PROMIS, Main Core and The Suspension Of The Republic, Itself

ARE YOU ON THE LIST? In the spring of 2007, a retired senior official in the U.S. Justice Department sat before Congress and told a story so odd and ominous, it could have sprung from the pages of a pulp political thriller. It was about a principled bureaucrat struggling to protect his country from a highly classified program with sinister implications. Rife with high drama, it included a car chase through the streets of Washington, D.C., and a tense meeting at the White House, where the president's henchmen made the bureaucrat so nervous that he demanded a neutral witness be present. The bureaucrat was James Comey, John Ashcroft's second-in-command at the Department of Justice during Bush's first term. Comey had been a loyal political foot soldier of the Republican Party for many years. Yet in his testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee, he described how he had grown increasingly uneasy reviewing the Bush administration's various domestic surveillance and spying programs. Much of his testimony centered on an operation so clandestine he wasn't allowed to name it or even describe what it did. He did say, however, that he and Ashcroft had discussed the program in March 2004, trying to decide whether it was legal under federal statutes. Shortly before the certification deadline, Ashcroft fell ill with pancreatitis, making Comey acting attorney general, and Comey opted not to certify the program. When he communicated his decision to the White House, Bush's men told him, in so many words, to take his concerns and stuff them in an undisclosed location. The Continuity of Governance program encompasses national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces. In short, it's a road map for martial law. Comey refused to knuckle under, and the dispute came to a head on the cold night of March 10, 2004, hours before the program's authorization was to expire. At the time, Ashcroft was in intensive care at George Washington Hospital following emergency surgery. Apparently, at the behest of President Bush himself, the White House tried, in Comey's words, "to take advantage of a very sick man," sending Chief of Staff Andrew Card and then–White House counsel Alberto Gonzales on a mission to Ashcroft's sickroom to persuade the heavily doped attorney general to override his deputy. Apprised of their mission, Comey, accompanied by a full security detail, jumped in his car, raced through the streets of the capital, lights blazing, and "literally ran" up the hospital stairs to beat them there. Minutes later, Gonzales and Card arrived with an envelope filled with the requisite forms. Ashcroft, even in his stupor, did not fall for their heavy-handed ploy. "I'm not the attorney general," Ashcroft told Bush's men. "There"—he pointed weakly to Comey—"is the attorney general." Gonzales and Card were furious, departing without even acknowledging Comey's presence in the room. The following day, the classified domestic spying program that Comey found so disturbing went forward at the demand of the White House—"without a signature from the Department of Justice attesting as to its legality," he testified. What was the mysterious program that had so alarmed Comey? Political blogs buzzed for weeks with speculation. Though Comey testified that the program was subsequently readjusted to satisfy his concerns, one can't help wondering whether the unspecified alteration would satisfy constitutional experts, or even average citizens. Faced with push-back from his bosses at the White House, did he simply relent and accept a token concession? Two months after Comey's testimony to Congress, the New York Times reported a tantalizing detail: The program that prompted him "to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases." The larger mystery remained intact, however. "It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate," the article conceded. ONE NATION, UNDER SURVEILLANCE James Comey testifies before the Senate Judiciary Committee (Photo: Getty Images) Another clue came from a rather unexpected source: President Bush himself. Addressing the nation from the Oval Office in 2005 after the first disclosures of the NSA's warrantless electronic surveillance became public, Bush insisted that the spying program in question was reviewed "every 45 days" as part of planning to assess threats to "the continuity of our government." Few Americans—professional journalists included—know anything about so-called Continuity of Government (COG) programs, so it's no surprise that the president's passing reference received almost no attention. COG resides in a nebulous legal realm, encompassing national emergency plans that would trigger the takeover of the country by extra-constitutional forces—and effectively suspend the republic. In short, it's a road map for martial law. While Comey, who left the Department of Justice in 2005, has steadfastly refused to comment further on the matter, a number of former government employees and intelligence sources with independent knowledge of domestic surveillance operations claim the program that caused the flap between Comey and the White House was related to a database of Americans who might be considered potential threats in the event of a national emergency. Sources familiar with the program say that the government's data gathering has been overzealous and probably conducted in violation of federal law and the protection from unreasonable search and seizure guaranteed by the Fourth Amendment. According to a senior government official who served with high-level security clearances in five administrations, "There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived 'enemies of the state' almost instantaneously." He and other sources tell Radar that the database is sometimes referred to by the code name Main Core. One knowledgeable source claims that 8 million Americans are now listed in Main Core as potentially suspect. In the event of a national emergency, these people could be subject to everything from heightened surveillance and tracking to direct questioning and possibly even detention. DESPERATE TIMES Should another 9/11 occur, Continuity of Governance plans developed during the Cold War go into effect (Photo: Getty Images) Of course, federal law is somewhat vague as to what might constitute a "national emergency." Executive orders issued over the past three decades define it as a "natural disaster, military attack, [or] technological or other emergency," while Department of Defense documents include eventualities like "riots, acts of violence, insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, [and] disorder prejudicial to public law and order." According to one news report, even "national opposition to U.S. military invasion abroad" could be a trigger. Let's imagine a harrowing scenario: coordinated bombings in several American cities culminating in a major blast—say, a suitcase nuke—in New York City. Thousands of civilians are dead. Commerce is paralyzed. A state of emergency is declared by the president. Continuity of Governance plans that were developed during the Cold War and aggressively revised since 9/11 go into effect. Surviving government officials are shuttled to protected underground complexes carved into the hills of Maryland, Virginia, and Pennsylvania. Power shifts to a "parallel government" that consists of scores of secretly preselected officials. (As far back as the 1980s, Donald Rumsfeld, then CEO of a pharmaceutical company, and Dick Cheney, then a congressman from Wyoming, were slated to step into key positions during a declared emergency.) The executive branch is the sole and absolute seat of authority, with Congress and the judiciary relegated to advisory roles at best. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police state. In case of a wide-scale attack, the executive branch becomes the sole and absolute seat of authority. The country becomes, within a matter of hours, a police stateInterestingly, plans drawn up during the Reagan administration suggest this parallel government would be ruling under authority given by law to the Federal Emergency Management Agency, home of the same hapless bunch that recently proved themselves unable to distribute water to desperate hurricane victims. The agency's incompetence in tackling natural disasters is less surprising when one considers that, since its inception in the 1970s, much of its focus has been on planning for the survival of the federal government in the wake of a decapitating nuclear strike. Under law, during a national emergency, FEMA and its parent organization, the Department of Homeland Security, would be empowered to seize private and public property, all forms of transport, and all food supplies. The agency could dispatch military commanders to run state and local governments, and it could order the arrest of citizens without a warrant, holding them without trial for as long as the acting government deems necessary. From the comfortable perspective of peaceful times, such behavior by the government may seem far-fetched. But it was not so very long ago that FDR ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans—everyone from infants to the elderly—be held in detention camps for the duration of World War II. This is widely regarded as a shameful moment in U.S. history, a lesson learned. But a long trail of federal documents indicates that the possibility of large-scale detention has never quite been abandoned by federal authorities. Around the time of the 1968 race riots, for instance, a paper drawn up at the U.S. Army War College detailed plans for rounding up millions of "militants" and "American negroes," who were to be held at "assembly centers or relocation camps." In the late 1980s, the Austin American-Statesman and other publications reported the existence of 10 detention camp sites on military facilities nationwide, where hundreds of thousands of people could be held in the event of domestic political upheaval. More such facilities were commissioned in 2006, when Kellogg Brown & Root—then a subsidiary of Halliburton—was handed a $385 million contract to establish "temporary detention and processing capabilities" for the Department of Homeland Security. The contract is short on details, stating only that the facilities would be used for "an emergency influx of immigrants, or to support the rapid development of new programs." Just what those "new programs" might be is not specified. In the days after our hypothetical terror attack, events might play out like this: With the population gripped by fear and anger, authorities undertake unprecedented actions in the name of public safety. Officials at the Department of Homeland Security begin actively scrutinizing people who—for a tremendously broad set of