CIA officials to testify against Libby

Looks like Fitzgerald might have a case after all:

Two top CIA officials will bolster prosecutors' charge that Vice President Cheney's chief aide lied to them, court papers show.

Prosecutors say disgraced Cheney chief of staff Lewis (Scooter) Libby learned CIA spy Valerie Plame's identity from, among others, agency officials who will be called to testify at his trial for perjury, false statements and obstruction of justice....

Libby has said journalists told him about Plame - not Cheney or the six witnesses named so far by prosecutors.

Other than prematurely describing Libby as "disgraced", the article seems solidly sourced. The CIA men told Libby about Plame in response to direct inquiries from him -- so it'll be hard to use the "I can't remember" defense.

Apparently he's not going to be joined any time soon by Karl Rove, as the Truthout report to that effect remains unconfirmed by anyone else.

CIA, Rove, Plame, Libby, politics, midtopia

Stripping civil liberties one packet sniffer at a time

Speaking of Donklephant, they've got a nice analysis of Wired magazine's release of documents from the privacy lawsuit against AT&T. The Electronic Frontier Foundation filed the suit in response to the NSA phone database revelations.

What makes this whole thing especially alarming though, is that by tapping into AT&T, the NSA actually has access to much more than just AT&T customers’s data. Qwest was apparently the only major US telecom company that refused to work with the NSA on this program. So let’s say you’re a Qwest customer. You instant message a friend of yours who, unfortunately, is an AT&T customer. Because of the nature of IP routing, your traffic may very well have been routed through the NSA’s no longer very secret room even though you have no relationship with AT&T at all. According to Wired, ConXion, Verio, XO, Genuity, Qwest, PAIX, Allegiance, AboveNet, Global Crossing, C&W, UUNET, Level 3, Sprint, Telia, PSINet and Mae West were all compromised as a result of the fiber optic splitters that were installed at AT&T. The claim that this is targetted surveillance is growing much harder to believe,

More at the links. Check 'em out.

Mark Klein, civil liberties, AT&T, NSA, politics, midtopia

Gonzalez considers charging reporters in NSA leaks

Striking another blow for government secrecy, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales may prosecute reporters for having the audacity to listen to sources describe a secret, controversial and possibly illegal warrantless surveillance program.

On the talk show, when asked if journalists could be prosecuted for publishing classified information, Gonzales responded, "There are some statutes on the book which, if you read the language carefully, would seem to indicate that that is a possibility."

He was referring to the 1917 Espionage Act, which made it a crime for an unauthorized person to receive national defense information and transmit it to others.

This is Gonzales at his best, carefully parsing the letter of laws for anything that can be used to support a preferred course of action, without regard to context, morality or intent. It's the kind of lawyering that let him find torture exceptions to the Geneva Convention. It should surprise no one that Gonzales would resort to such technocratic lawyering, but it should persuade no one, too.

Conservatives have become quite enamored of the 1917 Espionage Act, being as it's the only extant law on the books that affords even the possibility of jailing reporters -- something of a conservative wet dream, it seems.

The problem is that the Espionage Act was a horrid piece of legislation, much of which has been explicitly and implicitly repudiated by successive Supreme Courts in the 90 years since its passage.

The law provides that any attempt to communicate or publish information related to national defense is a criminal act, if doing so was intended to harm national security. The harshest penalties apply if such actions occur during wartime.

The law is incredibly broad and vague, and could apply to just about any reporting on any aspect of military operations that doesn't involve merely repeating official military communications. Used aggressively, the law would gut any meaningful independent coverage of wartime conduct.

It also points up once again why treating our battle against terrorism as a "war" in the conventional sense is a really, really bad idea. Doing so will extend "extraordinary" wartime suspensions of civil liberties into ordinary everyday realities. And democracy is the loser when the public can no longer maintain credible independent oversight of government actions.

It speaks volumes about the administration that it is willing to reach back into the mists of time to find a bad law that it can use to silence its critics and stifle public discussion about the conduct of this "war". I hope they get their butts handed to them for even considering it.

Gonzales, espionage, politics, midtopia

BellSouth seeks retraction

Ratcheting up the pressure on USA Today, BellSouth has asked for a retraction on the newspaper's NSA database story.

It'll be interesting to see where this goes. BellSouth didn't challenge the story before publication, and the report appears to be at least partly true, in that AT&T hasn't denied it and Qwest has confirmed it. It's a battle of unverified denial vs. anonymous sources. So unless USA Today uncovers some problem with its reporting, I doubt they'll issue the retraction. But we'll see.

NSA, USA Today, BellSouth, politics, midtopia

NSA roundup

Two things of note today with the NSA phone database story, and a development in the NSA's warrantless wiretap story.

