Hall of Shame member to be sentenced

He's already in the Hall of Shame, but James Tobin will be sentenced to prison today for his role in the jamming of Democratic phone lines in New Hampshire in 2002.

The effects go beyond prison terms:

The New Hampshire Republican Party, burden by legal bills, is virtually broke, with $733.60 in its federal and state accounts.

The Republican National Committee, in turn, has paid $3 million in legal fees in criminal and civil cases growing out of the controversy. The RNC has paid at least $2.8 million to Williams & Connolly and other firms for Tobin's defense, and about $150,000 to Covington & Burling to defend the RNC in a civil suit brought by the New Hampshire Democratic Party.

Politics is hardball, but there's no place for dirty tricks. Win fair, or you don't deserve to win.

Update: He got 10 months and was fined $10,000.

New Hampshire, Tobin, politics, midtopia

Reactor-for-peace deal with Iran?

Europe is considering building a light-water reactor in Iran as part of a package of incentives to get Iran to give up its domestic uranium-enrichment capability.

McCormack said Tehran would be required to halt its program of enriching and reprocessing uranium on Iranian soil, saying the U.S. and others "do not want the Iranian regime to have the ability to master those critical pathways to a nuclear weapon."

The Iranian reaction? I'll give you one guess.

Hojjatollah Soltani, second secretary of the Iranian Embassy in Venezuela, said such a proposal would acceptable only if it "only if they recognize our right to (use) nuclear technology" — including uranium enrichment.

The deal is similar to the one we offered North Korea back in the 1990s, when we began building them two reactors in exchange for them giving up their nuclear program. Work on the reactors was halted a few years later when it became clear North Korea hadn't given up its own program.

There's no reason to think the outcome will be any different with Iran, but it's a worthwhile offer to make. Reactors take years to build, which provides plenty of time to ensure Iran is complying with the terms of the agreement. And if they reject the deal it's just one more example of Iranian intransigence on this subject.

nuclear, Iran, 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

The Rove indictment kerfuffle

Truthout, which last Friday reported that Karl Rove would be indicted soon, today reported that it had happened.

As I said last time, take it with a grain of salt. Truthout is a wee bit biased, there's no independent corroboration and Rove's spokesman virulently denies it.

That disconnect has led others to speculate that Truthout has been the victim of a well-built hoax. And Wonkette summed up their own skepticism with "Karl Rove indicted, everyone with a blog to get their own unicorn."

When you traffic in rumors, sometimes all you get is air.

Plame, Rove, politics, midtopia

No Iraq War Syndrome yet

On the good news front, researchers have found no evidence of an "Iraq War Syndrome" similar to the "Gulf War Syndrome" that affected veterans of the 1991 invasion.

They examined whether there had been an increase in ill health in soldiers returning from Iraq and compared the mental and physical health of forces who had been deployed and those who had not.

They found only slight increases in symptoms but reserve forces experienced more mental health problems than regular forces.

The most interesting side note is that this seems to knock the legs out from under the "depleted uranium" theory of causation. Depleted uranium, being exceedingly dense, is used in Western tank armor and antitank rounds. The general nervousness surrounding "radioactive" materials led many people to assert that the rounds caused health problems by creating fine dust particles that can be inhaled.

This never made much sense, since depleted uranium is less radioactive than natural uranium. Even uranium miners -- exposed to much higher doses for much longer periods of time -- come out clean.

Depleted uranium weaponry was used as much or more in the Iraq war as it was in 1991. If it was a serious cause of health problems, they would have shown up in the current study. They did not.

Speaking as a former tanker, I'm relieved. I never worked with DU rounds, but the effectiveness of DU -- both as protection and weapon -- is not something I would give up lightly. Even if they posed a health threat, I'd be willing to accept a slight increase in long-term health risks in exchange for surviving the war. It just doesn't make sense to increase your odds of dying now by 10 percent in order to reduce your odds of dying 30 years from now by 5 percent. If you want to live forever, don't volunteer for a combat branch of the military.

depleted uranium, health, Iraq, politics, midtopia

Pentagon identifies all Gitmo detainees

No, seriously.