reasons—have been flagged in Main Core as potential domestic threats. Some of these individuals might receive a letter or a phone call, others a request to register with local authorities. Still others might hear a knock on the door and find police or armed soldiers outside. In some instances, the authorities might just ask a few questions. Other suspects might be arrested and escorted to federal holding facilities, where they could be detained without counsel until the state of emergency is no longer in effect. It is, of course, appropriate for any government to plan for the worst. But when COG plans are shrouded in extreme secrecy, effectively unregulated by Congress or the courts, and married to an overreaching surveillance state—as seems to be the case with Main Core—even sober observers must weigh whether the protections put in place by the federal government are becoming more dangerous to America than any outside threat. Another well-informed source—a former military operative regularly briefed by members of the intelligence community—says this particular program has roots going back at least to the 1980s and was set up with help from the Defense Intelligence Agency. He has been told that the program utilizes software that makes predictive judgments of targets' behavior and tracks their circle of associations with "social network analysis" and artificial intelligence modeling tools. "The more data you have on a particular target, the better [the software] can predict what the target will do, where the target will go, who it will turn to for help," he says. "Main Core is the table of contents for all the illegal information that the U.S. government has [compiled] on specific targets." An intelligence expert who has been briefed by high-level contacts in the Department of Homeland Security confirms that a database of this sort exists, but adds that "it is less a mega-database than a way to search numerous other agency databases at the same time." CROWD CONTROL New Yorkers walk home on the afternoon of the September 11 attacks (Photo: Getty Images) A host of publicly disclosed programs, sources say, now supply data to Main Core. Most notable are the NSA domestic surveillance programs, initiated in the wake of 9/11, typically referred to in press reports as "warrantless wiretapping." In March, a front-page article in the Wall Street Journal shed further light onto the extraordinarily invasive scope of the NSA efforts: According to the Journal, the government can now electronically monitor "huge volumes of records of domestic e-mails and Internet searches, as well as bank transfers, credit card transactions, travel, and telephone records." Authorities employ "sophisticated software programs" to sift through the data, searching for "suspicious patterns." In effect, the program is a mass catalog of the private lives of Americans. And it's notable that the article hints at the possibility of programs like Main Core. "The [NSA] effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called black programs whose existence is undisclosed," the Journal reported, quoting unnamed officials. "Many of the programs in various agencies began years before the 9/11 attacks but have since been given greater reach." "We're at the edge of a cliff," says Bruce Fein, a top justice official in the Reagan administration. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. "The following information seems to be fair game for collection without a warrant: the e-mail addresses you send to and receive from, and the subject lines of those messages; the phone numbers you dial, the numbers that dial in to your line, and the durations of the calls; the Internet sites you visit and the keywords in your Web searches; the destinations of the airline tickets you buy; the amounts and locations of your ATM withdrawals; and the goods and services you purchase on credit cards. All of this information is archived on government supercomputers and, according to sources, also fed into the Main Core database. Main Core also allegedly draws on four smaller databases that, in turn, cull from federal, state, and local "intelligence" reports; print and broadcast media; financial records; "commercial databases"; and unidentified "private sector entities." Additional information comes from a database known as the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment, which generates watch lists from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence for use by airlines, law enforcement, and border posts. According to the Washington Post, the Terrorist Identities list has quadrupled in size between 2003 and 2007 to include about 435,000 names. The FBI's Terrorist Screening Center border crossing list, which listed 755,000 persons as of fall 2007, grows by 200,000 names a year. A former NSA officer tells Radar that the Treasury Department's Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, using an electronic-funds transfer surveillance program, also contributes data to Main Core, as does a Pentagon program that was created in 2002 to monitor antiwar protesters and environmental activists such as Greenpeace. HERE'S LOOKING AT YOU From your late-night e-mails and travel plans to phone records and financial transactions, the government finds you fascinating—and may consider you a potential enemy of the state (Photo: Illustration by Brett Ryder) If previous FEMA and FBI lists are any indication, the Main Core database includes dissidents and activists of various stripes, political and tax protesters, lawyers and professors, publishers and journalists, gun owners, illegal aliens, foreign nationals, and a great many other harmless, average people. A veteran CIA intelligence analyst who maintains active high-level clearances and serves as an advisor to the Department of Defense in the field of emerging technology tells Radar that during the 2004 hospital room drama, James Comey expressed concern over how this secret database was being used "to accumulate otherwise private data on non-targeted U.S. citizens for use at a future time." Though not specifically familiar with the name Main Core, he adds, "What was being requested of Comey for legal approval was exactly what a Main Core story would be." A source regularly briefed by people inside the intelligence community adds: "Comey had discovered that President Bush had authorized NSA to use a highly classified and compartmentalized Continuity of Government database on Americans in computerized searches of its domestic intercepts. [Comey] had concluded that the use of that 'Main Core' database compromised the legality of the overall NSA domestic surveillance project." If Main Core does exist, says Philip Giraldi, a former CIA counterterrorism officer and an outspoken critic of the agency, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is its likely home. "If a master list is being compiled, it would have to be in a place where there are no legal issues"—the CIA and FBI would be restricted by oversight and accountability laws—"so I suspect it is at DHS, which as far as I know operates with no such restraints." Giraldi notes that DHS already maintains a central list of suspected terrorists and has been freely adding people who pose no reasonable threat to domestic security. "It's clear that DHS has the mandate for controlling and owning master lists. The process is not transparent, and the criteria for getting on the list are not clear." Giraldi continues, "I am certain that the content of such a master list [as Main Core] would not be carefully vetted, and there would be many names on it for many reasons—quite likely including the two of us." UNDER REAGAN In the 1980s, control of the FBI's "security index" was reportedly transferred to none other than FEMA (Photo: Getty Images) Would Main Core in fact be legal? According to constitutional scholar Bruce Fein, who served as associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, the question of legality is murky: "In the event of a national emergency, the executive branch simply assumes these powers"—the powers to collect domestic intelligence and draw up detention lists, for example—"if Congress doesn't explicitly prohibit it. It's really up to Congress to put these things to rest, and Congress has not done so." Fein adds that it is virtually impossible to contest the legality of these kinds of data collection and spy programs in court "when there are no criminal prosecutions and [there is] no notice to persons on the president's 'enemies list.' That means if Congress remains invertebrate, the law will be whatever the president says it is—even in secret. He will be the judge on his own powers and invariably rule in his own favor." Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crudeThe veteran CIA intelligence analyst notes that Comey's suggestion that the offending elements of the program were dropped could be misleading: "Bush [may have gone ahead and] signed it as a National Intelligence Finding anyway." But even if we never face a national emergency, the mere existence of the database is a matter of concern. "The capacity for future use of this information against the American people is so great as to be virtually unfathomable," the senior government official says. In any case, mass watch lists of domestic citizens may do nothing to make us safer from terrorism. Jeff Jonas, chief scientist at IBM, a world-renowned expert in data mining, contends that such efforts won't prevent terrorist conspiracies. "Because there is so little historical terrorist event data," Jonas tells Radar, "there is not enough volume to create precise predictions." The overzealous compilation of a domestic watch list is not unique in postwar American history. In 1950, the FBI, under the notoriously paranoid J. Edgar Hoover, began to "accumulate the names, identities, and activities" of suspect American citizens in a rapidly expanding "security index," according to declassified documents. In a letter to the Truman White House, Hoover stated that in the event of certain emergency situations, suspect individuals would be held in detention camps overseen by "the National Military Establishment." By 1960, a congressional investigation later revealed, the FBI list of suspicious persons included "professors, teachers, and educators; labor-union organizers and leaders; writers, lecturers, newsmen, and others in the mass-media field; lawyers, doctors, and scientists; other potentially influential persons on a local or national level; [and] individuals who could potentially furnish financial or material aid" to unnamed "subversive elements." This same FBI "security index" was allegedly maintained and updated into the 1980s, when it was reportedly transferred to the control of none other than FEMA (though the FBI denied this at the time). FEMA, however—then known