First, the New York Times has a thoughtful essay by Jonathan David Farley of the Center for International Secuirty and Cooperation, who sheds more light on the question: does copying everyone's phone records help us find terrorists? His answer: no, for several reasons, among them one I mentioned a few days ago: the Kevin Bacon problem.

It's a thought-provoking explanation of how network analysis works, and the problems posed by the NSA's version. His conclusion: the NSA effort would not actually be effective, and for that reason alone it is not worth the civil liberties damage.

Meanwhile, two of the phone companies mentioned in the USA Today story that set off this brouhaha have denied that they were ever approached by the NSA:

Verizon Communications Inc. denied Tuesday that it had received a request for customer phone records from the National Security Agency, bringing into question key points of a USA Today story. ... The statement came a day after BellSouth Corp. also said the NSA had never requested customer call data, nor had the company provided any.

Denials aren't proof of anything, of course. But then, neither are anonymously sourced stories. Their denials leave AT&T as the only company to not deny the charge, and Qwest has already said it was approached but turned the government down.

Finally, Arlen Specter has struck a deal with other GOP members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, laying the ground rules for determining the legality of the NSA spy programs.

It's basically a surrender:

Specter has mollified conservative opposition to his bill by agreeing to drop the requirement that the Bush administration seek a legal judgment on the program from a special court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

Instead, Specter agreed to allow the administration to retain an important legal defense by allowing the court, which holds its hearings in secret, to review the program only by hearing a challenge from a plaintiff with legal standing, said a person familiar with the text of language agreed to by Specter and committee conservatives.

Conservative Republicans who pushed for the change say that it will help quell concerns about the measure’s constitutionality and allow the White House to retain a basic legal defense.

An expert in constitutional law and national security, however, said that the change would allow the administration to throw up huge obstacles to anyone seeking to challenge the program’s legality.

Exactly. The only people with legal standing would be someone who could show they were affected by the program. But with the surveillance targets being kept secret, no one will know if they were a target, and certainly couldn't prove it. So showing standing will be a nigh-impossible task.

All of this is simply to clear the way for legislation that would declare the surveillance program legal. The only bone thrown to opponents is a clause giving the FISA court jurisdiction over challenges to the program. But FISA already had such jurisdiction over intelligence matters, and the administration didn't care, instead asserting non-FISA authority for the program. Bush will continue to assert "inherent" constitutional authority for the program and thus continue to ignore FISA. And thanks to Specter's surrender, FISA can't do anything about it until someone with standing challenges the program.

The story does note that some cases are already in the pipeline:

But a GOP aide familiar with the compromise said more than 20 cases are “in the pipeline” in which plaintiffs have challenged the surveillance program. It was very likely that the court would rule on one of the cases if Specter’s bill passed, the aide added.

Maybe. We'll see how many of those cases survive the "standing" hurdle.

BellSouth, Verizon, Specter, terrorism, NSA, politics, midtopia

Where's the strategic intelligence?

The New York Times had an interesting article this Sunday about the CIA. It suggests that by responding to the huge demand for immediate intelligence, we as a nation have lost the means to generate strategic intelligence -- the kind of stuff that gives a clear picture of the war we use tactical intelligence to win.

The greatest problem in the eyes of some C.I.A. and other intelligence officials who served before and after 9/11 is that the agency can no longer produce strategic intelligence. It can no longer advise the president on the wisest ways to use military and diplomatic force. Its ability to see over the horizon has dwindled until its thousands of analysts can't see past the end of their desks.

The big picture has been bumped by spot news. Strategic intelligence is the power to know your enemies' intentions. Spot news is what happened last night in Waziristan. Drowned by demands from the White House and the Pentagon for instant information, "intelligence analysts end up being the Wikipedia of Washington," John McLaughlin, the deputy director and acting director of central intelligence from October 2000 to September 2004, said in an interview.

Why is this important? Because the CIA is the only civilian spy agency we have. The rest of our intelligence assets are dominated by the Pentagon, which does a fine job but has a different focus.

Once upon a time in the cold war, the C.I.A. could produce strategic intelligence. It countered the Pentagon's wildly overstated estimates of Soviet military power. It cautioned that the war in Vietnam could not be won by military force. It helped keep the cold war cold.

"You need to have a civilian check on the military in American society," said Richard L. Russell, a decorated C.I.A. analyst who now teaches senior diplomats and military officers at the National Defense University. "It's healthy for the president to have a second opinion on military affairs."

Instead, the demand for up-to-the-second data is turning the CIA into an adjunct of the military -- not culturally, but practically.

The agency is becoming "a battlefield combat support agency," Mr. Russell said. C.I.A. officers in Baghdad and at headquarters are pinned down answering daily tactical questions of the military: How strong is that bridge? How wide is that road?

