 2007 maybe 80 percent of all sigint -- including voice messages, I repeat -- are now broken up into packets and travel mixed up with the packets of millions of other users nationally and internationally.

[4] FISA was written in 1978, when J. Edgar Hoover was only six years in his grave. It assumes direct one-to-one analog transmission over wires. That's what wiretapping -- that word you all use like you know what you're talking about -- was about. Guess what? You -- or NSA -- can't really do literal wiretapping in the majority of cases any more because the underlying global teleco infrastructure is so changed. It's mostly packet mode, internet-style.

[5] In terms of the legal landscape, here's one effect of the above. By one severely legalistic interpretation of FISA in 2007, it would be illegal to intercept Osama bin Laden's email messages even if one knew exactly when and where he were sending them, had access to the electronic pipeline they travelled in and knew that those messages contained instructions to commit another 9-11. That's because to get at Osama's communication, which is broken into packets, you'd also have to filter through the headers on all the packets containing the private communications of millions of other users. (See also the CALEA controversy)

[5] Today's digital infrastructure is also such that maybe 80 percent of all global sigint goes through switching stations in the US and its allies; a whopping 94 percent of all internet communications between different planetary regions goes through North America, with communications between whole continents depending on the Us connection. Internet traffic between Latin America and Asia or Latin America and Europe is entirely routed through the US In many cases, you can't surveill a foreign-to-foreign communication without also looking at the communications of American persons. And yet FISA forbids that.

[6] So the Bush administration is actually telling part of the truth about that. If they're telling the truth here, it may be because they want to keep something else hidden. What? Well, consider the scope of what NSA can do in a world like the one I describe above -- it's pretty irresistible to any state government, especially when you're supposed to be fighting a GWOT. Understand, too, that the phone companies are not giving out your call records after the fact. Rather, NSA is surveilling it all real-time and doing, primarily, traffic and network analysis. If a noteworthy network/traffic pattern emerges, then subsequently other tools are brought increasingly to bear - e.g. SilentRunner - escalating to the point of the relevant authorities seeking a FISA court warrant if they have time/can be bothered.

[7] But now there's another legal problem, which is bigger than just FISA and is something the Bush administration doesn't want to talk about -- and it is the reason why some of the FISA judges were so disturbed about NSA's surveillance that the head FISA judge insisted that any applications for warrants that arose out of the NSA program be so marked. Neither NSA data surveillance nor the results it produces (and it has produced results in many cases) in any way satisfies the legal demand for a showing of old-fashioned ‘probable cause.’

O