as the Federal Preparedness Agency—already had its own domestic surveillance system in place, according to a 1975 investigation by Senator John V. Tunney of California. Tunney, the son of heavyweight boxing champion Gene Tunney and the inspiration for Robert Redford's character in the film The Candidate, found that the agency maintained electronic dossiers on at least 100,000 Americans that contained information gleaned from wide-ranging computerized surveillance. The database was located in the agency's secret underground city at Mount Weather, near the town of Bluemont, Virginia. The senator's findings were confirmed in a 1976 investigation by the Progressive magazine, which found that the Mount Weather computers "can obtain millions of pieces [of] information on the personal lives of American citizens by tapping the data stored at any of the 96 Federal Relocation Centers"—a reference to other classified facilities. According to the Progressive, Mount Weather's databases were run "without any set of stated rules or regulations. Its surveillance program remains secret even from the leaders of the House and the Senate." JUST IN CASE The Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan" (Photo: Getty Images) Ten years later, a new round of government martial law plans came to light. A report in the Miami Herald contended that Reagan loyalist and Iran-Contra conspirator Colonel Oliver North had spearheaded the development of a "secret contingency plan,"—code-named REX 84—which called "for suspension of the Constitution, turning control of the United States over to FEMA, [and the] appointment of military commanders to run state and local governments." The North plan also reportedly called for the detention of upwards of 400,000 illegal aliens and an undisclosed number of American citizens in at least 10 military facilities maintained as potential holding camps. North's program was so sensitive in nature that when Texas congressman Jack Brooks attempted to question North about it during the 1987 Iran-Contra hearings, he was rebuffed even by his fellow legislators. "I read in Miami papers and several others that there had been a plan by that same agency [FEMA] that would suspend the American Constitution," Brooks said. "I was deeply concerned about that and wondered if that was the area in which he [North] had worked." Senator Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Iran, immediately cut off his colleague, saying, "That question touches upon a highly sensitive and classified area, so may I request that you not touch upon that, sir." Though Brooks pushed for an answer, the line of questioning was not allowed to proceed. Wired magazine turned up additional damaging information, revealing in 1993 that North, operating from a secure White House site, allegedly employed a software database program called PROMIS (ostensibly as part of the REX 84 plan). PROMIS, which has a strange and controversial history, was designed to track individuals—prisoners, for example—by pulling together information from disparate databases into a single record. According to Wired, "Using the computers in his command center, North tracked dissidents and potential troublemakers within the United States. Compared to PROMIS, Richard Nixon's enemies list or Senator Joe McCarthy's blacklist look downright crude." Sources have suggested to Radar that government databases tracking Americans today, including Main Core, could still have PROMIS-based legacy code from the days when North was running his programs. In the wake of 9/11, domestic surveillance programs of all sorts expanded dramatically. As one well-placed source in the intelligence community puts it, "The gloves seemed to come off." What is not yet clear is what sort of still-undisclosed programs may have been authorized by the Bush White House. Marty Lederman, a high-level official at the Department of Justice under Clinton, writing on a law blog last year, wondered, "How extreme were the programs they implemented [after 9/11]? How egregious was the lawbreaking?" Congress has tried, and mostly failed, to find out. HISTORY'S LESSONS Japanese Americans moved to internment camps in World War II In July 2007 and again last August, Representative Peter DeFazio, a Democrat from Oregon and a senior member of the House Homeland Security Committee, sought access to the "classified annexes" of the Bush administration's Continuity of Government program. DeFazio's interest was prompted by Homeland Security Presidential Directive 20 (also known as NSPD-51), issued in May 2007, which reserves for the executive branch the sole authority to decide what constitutes a national emergency and to determine when the emergency is over. DeFazio found this unnerving. But he and other leaders of the Homeland Security Committee, including Chairman Bennie Thompson, a Mississippi Democrat, were denied a review of the Continuity of Government classified annexes. To this day, their calls for disclosure have been ignored by the White House. In a press release issued last August, DeFazio went public with his concerns that the NSPD-51 Continuity of Government plans are "extra-constitutional or unconstitutional." Around the same time, he told the Oregonian: "Maybe the people who think there's a conspiracy out there are right." None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the question, "As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration?"Congress itself has recently widened the path for both extra-constitutional detentions by the White House and the domestic use of military force during a national emergency. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 effectively suspended habeas corpus and freed up the executive branch to designate any American citizen an "enemy combatant" forfeiting all privileges accorded under the Bill of Rights. The John Warner National Defense Authorization Act, also passed in 2006, included a last-minute rider titled "Use of the Armed Forces in Major Public Emergencies," which allowed the deployment of U.S. military units not just to put down domestic insurrections—as permitted under posse comitatus and the Insurrection Act of 1807—but also to deal with a wide range of calamities, including "natural disaster, epidemic, or other serious public health emergency, terrorist attack, or incident." More troubling, in 2002, Congress authorized funding for the U.S. Northern Command, or NORTHCOM, which, according to Washington Post military intelligence expert William Arkin, "allows for emergency military operations in the United States without civilian supervision or control." "We are at the edge of a cliff and we're about to fall off," says constitutional lawyer and former Reagan administration official Bruce Fein. "To a national emergency planner, everybody looks like a danger to stability. There's no doubt that Congress would have the authority to denounce all this—for example, to refuse to appropriate money for the preparation of a list of U.S. citizens to be detained in the event of martial law. But Congress is the invertebrate branch. They say, 'We have to be cautious.' The same old crap you associate with cowards. None of this will change under a Democratic administration, unless you have exceptional statesmanship and the courage to stand up and say, 'You know, democracies accept certain risks that tyrannies do not.'" CREDIBLE WITNESS James Comey (Photo: Getty Images) As of this writing, DeFazio, Thompson, and the other 433 members of the House are debating the so-called Protect America Act, after a similar bill passed in the Senate. Despite its name, the act offers no protection for U.S. citizens; instead, it would immunize from litigation U.S. telecom giants for colluding with the government in the surveillance of Americans to feed the hungry maw of databases like Main Core. The Protect America Act would legalize programs that appear to be unconstitutional. Meanwhile, the mystery of James Comey's testimony has disappeared in the morass of election year coverage. None of the leading presidential candidates have been asked the questions that are so profoundly pertinent to the future of the country: As president, will you continue aggressive domestic surveillance programs in the vein of the Bush administration? Will you release the COG blueprints that Representatives DeFazio and Thompson were not allowed to read? What does it suggest about the state of the nation that the U.S. is now ranked by worldwide civil liberties groups as an "endemic surveillance society," alongside repressive regimes such as China and Russia? How can a democracy thrive with a massive apparatus of spying technology deployed against every act of political expression, private or public? (Radar put these questions to spokespeople for the McCain, Obama, and Clinton campaigns, but at press time had yet to receive any responses.) These days, it's rare to hear a voice like that of Senator Frank Church, who in the 1970s led the explosive investigations into U.S. domestic intelligence crimes that prompted the very reforms now being eroded. "The technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny," Church pointed out in 1975. "And there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know." Christopher Ketcham writes for Harper's, GQ, and Mother Jones, among other publications UPDATE Since this article went to press, several documents have emerged to suggest the story has longer legs than we thought. Most troubling among these is an October 2001 Justice Department memo that detailed the extra-constitutional powers the U.S. military might invoke during domestic operations following a terrorist attack. In the memo, John Yoo, then deputy assistant attorney general, "concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations." (Yoo, as most readers know, is author of the infamous Torture Memo that, in bizarro fashion, rejiggers the definition of "legal" torture to allow pretty much anything short of murder.) In the October 2001 memo, Yoo refers to a classified DOJ document titled "Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States." According to the Associated Press, "Exactly what domestic military action was covered by the October memo is unclear. But federal documents indicate that the memo relates to the National Security Agency's Terrorist Surveillance Program." Attorney General John Mukasey last month refused to clarify before Congress whether the Yoo memo was still in force. Meanwhile, congressional sources tell Radar that Congressman Peter DeFazio has apparently abandoned his effort to get to the bottom of the White House COG classified annexes. Penny Dodge, DeFazio's chief of staff, says otherwise. "We will be sending a letter requesting a classified briefing soon," she told Radar this week. This article is from the May/June issue of Radar Magazine..