The handover marks the first time that everyone who has been held at Guantanamo Bay in the Bush administration's war on terror has been identified, according to Navy Lt. Cmdr. Chito Peppler. A total 201 of the names have never been disclosed by the Defense Department before.

The list is in pdf form here. But even more interesting is who isn't on it:

But none of the most notorious terrorist suspects were included, raising questions about where America's most dangerous prisoners are being held.

With this release, we'll start getting the stories behind the detentions. It'll be interesting to see how compelling those stories are. I have no doubt that at least some of the people at Gitmo deserved to be there. But it seems that large numbers of them committed no crime other than being in some way associated with the Taliban. And nothing justifies depriving detainees of their rights, be that access to a court or treatment according to the Geneva Conventions.

Let us hope that the Gitmo experiment is rapidly coming to an end, not to be repeated any time soon. And then let us turn our attention to the hidden prisoners still in U.S. custody. They appear to be uniformly bad people; I'm glad they're behind bars, and hope they stay there for a very long time. But we are still honor- and duty-bound to treat them according to the law. Even Saddam gets a trial; so, too, should our remaining prisoners.

Guantanamo, terrorism, Gitmo, 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

Border Guards

Bush is proposing sending several thousand National Guard troops to help secure the Mexican border.

Guarding borders is what militaries do, so I don't worry about the "militarization" of this particular police function.

But the Mexican border is 2,000 miles long. Here's the equation:

6,000 troops ÷ 2,000 miles = 3 soldiers per mile

No matter what you think about the idea of sending the military to stop illegal immigrants, that adds up to "token effort."

I'm more sympathetic to the "overstretching the military" argument; how long are we going to take Guard troops away from their families and civilian jobs? Having returned from Iraq, will border state troops now face the prospect of being sent to patrol the border? And will this be another example of Bush federalizing Guard units?

This is a temporary deployment, which helps address that issue, but it also means it's just a temporary solution -- more smoke than fire.

UPDATE: Bush's national address on the subject is encapsulated here, with the White House transcript here.

Nothing really new, other than ending the "catch and release" policy -- in which non-Mexican illegal immigrants are allowed to go free until their deportation hearing. Most (surprise, surprise) never show up again. That seems sensible.

It won't be cheap; the change will require new prisons to hold arrested immigrants until they get a deportation hearing, and justice requires that those hearings be held fairly quickly. And it's strictly small-bore, a tactical change.

The big bore stuff looks problematic. My own perspective is here.

terrorism, immigration, 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

Discriminating against poor students?

A California judge has suspended a statewide exam that high school students must pass to receive their diploma.

Today's Star Tribune had a brief on it, mentioning that the judge concluded the exam discriminated against "poor students" and those with limited English skills.

My first reaction was "Poor students? Isn't that the point of such an exam, to weed out the bad students?"

But upon further research, the judge meant students who are economically poor. And the argument there is an interesting one.

The lawsuit claimed that many students have not had the opportunity to learn the material on the exit exam because they went to substandard schools with unqualified teachers, insufficient textbooks and squalid conditions.

Freedman agreed, saying, "Students in economically challenged communities have not had an equal opportunity to learn the materials tested."

Freedman wrote in his opinion that the "record is replete" with evidence of California's underfunded schools and said his decision applies to students statewide.

Few people would disagree that students should graduate with certain basic skills. And a graduation exam is a good way to test whether they have those skills.

But as this lawsuit highlights, if a student has not acquired those skills, whose fault is it: the student's or the school system's? Who do you punish, the student or the school?

On the other hand, if you can get a diploma without learning those basic skills, what value does the diploma have?

It might come down to cases. But it seems to me the problem can be solved by focusing on the goal: turning out an educated populace.

If a student fails the exam, they don't get a diploma: they get shunted into a high-quality, well-funded remedial program that will bring their skills up so that they *can* pass the exam.

Meanwhile, if a school has a large percentage of students failing to pass the exam, it gets scrutinized. If the problem is funding, it gets more resources. If the problem is staff competence, it gets a housecleaning. If the problem is simply a highly challenged student body -- poor, large number of non-English speakers, unstable homes -- it gets something tailored to that.