Those are not the big strategic questions: How can the United States drain the swamp that breeds terrorism instead of killing snakes? What are the bricks and mortar for building democratic institutions in undemocratic states? Those questions are unanswered. "The C.I.A. becomes so consumed by the current crisis that it can't anticipate the next one," Mr. Russell said. "It becomes so balkanized that it becomes blinkered. Everyone's looking at their blades of grass and nobody's surveying the forest."

There are lots of reasons for the change in focus at the CIA, from the end of the cold war to the rise of the 24-hour news cycle. But it points up the growing lack of a counterbalance to the military in intelligence matters, and the ongoing inability to define exactly what it is we're fighting and what the best way to fight it might be.

This isn't about lack of data; the article notes that analysts never see 95 percent of the intelligence we collect. It's about lack of intelligent assessment of the incredible amount of data we have.

"They just don't have substantive experts," Mr. Russell said. "Name five C.I.A. experts on anything. I can't do it."

There's no point in fighting a war if we don't know who we're fighting, why we're fighting and why the current strategy is the best one. We don't need more data. We don't need more target analysis. We need people who can understand the world and explain why things work the way they do. Only then can we make informed choices about how best to defeat terror.

Bush has tried to address the problem by hiring more analysts. But it takes time to train them, and unless we change their mission, it won't help.

Carl W. Ford was an assistant secretary of state for intelligence from 2001 to 2003, capping a 38-year career that included senior posts at the Pentagon and CIA. As he put it:

Without fundamental changes in the ways American intelligence is analyzed and reported, Mr. Ford said, "we will continue to turn out the $40 billion pile of fluff we have become famous for."

"What we don't need is more money and people, at least not for now," he said. "Give us $20 billion more a year and we will give you just that much more fluff."

If this is true, than this represents a massive failure of our intelligence overhaul. If we didn't stop and think about what kind of intelligence we needed, and then set up the structure to provide it, we've wasted much of the past five years. And perhaps that failure helps explain the many mistakes we've made during that same time. Because if the administration didn't demand that its spies ask the right questions, it was never going to get the right answers.

I haven't used the words "Bush administration" and "incompetence" in a sentence for a while. But it may be time to dust them off again.

terrorism, CIA, intelligence, politics, midtopia

Another NSA poll

You won't see me dealing with polls much here, simply because they are too inconsequential, meaningless, and subject to change.

But since much has been made of last week's poll apparently showing 2-1 support for the NSA phone database, I thought I'd mention this one.

A majority of Americans disapprove of a massive Pentagon database containing the records of billions of phone calls made by ordinary citizens, according to a USA TODAY/Gallup Poll. About two-thirds are concerned that the program may signal other, not-yet-disclosed efforts to gather information on the general public.

The survey of 809 adults Friday and Saturday shows a nation wrestling with the balance between fighting terrorism and protecting civil liberties.

By 51%-43%, those polled disapprove of the program, disclosed Thursday in USA TODAY. The National Security Agency has been collecting phone records from three of the nation's largest telecommunication companies since soon after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

The discussion on this topic has just begun, so neither of these polls are gospel. But it's worth noting that this poll had double the sample size (and thus a smaller margin of error) than the earlier poll, and comes after people had had several days to read and think about the NSA program.

Also worth noting is this:

Most of those who approve of the program say it violates some civil liberties but is acceptable because "investigating terrorism is the more important goal."

So a strong majority thinks it violates civil liberties; it's just that a sizable minority think the trade-off is worth it.

I don't, obviously, for reasons I've outlined before. But I will be heartened if the discussion on these sorts of programs moves away from simplistic assertions like "security is paramount" and weak justifications like "it's not clearly illegal", and toward the broader question of "exactly what sort of infringements on civil liberties are we willing to tolerate in pursuit of physical safety?" And that, of course, begs for the follow up question: "are all these infringements touted as 'necessary' really necessary, or are there less-intrusive ways to protect us?"

And finally, the big question: "when push comes to shove, do Americans have the courage that it takes to live in a free society?"

I do. I hope a strong majority in this country do, too.

security, privacy, NSA, civil liberties, terrorism, politics, midtopia

Gee, who would have thunk it?

Why is a government phone database a bad idea? Because of stuff like this:

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we (Brian Ross and Richard Esposito) call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

Hmmm. Do you suppose that tracking calls made by reporters might have a chilling effect on their ability to report, far out of proportion to whatever legitimate security interest the government has in finding and plugging leaks?

Do you suppose that such practices might be ripe for abuse -- used, say, when the activity being investigated is not a national security issue but, say, embarassing or criminal?

Let's extend the analogy to the Internet, and let's make it personal.