Global Research Articles by Christopher Ketcham

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Americans Must Not Allow This To Happen!!!

Where the hell are the Libertarians?

This is outrageous and must not be allowed to happen. Does anyone really want either of our political parties to have this kind of power?

By Spencer S. Hsu

Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 12, 2008; Page A03

The Bush administration said yesterday that it plans to start using the nation's most advanced spy technology for domestic purposes soon, rebuffing challenges by House Democrats over the idea's legal authority.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said his department will activate his department's new domestic satellite surveillance office in stages, starting as soon as possible with traditional scientific and homeland security activities -- such as tracking hurricane damage, monitoring climate change and creating terrain maps.

Sophisticated overhead sensor data will be used for law enforcement once privacy and civil rights concerns are resolved, he said. The department has previously said the program will not intercept communications.

"There is no basis to suggest that this process is in any way insufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans," Chertoff wrote to Reps. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.) and Jane Harman (D-Calif.), chairmen of the House Homeland Security Committee and its intelligence subcommittee, respectively, in letters released yesterday.

"I think we've fully addressed anybody's concerns," Chertoff added in remarks last week to bloggers. "I think the way is now clear to stand it up and go warm on it."

His statements marked a fresh determination to operate the department's new National Applications Office as part of its counterterrorism efforts. The administration in May 2007 gave DHS authority to coordinate requests for satellite imagery, radar, electronic-signal information, chemical detection and other monitoring capabilities that have been used for decades within U.S. borders for mapping and disaster response.

But Congress delayed launch of the new office last October. Critics cited its potential to expand the role of military assets in domestic law enforcement, to turn new or as-yet-undeveloped technologies against Americans without adequate public debate, and to divert the existing civilian and scientific focus of some satellite work to security uses.

Democrats say Chertoff has not spelled out what federal laws govern the NAO, whose funding and size are classified. Congress barred Homeland Security from funding the office until its investigators could review the office's operating procedures and safeguards. The department submitted answers on Thursday, but some lawmakers promptly said the response was inadequate.

"I have had a firsthand experience with the trust-me theory of law from this administration," said Harman, citing the 2005 disclosure of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, which included warrantless eavesdropping on calls and e-mails between people in the United States and overseas. "I won't make the same mistake. . . . I want to see the legal underpinnings for the whole program."

Thompson called DHS's release Thursday of the office's procedures and a civil liberties impact assessment "a good start." But, he said, "We still don't know whether the NAO will pass constitutional muster since no legal framework has been provided."

DHS officials said the demands are unwarranted. "The legal framework that governs the National Applications Office . . . is reflected in the Constitution, the U.S. Code and all other U.S. laws," said DHS spokeswoman Laura Keehner. She said its operations will be subject to "robust," structured legal scrutiny by multiple agencies.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Big Brother In The Sky or Government As God

I was just reading a Pdf article ( http://www.fas.org/sgp/crs/intel/RL34421.pdf ) regarding spy satellites that have, until now, been used for spying on foreign countries, I hope for defensive purposes only, and not for corporate use. That is of concern, today, or it certainly should be of concern to citizens as well as the corporations, themselves, with government and corporations so closely intertwined that the majority of Telecoms welcomed the government to use them to spy on Americans and anyone else whose emails or phone calls are trafficked through the U.S., even though they knew it was illegal. (Only Quest refused until congress was asked and did change the law. Quest and its CEO were punished in every way one could think of short of Guantanamo, by use of government agencies; the IRS, etc.)

