Mood:
irritatedNow Playing: TIA spying NSA spying --> And this is suppose to protect us? HAHA
Topic: CIVIL RIGHTS
I want to start off, todays extrodinary long report, with the statement that a new bill that says A 45 day no-warrant-needed-law to spy on citizens, proposal is in the makings, there is more from this topic latter near the bottom of this rant, I only bring this tid-bit up now ...to set the tone for the rest of todays report:
So Lets get this Spy Study Started
The Government is getting ready to consider a bill on terrorist surveillance. It is soon to be introduced by Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio Get this Z3 Readers, It would allow the government to monitor the international calls of U.S. residents for 45 days without a warrant. The White House has called that approach a "generally sound measure."
(How is that bushman crap soup starting to taste now?)
So anyway, I read yesterday in the Online NY Times that The Federal Bureau of Investigation found apparent violations of its own wiretapping and other intelligence-gathering procedures more than 100 times in the last two years, and problems appear to have grown more frequent in some crucial respects, a Justice Department report released Wednesday said.
While some of these instances were considered technical glitches, the report, from the department's inspector general, characterized others as "significant," including wiretaps that were much broader in scope than approved by a court and others that were allowed to continue for weeks or sometimes months longer than was authorized.
But, the report disclosed, the Justice Department has opened reviews into two other controversial counterterrorism tactics that the department has widely employed since the Sept. 11 attacks.
They are
...1> The F.B.I.'s use of administrative subpoenas, known as national security letters, to demand records and documents without warrants in terror investigations, possibly abusing its subpoena powers to demand records in thousands of cases.
...2> The Office of Professional Responsibility, a Justice Department unit that reviews ethics charges against department lawyers, has opened inquiries related to the detention of 21 people held as material witnesses in terror investigations.
Although the FBI says they are quick to recover and correct mistakes (haha sure!) as a note of procedure the FBI was said to be doing --> "overcollection" of intelligence ? going beyond the scope approved by the court in authorizing a wiretap ? and "overruns," in which a wiretap or other intelligence-gathering method was allowed to continue beyond the approved time period without an extension. One case of wiretapping was for 373 days long.
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Lets move right along this stinky trail of spying...
See a few years back the Homeland Security started up the TIA and then very shortly it was supposedly shut down in Sept 03 by Congress eliminating funds for it, due to mostly, the massive complaining of citizens. Well guess what? It is still around it just changed its name and ...and now hides just under the mainstream radar in ......the Department of Homeland Security....that doesn't suprise you does it?
This TIA (Total Information Awarness) program sifts through tons of information looking to make some kind of connection. The problem is...it is like hunting for a needle in a haystack ...and doesn't provide results.
Let me use the info from --> Wired News dot Com to explain a little on why this wont even begin to work.
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Let's look at some numbers. We'll be optimistic -- we'll assume the system has a one in 100 false-positive rate (99 percent accurate), and a one in 1,000 false-negative rate (99.9 percent accurate). Assume 1 trillion possible indicators to sift through: that's about 10 events -- e-mails, phone calls, purchases, web destinations, whatever -- per person in the United States per day. Also assume that 10 of them are actually terrorists plotting.
This unrealistically accurate system will generate 1 billion false alarms for every real terrorist plot it uncovers.
Every day of every year, the police will have to investigate 27 million potential plots in order to find the one real terrorist plot per month. Raise that false-positive accuracy to an absurd 99.9999 percent and you're still chasing 2,750 false alarms per day
-- but that will inevitably raise your false negatives, and you're going to miss some of those 10 real plots.
This isn't anything new. In statistics, it's called the "base rate fallacy," and it applies in other domains as well. For example, even highly accurate medical tests are useless as diagnostic tools if the incidence of the disease is rare in the general population. Terrorist attacks are also rare, any "test" is going to result in an endless stream of false alarms.
This is exactly the sort of thing we saw with the NSA's eavesdropping program: the New York Times reported that the computers spat out thousands of tips per month.
Every one of them turned out to be a false alarm.
We'd be far better off putting people in charge of investigating potential plots and letting them direct the computers, instead of putting the computers in charge and letting them decide who should be investigated.
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See there is this follow up to this TIA program found on this link --> HERE!
(quote)
This guy "Sharkey" played a key role in TIA's birth, when he and a close friend, retired Navy Vice Adm. John Poindexter, President Reagan's national security adviser, brought the idea to Defense officials shortly after the 9/11 attacks. The men had teamed earlier on intelligence-technology programs for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which agreed to host TIA and hired Poindexter to run it in 2002. In August 2003, Poindexter was forced to resign as TIA chief amid howls that his central role in the Iran-Contra scandal of the mid-1980s made him unfit to run a sensitive intelligence program.