Focus on the goal: A diploma should mean something, and if students are failing to learn we should place the blame -- and the resources -- where it belongs.

education, California, politics, midtopia

Highly-enriched uranium found in Iran

is Iran still operating a clandestine nuclear enrichment program?

U.N. inspectors have found traces of near bomb-grade enriched uranium on nuclear equipment in Iran, diplomats said on Friday, as the EU prepared a declaration that will insist Tehran shelve all enrichment work.

Maybe not:

The new discovery by U.N. inspectors of high-enriched uranium traces in Iran was made on equipment from a former research site razed by Iran in 2004 before the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) could examine it, diplomats said.

Er, okay. So that means they had a clandestine enrichment program. Something we already knew. Phew.

Still, the fact that they had near bomb-grade uranium casts doubt on the peacefulness of the venture. Power plants don't need anywhere near that level of enrichment.

The Iranian reaction was, paraphrased, "you're all a bunch of pussies":

Iran signaled undiminished confidence in a lack of big power resolve against its atomic work with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad calling Western pressure "psychological propaganda" and the U.S.-mooted, last-resort option of war "unlikely." ... Reacting to the report, Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesman Hamid Reza Asefi told the students' news agency ISNA: "These comments lack any importance and do not come from a real source."

Not really the words of someone interested in a diplomatic solution, are they?

nuclear, Iran, politics, midtopia

Big windfarm planned for Texas

Kudos to Texas for thinking big, as usual.

A proposal to build the biggest offshore wind farm in the nation won approval yesterday from Texas state officials, the latest development in the fast-growing segment of the alternative-energy industry.

Texas General Land Office, which manages state lands and mineral rights, said yesterday that it reached an agreement granting Superior Renewable Energy the rights to 39,900 acres of submerged lands in the Gulf of Mexico, just off the coast of Padre Island and south of Baffin Bay. The big wind turbines, expected to number more than 100, will be erected as few as three and as many as eight miles offshore.

The Houston company, headed by the former executive of a small oil company, said it plans to build 500 megawatts of capacity, enough to power a small city or about 125,000 homes. But the firm's executive vice president and general counsel Michael Hansen said it will probably be about four years before construction begins.

This is serious money: the project will take four to five years to complete, at a cost of $1 billion to $2 billion.

There are the usual environmental concerns: The wind farm is astride a major migratory bird route. That's a legitimate problem, but surely we can develop ways to keep birds away from the blades. Eventually I'd like to see some sort of cost-comparison for wind farms, quantifying the benefits of reduced pollution against the threat to wildlife. On the plus side, the lease agreement contains tough standards for protecting birds, according to consumer watchdog Public Citizen.

Consider this a test case for offshore wind power generation. If it goes well, wind could become a significant source of power over the next decade.

renewable energy, wind farm, energy, texas, 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

Hamas militants propose recognition of Israel

According to Hamas members, there's a spirited debate going on within the party about recognizing Israel.

Many Hamas leaders favor recognizing Israel, but Foreign Minister Mahmoud Zahar and the group's top leader, Syria-based Khaled Mashaal, have refused, the official said.

The debate became public with the release of a proposal worked out by top militants, including those from Hamas, imprisoned in Israeli jails. The document calls for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the lands Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast War: the West Bank, Gaza and east Jerusalem.

Whether such a land-for-peace deal is acceptable to Israel is a matter of debate. And several other demands in the document, notably the right of return for Palestinian refugees, are strongly opposed by Israel. So the proposal is best considered a work in progress.

In some other promising signs, Israel said it would be willing to use some of its impounded tax payments to the Palestinian Authority for humanitarian efforts within Palestine. And Fatah and Hamas have agreed to stop violent clashes, a step away from civil war if it holds. However violence continued even after the truce.

Baby steps all. But steps in the right direction.

Fatah, Hamas, Palestine, Israel, politics, midtopia

Bob Ney under the microscope

I'm several days late getting to this, but Bob Ney has been added to the Hall of Shame watch.