How very Nixonian!

Spy satellites have also been used on U.S. soil for such things as taking pictures of a place just after a disaster, so that "helping agencies" can see what roads are washed out, for example, where certain building are located, like schools, where people may have gathered for shelter. Satellite info. is used by the Department of Agriculture to asses crop damage and the like, after hurricanes, floods along the Mississippi and other large rivers and, of course, drought. However, spy satellites have never been turned, so to speak, on the American people and used as a law enforcement tool, which could have terrible ramifications for what's left of the constitution; there are privacy issues, posse comitatus, 4th amendment issues (hard to type that and not laugh out loud, as the 4th amendment went out the window with Reagan's War On Drugs).

Now, the Bushites want just that; the freedom to use satellites, that we pay for, to spy on us and feed information to local law enforcement. They want the satellites under the auspices of DHS. Can this get anymore Orwellian? Actually, not even George O. himself could have imagined this.

The spy satellites we are talking about are billed as having technology and spying power that would make Google Earth and other such public programs seem ancient in comparison. This must be the technology we have heard can read a car's tag in Paris. They can do it in NYC as well. Some might say that it doesn't matter to them because they aren't breaking the law. O.k, I can buy that, at first glance, but only at first glance.

We all probably break a law or two at least once every day of our lives. I know I have no idea what all the laws of this country are and what they prohibit or demand. I don't believe anyone does; no, not even attorneys. (There are way too many laws in this country.)

Also, what if the law should suddenly change, so drastically that it shocks and scares the hell out of you? For example, the suspension of the constitution and the declaration of martial Law, let's say at 3:00 am. Black Humvees, with highly armed black clad men standing with AK47s through the large sunroof, and other military utility vehicles with odd looking equipment on top. are patrolling your neighborhood when you awaken. You are being told, over a speaker system in the vehicles, that you should remain in your homes unless you are a first responder.

In that case you may leave for work as long as you have your ID showing that you are a fireman, policeman, work at a hospital or clinic, whatever. You are effectively cut off from your family and friends, the members of which, live all around the country or across town, as all civilian communication is blocked.

Only TeeVee stations that carry disaster or warning information will have information from the government. Maybe that will be the only station available for days on end. Those of us who need to go to work, will be allowed to do so, after one or two days of complete lock-down. Our fellow employees will have no more information than we do. After work, you will be told to go straight home; no happy hour for you; no contact with friends even for the comfort of opinion sharing. Schools will be closed.

Now, just sit with that for a moment. Feel it! What's that that's piercing your heart like cold steel? Could it be terror? What's that feeling in the pit of your stomach? Might you toss your cookies, or will stomach cramps just set in for a few days? Did you believe that your brain could ever reach the amount of Hz it is reaching now? It is literally whirling, trying to understand and figure what's best to do, for the sake of your family and yourself. Only one thing seems certain. You are on your own.

The information channel says there have been several terrorist events around the country. Have there really been terrorist events? With all you now know, can you really trust this?

TeeVee News is off the air.

The attacksy have been of different natures; a small nuclear event, several bio-attacks in Air Travel hubs, and several chemical attacks. No more information can be given for national security reasons. Of course, the attacks were carried out by al Qaeda, maybe even al Qaeda in Iraq. Seems we will believe anything.

Do any of you gun guys plan on running to fetch your small arsenal. Don't bother. You will only need one gun...to use on yourself, if for some reason your name is on a list somewhere, slap-happily compiled as was the terrorist watch list and the no-fly list, and Bushes private special forces have come to relocate you and maybe your entire family to a "detainment camp." (google is your friend). DHS and Blackwater are not. (Remember Katrina? That wasn't just a big ass hurricane, it was a message from your government. Don't count on us. The only answer we have to any problem is the military.

Is there really anything more frightening than falling into the hands of your own government, especially when it is in a state of war and habeas corpus has been deep-sixed.

What if the government shares information with the corporations, with which it is so intertwined, like insurance companies, for example?

Perhaps the government spy satellites can be made to watch every move you and your family make for a month, without your knowledge, of course. Car insurance people would certainly be interested in whether or not you or any member of your family are aggressive drivers, if you routinely drive over the speed limit in a 35 MPH speed zone where accidents are frequent or consistently speed on the highways. Remember that your teen-aged son is being scrutinized as well. Need I say more. That insurance company won't insure you. You will be referred to an insurance company that charges ungodly monthly payments. What about standing up for your rights before you have zero left and you are living in a capitalist police state that will make the Soviet Union look like child's play?

* But here's a thought. Do we really have this kind of technology? If so, why in hell could we not find Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden? Why could we not pinpoint the exact locations of WMD caches in Iraq, supposedly easily spotted by these satellites, (other than the fact that there were none, of course).

Congress Critters on the intelligence committees know what we've got and what it can do. Why wouldn't they have asked for the satellite shots before they signed off on this illegal, unjust, freakin' war? Why was it necessary to kill millions of people, maim a few million more and destroy the lives of so many people here, in Iraq and in Afghanistan?

Oh. Do we still have that law against assassinating leaders of other nations; that nuisance of a law that I doubt administrations have obeyed in the first place, but makes a great excuse for all out war, with all of its glorious chaos and fog, during which all kinds of crime can be committed and unthinkable profits can be made by the very corporations who got those no-bid contracts for Iraq, Afghanistan and, yes, even New Orleans. (Make that unspeakable profits, as well.) Of course, some corporate financial records are available for scrutiny in the public record. How much are some of these jackasses making off the books? How many millions have just disappeared in Iraq by now?

The truth is out there. But I doubt we will ever be privy to any of it.