[stay tuned readers he will be back in a few paragraphs]
As Sharkey continued, "a new sponsor has come forward that will enable us to continue much of our previous work." Sources confirm that this new sponsor was ARDA. Along with the new sponsor came a new name. "We will be describing this new effort as 'Basketball,' " Sharkey wrote, apparently giving no explanation of the name's significance.
It's unclear whether work on Basketball continues. Sharkey didn't respond to an interview request, and Poindexter said he had no comment about former TIA programs. But a publicly available Defense Department document, detailing various "cooperative agreements and other transactions" conducted in fiscal 2004, shows that Basketball was fully funded at least until the end of that year (September 2004).
The document shows that the system was being tested at a research center jointly run by ARDA and SAIC Corp., a major defense and intelligence contractor that is the sole owner of Hicks & Associates. The document describes Basketball as a "closed-loop, end-to-end prototype system for early warning and decision-making," exactly the same language used in contract documents for the TIA prototype system when it was awarded to Hicks in 2002. An SAIC spokesman declined to comment for this story.
Another key TIA project that moved to ARDA was Genoa II, which focused on building information technologies to help analysts and policy makers anticipate and pre- terrorist attacks. Genoa II was renamed Topsail when it moved to ARDA, intelligence sources confirmed. (The name continues the program's nautical nomenclature; "genoa" is a synonym for the headsail of a ship.)
As recently as October 2005, SAIC was awarded a $3.7 million contract under Topsail. According to a government-issued press release announcing the award, "The objective of Topsail is to develop decision-support aids for teams of intelligence analysts and policy personnel to assist in anticipating and pre-empting terrorist threats to U.S. interests."
That language repeats almost verbatim the boilerplate descriptions of Genoa II contained in contract documents, Pentagon
Devices developed under Genoa II's predecessor -- which Sharkey also managed when he worked for the Defense Department -- were used during the invasion of Afghanistan and as part of "the continuing war on terrorism," according to an unclassified Defense budget document.
Today, however, the future of Topsail is in question. A spokesman for the Air Force Research Laboratory in Rome, N.Y., which administers the program's contracts, said it's "in the process of being canceled due to lack of funds."
It is unclear when funding for Topsail was terminated.
But earlier this month, at a Senate Intelligence Committee hearing, one of TIA's strongest critics questioned whether intelligence officials knew that some of its programs had been moved to other agencies. Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., asked Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte and FBI Director Robert Mueller whether it was "correct that when [TIA] was closed, that several ... projects were moved to various intelligence agencies....
I and others on this panel led the effort to close [TIA] we want to know if Mr. Poindexter's programs are going on somewhere else, said Wyden."
Negroponte and Mueller said they didn't know. But Negroponte's deputy, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, who until recently was director of the NSA, said, "I'd like to answer in closed session." Asked for comment, Wyden's spokeswoman referred to his hearing statements. ....ya! I bet!!!
While the documents on the TIA programs don't show that their tools are used in the domestic eavesdropping, and knowledgeable sources wouldn't discuss the matter, the TIA programs were designed specifically to develop the kind of "early-warning system" that the president said the NSA is running.
Tom Armour, the Genoa II program manager, declined to comment for this story. But in a previous interview, he said that ARDA -- which absorbed the TIA programs -- has pursued technologies that would be useful for analyzing large amounts of phone and e-mail traffic. "That's, in fact, what the interest is," Armour said.
ARDA now is undergoing some changes of its own.
The outfit is being taken out of the NSA, placed under the control of Negroponte's office, and given a new name. It will be called the "Disruptive Technology Office," a reference to a term of art describing any new invention that suddenly, and often dramatically, replaces established procedures. Officials with the intelligence director's office did not respond to multiple requests for comment on this story.
(end quote)
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So now we move our study over to
"the civil-rights-crook Gonzales's"
and his avasive slant on this spying -->
Found on a FORBES Link Right Here It ironiaclly runs under the title headline of:
"Update 6: Gonzales: NSA Program Doesn't Need a Law"
....amazing huh?
It says right from the FORBES web site......
California Rep. Jane Harman, the House Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, said.... Gonzales has personally given her similar assurances. But generally she has "become increasingly skeptical over time about a lot of things I have been hearing." Harman declined to elaborate.
Yep strangely enough the watchdog groups are all over this. But just what is going to come of all this is hard to predict with the spin doctor republicans in full swing.
I know what is ethicly right and so does "EPIC" who is agressively following this. Not to mention, some of these Freedom Of Information Acts that they are suing for - are basiclly "requiring the Government to EXPLAIN their spying".