I post under a pseudonym. If I were to become a thorn in the side of the administration, they could easily track the IP addresses used for posting, learn my identity, and then take action. What if my employer is one of those that would not be happy to find that I'm running this site? The government could simply inform my employer and I'd be forced to stop blogging on pain of losing my job.

I broke no law. I would not be charged with any crime. But I would be effectively silenced.

Such things are insidious, and harmful to a free society. They ought to be odious to anyone who values a free society and a strong democracy. Handing the government the keys to our privacy in hopes that they will keep us safe from terrorists simply exchanges a distant threat for a near one, and destroys the very thing that we're trying to defend.

civil liberties, privacy, NSA, politics, midtopia

NSA spying update

It's been a very busy day at work, and other bloggers are way ahead of me. So I'll just point you to the insights at the following purveyors of food thought:

The Moderate Voice has a good roundup of opinion.
One Donklephant poster explains his concerns, while another asks "does datamining work, anyway?"

My few thoughts:

The Washington Post poll showing 63% support for the program is worthless, because it's based on 400 people interviewed the same day the story broke. It's a sampling of opinion, but not necessarily informed opinion.

The idea behind "social networks" is to find out who's connected to whom. You find a suspect, find out who's talking to him, then find out who's talking to those people, and so on. Sounds great -- unless you've ever played the Kevin Bacon game. Do that and you soon come to the conclusion that it's possible to connect anyone to nearly anyone else in relatively few moves. Which makes sense, because the connections progress geometrically.

So to find a meaningful pattern, you have to start with a known terrorist phone number. And if you've got that, you ought to be able to get warrants to tap that phone, pull its records, and look at those direct connections.

If that's true -- and I freely admit to not be an expert -- all the database does is save a little time. Is that worth the huge invitation to abuse that it offers?

Finally, ThinkProgress notes that the phone companies could be liable for billions of dollars in damages if they turned over records illegally. Somehow I think they'll get excused from that, given the NSA arm-twisting, but there could be some expensive lawsuits in their future.

terrorism, privacy, civil liberties, NSA, politics, midtopia

Rove to be indicted?

Truthout is reporting that Karl Rove has told his bosses that he will be indicted in the Valerie Plame case, and would resign when that happened.

Details of Rove's discussions with the president and Bolten have spread through the corridors of the White House where low-level staffers and senior officials were trying to determine how the indictment would impact an administration that has been mired in a number of high-profile political scandals for nearly a year, said a half-dozen White House aides and two senior officials who work at the Republican National Committee.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, sources confirmed Rove's indictment is imminent. These individuals requested anonymity saying they were not authorized to speak publicly about Rove's situation. A spokesman in the White House press office said they would not comment on "wildly speculative rumors."

Which, at the moment, is all they are. Truthout is not exactly an unbiased source, and so far there's no independent confirmation. But it would be unusual for Truthout to state the case so clearly if they didn't have something to back it up.

Fitzgerald, Plame, Rove, politics, midtopia

NSA has database of millions of phone calls

You've heard about the National Security Agency's data-mining programs -- the ones that sift through huge quantities of data looking for patterns that might indicate terrorist activity.

But up until now the extent -- and implications -- of such programs have been only vaguely discussed, since hard facts were scarce.

No more. USA Today reports that the NSA phone-call-tracking effort is huge -- and it's all being stored in a giant database.

he National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

The NSA program reaches into homes and businesses across the nation by amassing information about the calls of ordinary Americans — most of whom aren't suspected of any crime. This program does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations. But the spy agency is using the data to analyze calling patterns in an effort to detect terrorist activity, sources said in separate interviews. ...

The agency's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders....

For the customers of these companies, it means that the government has detailed records of calls they made — across town or across the country — to family members, co-workers, business contacts and others.

This effort doesn't involve actual eavesdropping -- listening in on the conversations. Legality aside, that would be physically impossible given the volume of calls. Instead the NSA is assembling a record of who called whom when, and for how long, anywhere in the United States.

A look at some of the issues raised by the story:

Extent: The program appears to be far more extensive than has been suggested previously. With an exception I'll discuss below, it's an attempt to log every domestic call in the United States.

Privacy: The records are scrubbed of personal identifying information, such as names, Social Security numbers and street addresses. Getting those requires some showing of "probable cause." But if you have the phone number, there are plenty of ways to get the other information. The simplest is a reverse phone directory, in which you enter a phone number and get the name and street address back.

Plus, there's no way to tell what the information is being used for. The NSA told one phone company that the data could be shared with other government agencies, such as the FBI, the CIA and the DEA. The last example, especially, makes it sound as if the database would be used as a general crime-fighting tool -- conveniently bypassing warrant and privacy laws.