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

The Growing American Police State Seems Bipartisan

Another Milestone on the Road to Serfdom Scott Horton

Very rarely, I read a press account and see the footprint of a new world—there it is, lurking amidst the smudged black ink in the thin column. Sometimes it is a technological breakthrough that promises to make life easier, safer, or longer. But sometimes it is a redefinition of the parameters of human society. And sometimes it’s downright frightening. Time to pull it out of the banality of that newsprint and think. And it happened on Sunday morning. The article is by Eric Lichtblau, James Risen and Scott Shane, and it’s called “Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry.” Take the time to read this article carefully. Here are a few key grafs: For months, the Bush Administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program. But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime. The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure. To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified. But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed. What Lichtblau, Risen and Shane are describing is the dawn of a new National Surveillance State in the United States, a public-private partnership. And the object of this partnership—which emerges as a criminal conspiracy, quite literally, between telecom companies and the Bush Administration—is to watch and listen to you and everything you do. Of course, they will say it’s about “terrorists,” or about “narcotics traffickers.” And indeed every authoritarian and wannabe totalitarian system from the dawn of time has cast its snooping on citizens in just these terms. No problems with the honest citizen, they say, it’s the criminals and the enemies we’re after. We need your cooperation. But the technology used makes no such distinction—it is snooping on everyone. We learn about this mostly thanks to an engineer who saw what was happening and began to ask questions. The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency “could listen in” with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said. “At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something isn’t right.” So the United States intelligence agencies in cahoots with major telecom providers are intercepting and reviewing your communications. This is occurring without warrants. And the legal community is in accord: it was criminal conduct. And that’s why the Bush Administration is frantically pushing right now for immunity: to ensure that its collaborators face no adverse consequences from their criminal acts. What kind of society does this sound like? Now let’s tack on one further extremely disturbing fact. One telecom company said “no.” It was Qwest. The Qwest response to overtures was simple: “We’d love to work with you on this. But you do need to change the law so we can do it legally.” Apparently as soon as that happened, Qwest lost a series of important government contracts. And the next thing you know, the Justice Department was feverishly working on a criminal investigation looking at Qwest’s CEO on insider trading allegations—amidst very strange dealings between the Justice Department and the federal judge hearing the case. Of course, this is all the purest coincidence. Or maybe not. What kind of society does this sound like? This is not the America we used to live in. It is not a nation that stood as a bulwark for civil liberties. It is a nation with an executive who is drunk on power. An executive who refuses to respect the legal constraints established by the Constitution, and even the criminal law. As dawn turned to midmorning in the era of technology, thinkers agreed that the great threat facing mankind was the threat of a totalitarian rule. They saw the vision that Orwell transcribed, in which human freedom would be horribly constrained as the species assumed the role accorded to cogs in some massive machine. This was hard for Americans to envision—they were born and lived in a country that knew and seriously guarded civil liberties. But those who traveled abroad saw the evidence plainly enough, especially in the twenties and thirties, as totalitarian states rose and enslaved their peoples. Then fascism rose and fell. And after it, the efforts to build a Marxist-Leninist world imploded as well. But it’s wrong to suppose on the basis of these failed nightmare-utopias that the threat Orwell envisioned had passed. It has merely moved on, to a new form. How would America and its market system behave in the face of such a threat? In the mind of some, like Hayek and Mises, the forces of the market would restrain an overreaching government and would serve to maximize human freedom. We needed to be on guard, of course, against the rise of monopolies and preserve the competitive edge. And we have to adhere rigorously to a principle of legality. As Mises reminds us, it is the centering of power in the hands of a few men and not in the rule of law, that presents the gravest threat to individual freedom in the market economies. I don’t object to private businesses, including those in the telecommunications sector, cooperating with government, including the intelligence services. They should do so, of course, to promote society’s interest in collective security. But this cooperation needs to occur within the boundaries of the law, and it must respect the rights of their customers, and more broadly of the citizenry. What the Bush Administration and the telecoms did was wrong, and both should be held to account for their wrongdoing. That’s the way a state committed to the rule of law works. The question is now before the Senate for a vote on the telecom amnesty bill. As usual, the White-Flag Democrats are abandoning opposition to the Administration’s initiative and are laying the foundation for it to be steamrolled through the Senate. Harry Reid’s conduct in particular has been reprehensible and spineless. This vote is a milestone on the road to serfdom. It’s time to put up a roadblock instead. Write or phone your senator immediately and advise them that you oppose the grant of amnesty for warrantless surveillance to telecommunications companies and that you expect them to do the same.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Chris Dodd Mounts Fight For Americans' Rights

Way To Go, Senator! You're our hero of the week!

Dodd ready to mount filibuster to block telecom immunity

12/17/2007 @ 8:48 am

Filed by Nick Juliano

Live video of the Senate debate on the FISA update and telecom immunity can be seen on C-Span 2 here.

Sen. Chris Dodd has taken to the Senate floor to urge his colleagues to block a proposal to grant legal immunity to telecommunications companies that facilitated the warrantless surveillance of Americans.

"I rarely come to the floor with this much anger," Dodd said. "I've never seen contempt of the rule of law such as this."

The Senate is considering an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that includes a provision aimed at invalidating some 40 lawsuits that have been filed against telephone and internet companies. Plaintiffs in those suits say the telecommunications industry acted illegally and ignored the constitution in facilitating warrantless government wiretaps aimed at Americans.

Shortly after noon Monday, the Senate voted 76-10 to proceed to regular debate on a proposed FISA update from the Intelligence Committee that includes telecom immunity; a Judiciary measure without immunity is pending as a substitute amendment. Dodd is expected to mount his filibuster once debate on the measure begins this afternoon.

Monday's consideration of telecom immunity came a day after new reports that the reach of the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance efforts extended far beyond fighting terrorism and some were proposed or instituted before 9/11.

"The administration has claimed that is seeking merely foreign intelligence and that the intelligence is for national security purposes only. We see now that those claims are a part of a larger and more chilling picture," said the ACLU's Caroline Frederickson in a news release, referring to reports that first appeared in the New York Times detailing the NSA's efforts to tap into domestic communication networks and warrantlessly target calls to Latin America in search of drug dealers.

I doubt that the spying program was intended to nab big Latin American drug dealers. That's just the back-up story, in case the fact that the spying program was being set up two weeks after Bush and Cheney took office. Does anyone else remember the "war on drugs" being a Bush administration priority during the Bush campaign or on inauguration day? I remember drugs becoming an Ashcroft priority after 9/11, when he tried, over and over, to connect Al Qaida to drugs and drug users. His attempts failed only because it was pointed out that the money we pay at the gas pump supported terrorism far more than illicit drugs ever could and that the Taliban did not allow Afghan poppy fields to flourish, as they have since NATO took over.

"Those who have filed the over 40 legitimate cases against the telecom companies deserve their day in court - especially now that what we thought we knew about the companies' involvement in domestic spying was, perhaps, just the tip of the iceberg," Fredrickson continued. "It becomes clearer and clearer just how in the dark Americans are when it comes to the surveillance they are subject to under this administration. It seems that the more we learn, the less we know.”

Debate over the FISA update began at 10 a.m. Monday, and Dodd began speaking around 11 a.m.

"Believe me when I say if I did not speak today, my conscience would not rest," Dodd told his colleagues. He praised the Senate as a chamber in which even a "minority of one" can mount a protest against unacceptable legislation, to counteract the president's bully pulpit, as he sought to turn his minority into a "majority" of senators against telecom immunity.

Accusing telecommunications companies of "betraying millions of customers trust" by handing over phone records to the government for construction of a massive database, Dodd said, blocking lawsuits against the companies would eliminate the last bastion of oversight of the president's warrantless wiretapping program.

"Was it legal?" Dodd asked. "That I don't know, but if we pass this bill we will never know."

The Connecticut senator accused President Bush of usurping the rule of law by asking the country to simply trust that he wasn't trampling on citizens' constitutional rights.

"We say to the president of the United States that a nation of free men and women would never take 'trust me' for an answer, not even from a perfect president," Dodd said. "At these times, I would be a fool to take that offer."