My email I received from EPIC led me to this quote and I want to share it for you Z3 Readers ....it can stll possibly by found --> HERE
[**this link may be hard to open - I don't know why? if it didn't work try this route EPIC 13.05?]
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...Now! This Link --> Here is a letter to Gonzales form (D)Patrick Leahy.
NICE LETTER!
Check it out Z3 Readers!!
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Here is what I read from EPIC it also is more on the upcoming 45 days No Warrant Needed Bill..,
And get this .., They are saying this:
(quote)House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi of California, the former top Democrat on the intelligence panel, has publicly questioned what the congressional leaders don't know. Her spokeswoman, Jennifer Crider, said Republicans have been unwilling to perform oversight of the administration.
~~~~~~~ Now about that 45 days No Warrent Needed Topic read on ~~~~~~~~~
Specter was also critical of a terrorist surveillance bill - soon to be introduced by Sen. Mike DeWine, R-Ohio, and other moderate lawmakers - that would allow the government to monitor the international calls of U.S. residents for 45 days without a warrant. The White House has called that approach a "generally sound measure."
Specter is planning to offer his own proposal that would require a federal intelligence court to vouch for the program's constitutionality every 45 days.
Democrats are calling for more oversight and may not embrace either approachAlso Wednesday, in response to a judge's order, the Bush administration released a fraction of the documents requested under the Freedom of Information Act by the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Privacy Information Center and the National Security Archive. The administration asked for four additional months to process additional classified materials.
The release included e-mail exchanges between Justice officials about the program's legal justification. One official said the department's arguments had "a slightly after-the-fact quality or feeling to them," according to the privacy center.
In a statement, the center's general counsel, David Sobel, said the administration's actions show a continuing resistance to public scrutiny on the NSA program.
(end quote)
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I mention that EPIC was suing for FOIA documents on this subject ....here is the final quote I have for today my dear Z3 Readers, it is also from this great watchdog group "EPIC" which you can find on their website too ...check them out! They rock!
(quote)
Documents obtained by EPIC this week in a Freedom Of Information Act
lawsuit against the Department of Justice reveal that a former top
official in the Justice Department was skeptical of the Bush
Administration's legal justification for its controversial warrantless
surveillance program.
Among the released documents was a series of e-mails from former
Associate Deputy Attorney General David S. Kris. Kris -- now Chief
Ethics and Compliance Officer at Time Warner, Inc. -- provided his
former colleague a legal analysis concluding that the Authorization for
Use of Military Force Resolution likely did not authorize the
surveillance program. He also said that the DOJ's statutory arguments
"had a slightly after-the-fact quality or feeling to them."
The DOJ refused to disclose much additional information related to its
secretive warrantless surveillance program. Most of the documents
released this week are previously published justifications for the
program and transcripts of television appearances by the Attorney
General.
The documents disclosed by the DOJ this week cover only a small fraction
of the material at issue in the lawsuit. In legal papers filed the night
before the Justice Department's court-imposed deadline for releasing the
documents, the agency requested a delay of four months to complete is
processing of classified information related to the program.
The case arises from the New York Times' report in December that
President Bush secretly issued an executive order in 2002 authorizing
the National Security Agency to conduct warrantless surveillance of international telephone and Internet communications on American soil.
EPIC submitted FOIA requests to four DOJ components just hours after the
warrantless surveillance program's existence was first reported. Noting the extraordinary public interest in the program -- and its potential illegality -- EPIC asked the agencies to expedite the processing of its
requests. The DOJ agreed that the requests deceived priority treatment,
but failed to comply with theFOIA's usual time limit of twenty workingdays. The court's February 16 order found that delay to be unreasonable,
and ordered the Justice Department to disclose all responsive documents by March 8, or to describe the information it sought to withhold and provide legal justifications for non-disclosure.
"President Bush has invited meaningful debate about the warrantless surveillance program," U.S. District Judge Henry H. Kennedy wrote. "That
can only occur if DOJ processes [EPIC's] FOIA requests in a timely
fashion and releases the information sought."
EPIC's case has been consolidated with a lawsuit filed by the American
Civil Liberties Union and the National Security Archive concerning many
of the same documents.
(end quote)
DOJ's Motion Requesting More Time to Process Classified Material (pdf):
Click here for the EPIC pdf file
To all the Z3 Readers who read this far,
!- This was a lot of information to cover -!
...I wanted to shorten the quotes but they needed to be reprinted as much as we all know---
"The Truth Needs To Be Exposed!
And THANK YOU PATRIOTS -
You give this Great Nation Hope
Cheers! ~ Joe