Line-blurring: The NSA, like the CIA, has historically been prohibited from spying domestically for civil liberty reasons. This program is proof that that prohibition has been shattered. Not only is the NSA monitoring domestic communications, but as I'll discuss below, the agency said the information might be shared with the CIA, thus getting the spy agency into the domestic intelligence business.

If you're keeping track, American citizens are now being scrutinized by local police intelligence units, the FBI, the CIA, the NSA and even the Pentagon. And those agencies are increasingly unshackled by such bothersome things as warrants or probable cause requirements.

Legality: By law, phone companies require a court order before turning over customer data. The NSA program doesn't bother with that. Nor does it bother with the FISA court, in keeping with Bush administration practice. Instead, Bush claims that the his "inherent authority" and the Patriot Act give him the power to run such a program.

But a telling example is the exception I alluded to above. One major phone company refused to comply with the NSA program: Qwest. (My phone company, by the way), leaving a 14-state hole in the NSA's surveillance. Qwest's concerns were threefold: the legality of the program, who would have access to the data, and how the data would be used.

The NSA told Qwest that other government agencies, including the FBI, CIA and DEA, also might have access to the database, the sources said. ... NSA representatives pointedly told Qwest that it was the lone holdout among the big telecommunications companies. It also tried appealing to Qwest's patriotic side: In one meeting, an NSA representative suggested that Qwest's refusal to contribute to the database could compromise national security, one person recalled.

In addition, the agency suggested that Qwest's foot-dragging might affect its ability to get future classified work with the government. Like other big telecommunications companies, Qwest already had classified contracts and hoped to get more.

Note that none of these were legal arguments; they were emotional appeals. The NSA was on shaky legal ground -- and knew it:

Unable to get comfortable with what NSA was proposing, Qwest's lawyers asked NSA to take its proposal to the FISA court. According to the sources, the agency refused.

The NSA's explanation did little to satisfy Qwest's lawyers. "They told (Qwest) they didn't want to do that because FISA might not agree with them," one person recalled. For similar reasons, this person said, NSA rejected Qwest's suggestion of getting a letter of authorization from the U.S. attorney general's office. A second person confirmed this version of events.

So there you have it. NSA didn't want to ask for permission because they knew they probably wouldn't get it. Not because the FISA court was inefficient, as has been claimed; but because FISA, quite properly, would likely have disallowed the program.

What we have here is another classic example of the Bush administration's approach to security and civil liberties: Begin a hugely invasive monitoring program, with few if any privacy protections; conduct it entirely in secret; and instead of seeking approval and authorization from the organizations expressly established to do so, just ignore them (and the law) and hope not to get caught.

The secrecy part is the most maddening part of it, because it served no legitimate purpose. Suppose everyone knew that the government was collecting data on domestic calls; how does that help terrorists? What could they do about it? The secrecy only served to hide the program from public scrutiny.

Might data-mining be useful? Yes. But it should be fully debated, and if implemented it should come with oversight and privacy protections. These massive, secrecy-shrouded invasions of privacy need to stop.

USA Today also has a useful Q&A on the program.

Update: Congress -- both Republican and Democrat -- is demanding answers. You have to figure that eventually Bush will so alienate the legislative branch that they'll start acting like a real check again.

civil liberties, security, terrorism, data-mining, NSA, politics, midtopia

NSA derails domestic spying probe

A Justice Department investigation into its own role in the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program has ended because -- are you ready for this? -- the NSA refused to grant them the necessary security clearances.

You know, it was kind of a slow news day. Kudos to the NSA for shaking things up.

This was Justice probing its own involvement in the matter, not an investigation of the NSA. So in that sense this is small potatoes. But you have to love it when a government agency foils an investigation into one of its projects by the simple expedient of refusing to share any information on the project.

domestic spying, eavesdropping, civil liberties, NSA, politics, midtopia

Judge calls wiretapping argument "gobbledygook"

An appeals court panel has sharply criticized the Bush administration's new rules making it easier to eavesdrop on Internet phone calls.

The skepticism expressed so openly toward the government's case during a hearing in U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia emboldened a broad group of civil liberties and education groups who argued that the U.S. improperly applied telephone-era rules to a new generation of Internet services.

"Your argument makes no sense," U.S. Circuit Judge Harry T. Edwards told the lawyer for the Federal Communications Commission, Jacob Lewis. "When you go back to the office, have a big chuckle. I'm not missing this. This is ridiculous."

At another point in the hearing, Judge Edwards told the FCC's lawyer his arguments were "gobbledygook" and "nonsense." The court's decision was expected within several months.

Yowch.

