US is turning more Orwellian every day

1. This Time, It Really Is Orwellian -- by Robert Parry

Given George W. Bush's history of outright lying, especially on national security matters, it may seem silly to dissect his words about the new disclosure that his administration has collected phone records of some 200 million Americans.

But Bush made two parse-able points in reacting to USA Today's story about the National Security Agency building a vast database of domestic phone calls. "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," Bush said, adding "the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities."

In his brief remarks, however, Bush didn't define what he meant by "ordinary Americans" nor whether the data-mining might cover, say, thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people, just not "millions."

For instance, would a journalist covering national security be regarded as an "ordinary American"? What about a political opponent or an anti-war activist who has criticized administration policies in the Middle East? Such "unordinary" people might number in the tens of thousands, but perhaps not into the millions.

Also, isn't it reasonable to suspect that the Bush administration would be tempted to tap into its huge database to, say, check on who might have been calling reporters at the New York Times, the Washington Post, the New Yorker - or now USA Today - where significant national security stories have been published?

Or during Campaign 2004, wouldn't the White House political apparatchiks have been eager to know whether, say, Sen. John Kerry had been in touch with foreign officials who might have confided that they were worried about Bush gaining a second term?

Or what about calls to and from special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald while he investigates a White House leak of the identity of Valerie Plame, the CIA officer married to former Ambassador Joseph Wilson, an Iraq War critic?

What if one of these "unordinary" Americans had placed a lot of calls to an illicit lover or a psychiatrist? Wouldn't Bush's aggressive political operatives know just how to make the most of such information?

Paranoia?

While such concerns might seem paranoid to some observers, Bush has blurred his political fortunes with the national interest before, such as his authorization to Vice President Dick Cheney's staff in mid-2003 to put out classified material on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction to undercut Ambassador Wilson.

Though Plame was an undercover CIA officer working on sensitive WMD investigations, her classified identity was bandied about - and ultimately disclosed - by the likes of White House political adviser Karl Rove, who had no real "need to know" a discrete intelligence secret that sensitive.

In a court filing on April 5, 2006, Fitzgerald said his investigation uncovered government documents that "could be characterized as reflecting a plan to discredit, punish, or seek revenge against Mr. Wilson" because of his criticism of the administration's handling of the evidence on Iraq's alleged pursuit of enriched uranium in Africa.

There are also historical reasons to suspect that the administration might be inclined to use its huge database against its critics. Some senior administration officials, such as Cheney, held key government jobs in the 1970s when one of the goals of spying on Americans was to ferret out suspected links between U.S. dissidents and foreign powers.

It had become an article of faith for some government officials that the civil rights movement and the anti-Vietnam War protests must have been orchestrated and financed by some international enemy of the United States.

Some of the excesses in those investigations, such as the bugging of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and break-ins targeting Pentagon Papers leaker Daniel Ellsberg, led to new laws in the 1970s limiting the power of the Executive.

For instance, in 1978, Congress enacted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which tried to balance the government's legitimate interest in tracking foreign agents and the citizens' constitutional right of protection against unreasonable searches.

However, after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, Bush asserted "plenary" - or unlimited - powers as Commander in Chief and brushed aside legal requirements that the government obtain a warrant through a special FISA court before eavesdropping on phone calls inside the United States.

Cover-Up

After making that decision, Bush lied to conceal what he had done. On April 20, 2004, he told a crowd in Buffalo, N.Y., that warrants were still required for all wiretaps.

"By the way, any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires - a wiretap requires a court order," Bush said. "Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so."

After the New York Times disclosed the warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005, Bush continued to misrepresent the program, calling it "limited" to "taking known al-Qaeda numbers - numbers from known al-Qaeda people - and just trying to find out why the phone calls are being made."

In his folksy style, he told an audience in Louisville, Kentucky, on Jan. 11, 2006, that "it seems like to me that if somebody is talking to al-Qaeda, we want to know why."

But the program that Bush described could easily have been accomplished through warrants under the FISA law, which lets the government wiretap for 72 hours before going to a secret court for a warrant.

Even before the USA Today disclosure on May 11, 2006, it was clear that Bush's spying program was much larger than he had let on. Indeed, the operation was reportedly big enough to generate thousands of tips each month, which were passed on to the FBI.

"But virtually all of [the tips], current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans," the New York Times reported. "FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators.… Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy." [NYT, Jan. 17, 2006]

Also, undermining Bush's claims about the limited nature of the NSA's activities is why the administration would need to possess the complete phone records of the 200 million customers of AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth - if the government were only conducting what Bush and his aides have called a "targeted terrorist surveillance program."

(Qwest, a Colorado-based company with about 14 million customers, refused to turn over its records to the government because there was no court order, USA Today reported.)

The stated goal of tracking phone numbers that had been called by al-Qaeda operatives could be easily done with warrants from the FISA court. There would be no need to compile every personal and business call made by 200 million Americans.