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John Rockefeller (D-WV), whose committee passed a measure that would grant immunity to telecoms, insisted early in Monday's debate, which is being televised on C-Span 2, that such immunity was narrowly targeted to telephone and internet companies that facilitated the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program between Sept. 11, 2001, and January of this year, when the FISA court ruled on the program.

So, does that mean that those telecoms participating in the domestic spying program before 9/11/01 would be exempt from the immunity in the senate bill?

Dodd, a dark-horse candidate for the Democratic presidential nod, tried to put a "hold" on any FISA update with telecom immunity, but that request apparently has been ignored by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV).

The 64-year-old Connecticut Senator plans to filibuster the bill -- the old fashioned way -- when it comes to the floor Monday. There is no word on how long Dodd's filibuster will last.

"It looks like the Senate Democratic leadership are not going to be the ones standing firm," a source familiar with the filibuster plan told RAW STORY.

Maybe, then, they don't need to be "the leadership" anymore!

In the modern Congress, the filibuster has become a de facto tool to require 60 votes in the Senate to pass virtually any piece of important or controversial legislation. Dodd's effort Monday would be the first time one Senator actually sought to block a bill by taking to the floor and refusing to yield since former Sen. Al D'Amato held the floor for 15 hours to protest job losses from his home state of New York to Mexico. That was in 1992 -- more than 15 years ago.

In 2003, Republicans cooperatively staged an all-night session to dramatize Democratic efforts to block President Bush's judicial nominations; earlier that week Reid held the floor for nearly nine hours to protest the Republicans stunt. And earlier this year, Reid kept the Senate in session all night to protest Republicans' refusal to allow a simple majority vote on a measure aimed at withdrawing US troops from Iraq.

Already, Dodd has lined up support from Sens. Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Ted Kennedy (D-MA), to whom he plans to yield the floor for 20-minute "questions" that would allow him to take quick breaks but keep the filibuster going, reports FireDogLake.

Writing at TPM Cafe, Feingold criticizes Reid's plans to proceed with a measure passed by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which does not include telecom immunity, instead of with a Judiciary Committee measure that has no immunity. The Intelligence bill will be the base when the Senate begins debate, and the Judiciary measure will be pending as a replacement amendment. It would require 60 votes to supplant the Intel bill with Judiciary's version.

"We have a big fight on our hands, and unfortunately, the deck is now stacked against us," Feingold said. "Instead of being able to defend improvements that were made in the Judiciary Committee, we are going to have to start all over again to try to salvage the good work that was done to improve the bill."

Dodd and Feingold plan to offer an amendment to strip telecom immunity from the FISA update.

Speaking on the Senate floor Monday, Feingold criticized the Intelligence Committee's proposal to grant immunity and accused administration officials of lying to Senators last week during a classified briefing about the proposed FISA updates.

"I am certain that over the course of this week, we will hear a number of arguments about why the Judiciary bill will hamper the fight against terrorism. Let me say now to my colleagues: Do not believe everything you hear," Feingold said. "Last week I sat with many of you in the secure room in the Capitol, S-407, and listened to arguments made by the Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General. And I can tell you with absolute certainty that several of the examples they gave were simply wrong. Simply false. I am happy to have a classified meeting with anyone in this body who wishes to discuss this."

FDL says comments readers leave there could be read by Sen. Dodd when he takes to the Senate floor, and it is calling on the Senate's other presidential candidates -- Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama -- to stand by their pledges to support Dodd's filibuster.

"The time for leadership is now, not January 2009. ... You want to be our leader? Leadership begins by standing with Senator Dodd," wrote Scarecrow at FDL Monday.

The Senate convenes at 10 a.m. Monday, and Dodd's filibuster is expected to begin soon after that. His plan to hold up business on the Senate floor comes as the chamber scrambles to pass several important spending bills and other legislation before recessing for the holidays at the end of this week.

DEVELOPING...

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.

Two Weeks Into The Bush Administration, Spying on Americans Was In The Works

December 16, 2007

Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry

By ERIC LICHTBLAU, JAMES RISEN and SCOTT SHANE

WASHINGTON — For months, the Bush administration has waged a high-profile campaign, including personal lobbying by President Bush and closed-door briefings by top officials, to persuade Congress to pass legislation protecting companies from lawsuits for aiding the National Security Agency’s warrantless eavesdropping program.

But the battle is really about something much bigger. At stake is the federal government’s extensive but uneasy partnership with industry to conduct a wide range of secret surveillance operations in fighting terrorism and crime.

The government's extensive, but uneasy partnership with industry? Did I read that correctly? Unless industry has gotten their collective head out of their collective butt long enough to understand what such a horribly intertwined relationship, like the one they have with our government, could mean to them (not good), down the road, there is nothing uneasy about the relationship between government and big business; extensive, YES, but not uneasy. It is becoming more and more difficult to define the line between them.

Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, but for the most part our government and the corporations; CEOs and other corporate officers who run them, have a mutual back-scratching relationship that can only lead to a fascist state.

Ask yourself, "whose interests seem more important to the W.H. and/or Congress?" Would you say "the ordinary American citizen, making less than $60,000/year, or the corporate officer making more than that in a week. Money is power and power is money. Corporatism is alive and well...not to mention very, very dangerous to our country and to us.

The N.S.A.’s reliance on telecommunications companies is broader and deeper than ever before, according to government and industry officials, yet that alliance is strained by legal worries and the fear of public exposure.

To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.

I thought that this hyped-up surveillance program was for the express purpose of stopping "turrist" from attacking the U.S. and our allies (if we have any real ones left). I didn't realize that we were witnessing a police state form, where anyone can be surveilled for any old crime for which they may be suspected. What's next, Hillary Clinton using information from the NSA/AT&T, Verizon spook programs to track down deadbeat dads or any other particular crime any future president decides to crack down on? If this type of surveillance can be used for any kind of crime, we need to change the laws and stop making stupid laws that are, finally and generally, unenforceable, even with the souped up surveillance, with the exception of the poor. Most laws like the ones made as a part of the "war on drugs" and the ones which will be made as part of the "war on abortion," will be enforced against the poor and the folks with scads of money won't have to worry a whit.

But in 2004, one major phone carrier balked at turning over its customers’ records. Worried about possible privacy violations or public relations problems, company executives declined to help the operation, which has not been previously disclosed.

In a separate N.S.A. project, executives at a Denver phone carrier, Qwest, refused in early 2001 to give the agency access to their most localized communications switches, which primarily carry domestic calls, according to people aware of the request, which has not been previously reported. They say the arrangement could have permitted neighborhood-by-neighborhood surveillance of phone traffic without a court order, which alarmed them.

The federal government’s reliance on private industry has been driven by changes in technology. Two decades ago, telephone calls and other communications traveled mostly through the air, relayed along microwave towers or bounced off satellites. The N.S.A. could vacuum up phone, fax and data traffic merely by erecting its own satellite dishes. But the fiber optics revolution has sent more and more international communications by land and undersea cable, forcing the agency to seek company cooperation to get access.