The question at hand is whether Internet Service Providers are "information services", which are explicitly exempted from a 1994 law requiring that telephone service providers ensure their equipment can accomodate police wiretaps. That's what allows monitoring of e-mail conversations and instant messaging, for example.

On the other hand, the judge seemed to agree that the law covers "voice over Internet protocol", or VOIP, which uses Internet connections but functions just like a traditional phone.

This is not a big thing, especially since Congress could easily revise the law to more precisely spell out what they wish to allow. But it's good to see the judicial system keeping an eye out for civil liberties.

politics, Internet, eavesdropping, wiretaps, terrorism, politics, midtopia

Porter Goss resigns

CIA director Porter Goss has resigned.

No reason was given. Goss has been mentioned as being somehow involved in Hookergate with former Rep. Randy Cunningham, but that connection looks tenuous. So unless there's more there than has come out publicly, let's look for less prurient reasons for the resignation. Like, say, his ongoing alienation of much of the senior staff at CIA, which have been resigning in droves. Or his reduced stature thanks to the ascension of John Negroponte as Director of National Intelligence. That raises other questions: Did Negroponte push him out?

More as it develops.

Update: The Washington Post's take.

Update 2: Another good question is what this means for the CIA's intelligence-gathering efforts. It's not a good sign that there remains so much turmoil at the agency 5 years after 9/11; It's still caught up in internal problems when we really want it to be focusing its efforts outward. Reform takes time, and will be distracting. The question is, were Goss' reforms the right ones? If so, will they be carried forward by his successor? Or will his tenure turn out to have been a year of spinning wheels that cost us momentum as well as a number of senior operatives?

CIA, Goss, politics, midtopia

Police intelligence units stage comeback

In conjunction with yesterday's report that Bush is simply ignoring laws he doesn't like, this all starts to sound like variations on a theme. From U.S. News & World Report:

Since 9/11, the U.S. Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have poured over a half-billion dollars into building up local and state police intelligence operations. The funding has helped create more than 100 police intelligence units reaching into nearly every state.

To qualify for federal homeland security grants, states were told to assemble lists of "potential threat elements"--individuals or groups suspected of possible terrorist activity. In response, state authorities have come up with thousands of loosely defined targets, ranging from genuine terrorists to biker gangs and environmentalists.

Guidelines for protecting privacy and civil liberties have lagged far behind the federal money. After four years of doling out homeland security grants to police departments, federal officials released guidelines for the conduct of local intelligence operations only last year; the standards are voluntary and are being implemented slowly.

I'm okay with the police being on the lookout for terror suspects. But basic standards of evidence and conduct need to be followed, or any such system is guaranteed to be abused.

U.S. News has a sidebar on why pervasive police surveillance is troublesome.

Starting in the 1970s, lawsuits and grand jury investigations uncovered all kinds of abuse by these units: illegal spying, burglaries, beatings, unwarranted raids, the spreading of disinformation. Americans engaged in constitutionally protected free speech were routinely photographed, wiretapped, and harassed--all in the name of national security. In Memphis, the police department spied on the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and gathered data on political activists' bank accounts, phone records, and close associates. In New Haven, Conn., police wiretapped over a thousand people. In Philadelphia, then police chief Frank Rizzo boasted of holding files on 18,000 people. The list of "subversives" grew to include the League of Woman Voters, civil rights groups, religious figures, and politicians running for office.

If you want even more history and examples of how police powers can be abused, I heartily recommend Geoffrey Stone's book "Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime." It traces the history of free speech law from the founding of the Republic.

The FBI did all sorts of heinous things under its COINTELPRO initiative, including arranging for antiwar activists to be fired, sabotaging the campaigns of antiwar candidates, mailing anonymous letters to their spouses suggesting the activists were having affairs, causing activists to be evicted, disabling their cars, intercepting their mail, planting derogatory information about them in the press.... the list goes on.

Then there's the blurry line between infiltration and agitation:

1. A state undercover agent served as co-chair of the Students for a Democratic Society chapter in Columbia, S.C.

2. Another became chairman of the SDS chapter at the University of Texas.

3. Agents infiltrating the SDS chapter at Northwestern led a sit-in in 1968 and then actively participated in a 1969 Weatherman action.

4. Other Chicago undercover operatives provided explosives to the Weathermen, encouraged them to shoot the police, and led an assault upon a uniformed police sergeant during a demonstration, which was widely publicized as "proving the violence" of the New Left.

Supporters of this resurgence in police activity say that the police have learned the lessons of history and will be more careful this time. I'm not reassured, especially given the examples in the U.S. News story.

In February 2006 near Washington, D.C., two Montgomery County, Md., homeland security agents walked into a suburban Bethesda library and forcefully warned patrons that viewing Internet pornography was illegal. (It is not.)... Similarly, in 2004, two plainclothes Contra Costa County sheriff's deputies monitored a protest by striking Safeway workers in nearby San Francisco, identifying themselves to union leaders as homeland security agents.