"It's the largest database ever assembled in the world," one person told USA Today. The program's goal is "to create a database of every call ever made" within the nation's borders, the person said. [USA Today, May 11, 2006]

In describing Bush's policies over the past several years, the word "Orwellian" has sometimes been overused. But a government decision to electronically warehouse the trillions of phone numbers called by its citizens over their lifetimes is the essence of George Orwell's Big Brother nightmare.

(Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com . It's also available at Amazon.com , as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & "Project Truth.")


2. Big Brother at NSA
Boston Globe Editorial

President Bush has tried to justify the warrantless tapping of Americans' phone calls by saying that the government only listened to calls with Al Qaeda suspects overseas. Now it turns out that the government is collecting records on untold numbers of domestic calls, for no clear purpose other than to detect patterns. So far, none of the sources that described this practice to USA Today has said these calls are being recorded, but it is a violation of individual privacy to have this information collected, especially when it is done without the knowledge of the public and a vote of authorization by Congress.

The lack of public outrage after the revelation that overseas calls were being tapped without the court warrants required by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act suggests that Bush succeeded in persuading most Americans that the bugging was not aimed at them. The newly disclosed practice, however, does include the telephone records of ordinary Americans. Congress, which has so far acquiesced in skirting FISA, should now force the administration to explain this data-mining. If Congress decides it is worthwhile, it must establish a legal framework for it.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Republican Arlen Specter, promises hearings that will include as witnesses the executives of AT&T, Verizon, and BellSouth, the three companies that have collaborated with the National Security Agency on this. Testimony from the companies will be needed because it is likely the Bush administration will stonewall efforts to force John Negroponte, the director of national intelligence, or officials from the NSA to describe and justify the program. Just this week, the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsibility had to give up trying to investigate the NSA's wiretapping program because of a lack of cooperation from the agency.

The data-mining report casts a shadow over Bush's nomination of General Michael Hayden to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Hayden led the NSA after Sept. 11 when it began the tapping of Al Qaeda suspects' calls and the collecting of domestic telephone records. In his confirmation hearing, he will have to explain and justify both the data-mining of the records and why the administration found it necessary to set aside a sensible wiretap law that allows the NSA to get a warrant as much as 72 hours after the fact.

The administration has set the NSA loose on these projects to head off another Sept. 11. But one lesson of Sept. 11 is that intelligence agencies had excellent information in their hands and did not know what to do with it. Before individuals sacrifice the privacy of their phone records, they deserve to know that they won't simply be added to unexplored mountains of data that are too vast and formless to be interpreted properly.

3. Ever-Expanding Secret
NY Times Editorial

Ever since its secret domestic wiretapping program was exposed, the Bush administration has depicted it as a narrow examination of calls made by and to terrorism suspects. But its refusal to provide any details about the extent of the spying has raised doubts. Now there is more reason than ever to be worried — and angry — about how wide the government's web has been reaching.

According to an article in USA Today, the National Security Agency has been secretly collecting telephone records on tens of millions of Americans with the cooperation of the three largest telecommunications companies in the nation. The scope of the domestic spying described in the article is breathtaking. The government is reported to be working with AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth to collect data on phone calls made by untold millions of customers.

President Bush has insisted in the past that the government is monitoring only calls that begin or end overseas. But according to USA Today, it has actually been collecting information on purely domestic calls. One source told the paper that the program had produced "the largest database ever assembled in the world."

The government has stressed that it is not listening in on phone calls, only analyzing the data to look for calling patterns. But if all the details of the program are confirmed, the invasion of privacy is substantial. By cross-referencing phone numbers with databases that link numbers to names and addresses, the government could compile dossiers of what people and organizations each American is in contact with.

The phone companies are doing a great disservice to their customers by cooperating. To its credit, one major company, Qwest, refused, according to the article, because it had doubts about the program's legality.

What we have here is a clandestine surveillance program of enormous size, which is being operated by members of the administration who are subject to no limits or scrutiny beyond what they deem to impose on one another. If the White House had gotten its way, the program would have run secretly until the war on terror ended — that is, forever.

Congress must stop pretending that it has no serious responsibilities for monitoring the situation. The Senate should call back Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and ask him — this time, under oath — about the scope of the program. This time, lawmakers should not roll over when Mr. Gonzales declines to provide answers. The confirmation hearings of Michael Hayden, President Bush's nominee for Central Intelligence Agency director, are also a natural forum for a serious, thorough and pointed review of exactly what has been going on.

Most of all, Congress should pass legislation that removes any doubt that this kind of warrantless spying on ordinary Americans is illegal. If the administration finds the current procedures for getting court approval of wiretaps too restrictive, this would be the time to make any needed adjustments.

President Bush began his defense of the N.S.A. program yesterday by invoking, as he often does, Sept. 11. The attacks that day firmed the nation's resolve to protect itself against its enemies, but they did not give the president the limitless power he now claims to intrude on the private communications of the American people.