After the disclosure two years ago that the N.S.A. was eavesdropping on the international communications of terrorism suspects inside the United States without warrants, more than 40 lawsuits were filed against the government and phone carriers. As a result, skittish companies and their lawyers have been demanding stricter safeguards before they provide access to the government and, in some cases, are refusing outright to cooperate, officials said.

I, frankly do not give a tinker's damn how many terrorists the government, ours or that of other nation, for that matter, spy on. My problem, and I do have one, is that I am far from convinced that the BuCheney spy program is just for protecting our citizens. I believe to the point of almost being convinced that they Bush administration has been spying on the political opposition and on dissenters, at least.

“It’s a very frayed and strained relationship right now, and that’s not a good thing for the country in terms of keeping all of us safe,” said an industry official who believes that immunity is critical for the phone carriers. “This episode has caused companies to change their conduct in a variety of ways.”

Safe from whom, Osama or Cheney?

With a vote in the Senate on the issue expected as early as Monday, the Bush administration has intensified its efforts to win retroactive immunity for companies cooperating with counterterrorism operations.

That probably means immunity for the Bushites too.

“The intelligence community cannot go it alone,” Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, wrote in a New York Times Op-Ed article Monday urging Congress to pass the immunity provision. “Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits.”

We will reserve thanks for the time when we find out what is really going on and the Bushites cannot be trusted. I"m afraid that that hods true for anyone who enables them.

Attorney General Michael B. Mukasey echoed that theme in an op-ed article of his own in The Los Angeles Times on Wednesday, saying private companies would be reluctant to provide their “full-hearted help” if they were not given legal protections.

They should be reluctant. They should think twice, before they get in bed with the Bush administration.

The government’s dependence on the phone industry, driven by the changes in technology and the Bush administration’s desire to expand surveillance capabilities inside the United States, has grown significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks. The N.S.A., though, wanted to extend its reach even earlier. In December 2000, agency officials wrote a transition report to the incoming Bush administration, saying the agency must become a “powerful, permanent presence” on the commercial communications network, a goal that they acknowledged would raise legal and privacy issues.

While the N.S.A. operates under restrictions on domestic spying, the companies have broader concerns — customers’ demands for privacy and shareholders’ worries about bad publicity.

In the drug-trafficking operation, the N.S.A. has been helping the Drug Enforcement Administration in collecting the phone records showing patterns of calls between the United States, Latin America and other drug-producing regions. The program dates to the 1990s, according to several government officials, but it appears to have expanded in recent years.

Officials say the government has not listened to the communications, but has instead used phone numbers and e-mail addresses to analyze links between people in the United States and overseas. Senior Justice Department officials in the Bush and Clinton administrations signed off on the operation, which uses broad administrative subpoenas but does not require court approval to demand the records.

At least one major phone carrier — whose identity could not be confirmed — refused to cooperate, citing concerns in 2004 that the subpoenas were overly broad, government and industry officials said. The executives also worried that if the program were exposed, the company would face a public-relations backlash.

The D.E.A. declined to comment on the call-tracing program, except to say that it “exercises its legal authority” to issue administrative subpoenas. The N.S.A. also declined to comment on it.

In a separate program, N.S.A. officials met with the Qwest executives in February 2001 and asked for more access to their phone system for surveillance operations, according to people familiar with the episode. The company declined, expressing concerns that the request was illegal without a court order.

While Qwest’s refusal was disclosed two months ago in court papers, the details of the N.S.A.’s request were not. The agency, those knowledgeable about the incident said, wanted to install monitoring equipment on Qwest’s “Class 5” switching facilities, which transmit the most localized calls. Limited international traffic also passes through the switches.

A government official said the N.S.A. intended to single out only foreigners on Qwest’s network, and added that the agency believed Joseph Nacchio, then the chief executive of Qwest, and other company officials misunderstood the agency’s proposal. Bob Toevs, a Qwest spokesman, said the company did not comment on matters of national security.

Other N.S.A. initiatives have stirred concerns among phone company workers. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging the agency’s wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.

The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency “could listen in” with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said.

“At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something isn’t right.”

Two other AT&T employees who worked on the proposal discounted his claims, saying in interviews that the project had simply sought to improve the N.S.A.’s internal communications systems and was never designed to allow the agency access to outside communications. Michael Coe, a company spokesman, said: “AT&T is fully committed to protecting our customers’ privacy. We do not comment on matters of national security.”

But lawyers for the plaintiffs say that if the suit were allowed to proceed, internal AT&T documents would verify the engineer’s account.

“What he saw,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing the plaintiffs along with Carl Mayer, “was decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans’ phone usage.”

Before 9/11...long before...the Bushites were were planning a comprehensive spying program directed at American, not Al Qaida. Two weeks...ONLY TWO WEEKS, after taking an oath to protecting and defend the constitution, the U.S. was already showing signs of becoming a police state and we were months from being hit. Why?

I remember vividly that no sooner than the inauguration was over, Cheney seemed to disappear. He just wasn't around much if at all. I didn't think much of it, because Veeps aren't normally all that important anyway, at least, not until this one. I had no idea, at the time, that Cheney was running things, even then.

I wonder exactly what he was doing in those first 9 months.

The same lawsuit accuses Verizon of setting up a dedicated fiber optic line from New Jersey to Quantico, Va., home to a large military base, allowing government officials to gain access to all communications flowing through the carrier’s operations center. In an interview, a former consultant who worked on internal security said he had tried numerous times to install safeguards on the line to prevent hacking on the system, as he was doing for other lines at the operations center, but his ideas were rejected by a senior security official.

The facts behind a class-action lawsuit in San Francisco are also shrouded in government secrecy. The case relies on disclosures by a former AT&T employee, Mark Klein, who says he stumbled upon a secret room at an company facility in San Francisco that was reserved for the N.S.A. Company documents he obtained and other former AT&T employees have lent some support to his claim that the facility gave the agency access to a range of domestic and international Internet traffic.

The telecommunications companies that gave the government access are pushing hard for legal protection from Congress. As part of a broader plan to restructure the N.S.A.’s wiretapping authority, the Senate Intelligence Committee agreed to give immunity to the telecommunications companies, but the Judiciary Committee refused to do so. The White House has threatened to veto any plan that left out immunity, as the House bill does.

“Congress shouldn’t grant amnesty to companies that broke the law by conspiring to illegally spy on Americans” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington.

But Bobby R. Inman, a retired admiral and former N.S.A. director who has publicly criticized the agency’s domestic eavesdropping program, says he still supports immunity for the companies that cooperated.

“The responsibility ought to be on the government, not on the companies that are trying to help with national security requirements,” Admiral Inman said. If the companies decided to stop cooperating, he added, “it would have a huge impact on both the timeliness and availability of critical intelligence.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. I.U. has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is I.U endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)


The Nazis, Fascists and Communists were political parties before they became enemies of liberty and mass murderers.