Union leaders and Web surfers. Well, I suppose they could cause trouble. But how about this one, from here in Minnesota?

In Minnesota, the state-run Multiple Jurisdiction Network Organization ran into controversy after linking together nearly 200 law enforcement agencies and over 8 million records. State Rep. Mary Liz Holberg, a Republican who oversees privacy issues, found much to be alarmed about when a local hacker contacted her after breaking into the system. The hacker had yanked out files on Holberg herself, showing she was classified as a "suspect" based on a neighbor's old complaint about where she parked her car.

Scary on two counts: the absurdness of the classification system and the insecurity of the data.

Or how about the lead example in the story:

[In Atlanta], two agents were assigned to follow around the county executive. Their job: to determine whether he was being tailed--not by al Qaeda but by a district attorney investigator looking into alleged misspending. A year later, one of its plainclothes agents was seen photographing a handful of vegan activists handing out antimeat leaflets in front of a HoneyBaked Ham store. Police arrested two of the vegans and demanded that they turn over notes, on which they'd written the license-plate number of an undercover car,

DAs and vegan protesters. Not good.

The fight against Al Qaeda is morphing into an intimidation campaign against the same old "troublemakers". We've been down this road before; it will be shameful if we go down it again.

civil liberties, terrorism, politics, midtopia

Mole hunt, take two

Turns out fired CIA analyst Mary McCarthy may not be the "secret prisons" leaker after all. Oops.

Howard Kurtz has his usual matter-of-fact analysis of the media coverage that led many (including yours truly) to that conclusion.

I think the media's response was perfectly logical. The CIA fired her, saying she had flunked a polygraph and admitted unauthorized contacts with reporters and, the official guidance went, she helped The Post's Dana Priest on the secret prisons story.

McCarthy made no comment, issued no statement, and didn't have a lawyer or a spokesman issue any statement. Ergo, she was not disputing the charges.

Except now she is.

Although the whole thing is still a bit strange. She has still made no comment, issued no statement, etc. Instead, a friend of hers is putting out the denial--several news cycles after the story broke.

Headlines may have overstated what was known, as headlines sometimes do; reporters don't write headlines, and that's what sometimes happens when a copy editor tries to condense a complex story down to six words on deadline.

Anyone who read Priest's stories would have known that she had multiple sources. But it made sense to conclude that she had one primary source, and that McCarthy was it.

So the mole hunt goes on. Oh that the agency would put as much effort into weighing the morality and legality of its covert activities so that such leaks were unnecessary.

CIA, terrorism, leaks, McCarthy, politics, midtopia

Mole hunt

I'm writing this while sitting curled up in a window seat on the eighth floor of a hotel overlooking the Chicago River. No, it doesn't suck.

But I digress....

The CIA thinks that it has found and fired the person responsible for alerting reporters to the existence of the agency's secret prison network. Her name: senior analyst Mary McCarthy.

She apparently confessed after failing a polygraph test. If so she isn't likely to face criminal prosecution, as polygraph tests aren't admissible in court.

Predictably, some people are calling her a traitor and others are calling her a hero. I'm not sure "hero" is fully justified, but I still come down in the latter camp.

There's no question that the leak was an important one, and necessary. A secret extrajudicial prison network is something so contrary to American values that it deserves public input and scrutiny. And the revelation that such a network exists is not detailed enough to damage security. If you think it is, then answer this question: tell me where one of these prisons is located, and who is held there. I'll wait.

McCarthy appears to have considered the leak carefully, telling reporters enough to get the story before the public but not enough to endanger operatives or compromise the operation of the system. That allows us to debate whether such a system should exist. If we decide "yes", then it can continue to operate unhampered. If we decide "no", then we can shut it down.

The administration cites the leak as having damaged relationships with other countries. Well, cripes, it should, if we're using their facilities or airports without telling them. It's only McCarthy's responsibility if her information turns out to be false. So far, that doesn't seem to be the case.

The administration also says the leak has damaged the CIA's credibility with other intelligence agencies, who question whether Americans are able to keep secrets. But that's a false question. The secret prison network is an extraordinary operation. Like the NSA surveillance program, there are deep and legitimate questions about its legality and morality. I don't see the harm in demonstrating that such troubling programs will come to light somehow. Maybe it will limit the appetite for such programs.