Ney is under the microscope for allegedly taking contributions and gifts in the form of trips, concerts, sporting events and meals from Abramoff and Tony Rudy, a former aide to DeLay who recently pleaded guilty to charges his conspired to bribe members of Congress with Abramoff.

On Monday, Ney's former chief of staff and later lobbyist Neil Volz was pleading guilty to two minor corruption charges in the U.S. District Court in Washington, D.C. ... Ney allegedly reciprocated for [Abramoff's] favors by introducing legislation to help Abramoff's Indian tribe clients and entered language into The Congressional Record denouncing the business practices of a cruise line owner with whom Abramoff was in a dispute.

A lot of bad chiefs of staff floating around, it seems.

Volz, Ney, politics, midtopia

The parties of disarray

It will come as no surprise that the Republicans are in disarray, with even hard-core partisans turning on President Bush.

The Gallup polling organization recorded a 13-percentage-point drop in Republican support for Bush in the past couple of weeks. These usually reliable voters are telling pollsters and lawmakers they are fed up with what they see as out-of-control spending by Washington and, more generally, an abandonment of core conservative principles.

There are also significant pockets of conservatives turning on Bush and Congress over their failure to tighten immigration laws, restrict same-sex marriage, and put an end to the Iraq war and the rash of political scandals, according to lawmakers and pollsters.

Those are just poll numbers, of course, and it's never a good idea to read too much into them. But the trend has been significant. And the really bad news for Republicans is that conservatives increasingly see little difference between them and the Democrats:

Michael Franc, a top official at the Heritage Foundation, said his organization hosted 600 of its top conservative donors last week and heard more widespread complaining about Republicans than at any other point in the past 12 years. "It begins with spending, extends through immigration and results in a sense that we have Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee for the two parties," Franc said.

Without that difference the election will come down to a referendum on Republican governance, which they will lose. This is a good thing in general -- I think most elections should be a referendum on the party in power. And in this case Republicans roundly deserve to lose. Let's just hope we don't see a whole lot of bad legislation over the next six months as the GOP desperately tries to shore up its prospects.

What might be surprising is that the Democrats are in disarray, too:

Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and the leader of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee have clashed angrily in recent days in a dispute about how the party should spend its money in advance of this fall's midterm elections.

Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), who is leading the party's effort to regain majority status in the House, stormed out of Dean's office several days ago leaving a trail of expletives, according to Democrats familiar with the session.

The problem is that some Dems want to focus on winning seats this November, while Dean wants to take a long-term view and rebuild the party from the ground up -- and there's not enough money to do both well.

Dean's right that the party needs restructuring. The Dems need to rebuild their platform, and they need to find effective leadership -- something that neither Nancy Pelosi nor Harry Reid provide. But it's not at all clear that Dean is the man for the job, either. His public gaffes have been mounting, and his fundraising hasn't kept pace with his ambitions or the GOP, which has outraised him 2-to-1 in the current election cycle. He's very smart and charming, something I'm reminded of every time I hear him speak. But he's not the measured moderate I want to see in charge.

His triumphs -- energizing the base, using the Internet -- seem largely tactical, not strategic. And his strategy -- spending heavily in Republican strongholds as a long-term effort to build the party base -- is quixotic if it costs the party seats in the meantime, and pointless if that spending is not supported by leadership and platform reforms. If you have a flawed product, no amount of marketing is going to get people to buy it.

Dean should be laying the long-term foundation first, and only then spend heavily to market it. He can do that on the cheap, freeing up money for the November campaign. Increased Democrat influence should translate into increased Democrat fundraising, which will make achieving Dean's long-term plan easier.

Sometimes the Republicans' greatest asset is that the Democrats are their chief opponent. Few governing parties have offered their opponents such an opportunity as exists now for the Democrats. It would be sadly typical if the Dems failed to capitalize on Republican woes because they were too focused on their own problems.

On the other hand, perhaps the sorry state of both parties will cause the rank-and-file to finally get fed up with the current leadership. And then perhaps the ideologues will be thrown overboard and the moderates reassert control. The public hunger for such a move exists; and the first party to make it happen could well be in the driver's seat for years to come.

Bush, Dean, 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