Leaking classified information is a crime, and I'm not going to argue that it shouldn't be. If something other than polygraph results tie McCarthy to the leak, she may well have to serve prison time. But there should be two acceptable defenses to such charges. One, that the information was improperly classified to begin with. Or two, that the activities being protected were illegal themselves, and thus by breaking one law McCarthy obeyed a higher law -- the Constitution. If she can persuade a judge of either case, she should go free and have a grateful nation's thanks.

leaks, McCarthy, CIA, politics, midtopia

Misusing intelligence

In yet another revelation that serves to debunk administration claims that they were innocent victims of bad intelligence regarding Iraq, we now learn that they ignored inconvenient reports regarding Iraq's bioweapons capacity.

On May 29, 2003, 50 days after the fall of Baghdad, President Bush proclaimed a fresh victory for his administration in Iraq: Two small trailers captured by U.S. and Kurdish troops had turned out to be long-sought mobile "biological laboratories." He declared, "We have found the weapons of mass destruction."

The claim, repeated by top administration officials for months afterward, was hailed at the time as a vindication of the decision to go to war. But even as Bush spoke, U.S. intelligence officials possessed powerful evidence that it was not true.

A secret fact-finding mission to Iraq -- not made public until now -- had already concluded that the trailers had nothing to do with biological weapons. Leaders of the Pentagon-sponsored mission transmitted their unanimous findings to Washington in a field report on May 27, 2003, two days before the president's statement.

The three-page field report and a 122-page final report three weeks later were stamped "secret" and shelved. Meanwhile, for nearly a year, administration and intelligence officials continued to publicly assert that the trailers were weapons factories.

This wasn't a matter of the intelligence being in dispute:

The technical team was unequivocal in its conclusion that the trailers were not intended to manufacture biological weapons. ... "There was no connection to anything biological," said one expert who studied the trailers.

Yes, earlier, preliminary examinations by military intelligence did conclude that the trailers had biological applications. But those conclusions should have been trumped, or at least balanced, by this one. Instead, this report was ignored and the earlier reports played up and repeated with growing enthusiasm.

This was a postwar incident, so it doesn't speak directly about the intelligence situation during the runup to the war. But it's reasonable to conclude that postwar administration practices were similar to prewar practices -- in this case, trumpeting "evidence" that supported the administration case while ignoring evidence that contradicted it.

That may be human nature, but it's an inexcusable basis for going to war.

Bush, bioweapons, intelligence, WMD, trailers, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Captured Documents, Part IV

The conservative blogosphere appears to be going nuts over the released documents, but they seem willing to ignore the nature of raw intelligence to do so -- for instance, taking information at face value without regard to the verifiability of the information or the reliability of the sources.

Even the government is saying there won't be any bombshells in the documents.

According to an intelligence official who declined to be identified, Negroponte plans to release all documents that have no further intelligence value. Files that might help apprehend members of the Iraqi insurgency will remain under wraps. So will files that could violate the privacy or harm the reputations of innocent people. For instance, the Hussein regime used rape as a method of torture, and the government won't release documents containing the names of Iraqi rape victims. Nor will it release files mentioning Iraqi-Americans or other US citizens, such as journalists.

The remaining documents, the official said, will mainly provide insights into Hussein's rule. ''This stuff needs to be laid bare because it helps the democratic process in Iraq, like it did in South Africa, like it did in Germany," he said.

If any of these documents actually proved the government's case against Iraq, it would have been published by now. What bloggers may hope for is finding an overlooked gem, or building smaller cases about specific details.

My own looks back that up. I don't speak Arabic, so I have to rely on already translated documents. But nothing I've found sheds any new light on the question of WMD or links to terrorism.

Still, it's fun digging around in primary documents.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Captured documents, part III

Yet more, from another transcript . Saddam's rambling is getting worse. On Pages 2-3, Saddam (presumably; once again he's only identified as "Male 1")is discussing what to do about inspections and the difficulty of documenting the destruction of his WMD programs.

It doesn’t have anything to do with banned weapons, that’s it. They destroyed the industrial foundations. They destroyed the Weapons. But can we guarantee that somebody didn’t forget any file? Then what are the basics for you? What is the value of a piece of paper? ... They were destroyed, now they say you have to bring me documents to show when they were destroyed? What day what time? Every single missile.

In this transcript, Iraqis are discussing a pending inspection visit by Kofi Annan to several presidential palaces, which would place the conversation in 1998. Saddam appears to be "Male 2" this time around. They're talking about where Annan will go and what he will see. It starts out sounding like they're trying to figure out how to hide things... but by page 15 I got the impression that what they're trying to protect is Saddam's privacy. He's in the middle of an international confrontation, and he's mostly concerned with strangers poking around his living areas!

You read enough of this stuff and I guarantee you'll be thinking to yourself, "I am glad I wasn't Saddam." How he didn't die of boredom, I'll never know. These meetings are b-o-r-i-n-g.

terrorism, Iraq, politics, midtopia