Archive for category: emptywheel

Say, has anyone noticed how omnipresent Ari Fleischer has been, of late? Obviously, the big news is his pimping for a $15 million propaganda campaign in favor of death and destruction.

"For those who believe in peace through strength, the cavalry iscoming," said former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, who isa founding board member of the group.

But Ari is also, all of a sudden, a seemingly acceptable source of the party line for the beltway media. He’s on Fox News accusing Congress of politicizing DOJ. And he’s dealing that line to the NYT, too.

“This is a reflection of the fact that the Democrats are on theoffensive and have more power than they used to,” Mr. Fleischer saidMonday, referring to Mr. Gonzales’s announcement. “The presidentdoesn’t have a lot of armor left, and the fact that they were able toforce him out is a chink in whatever armor he has left.”

Ari Fleischer has returned from his political exile in the harsh climes of Pound Ridge, NY, it seems (full disclosure: as a teenager, I was about 5 years behind Ari in the Pound Ridge schools).

Does anyone else find the timing interesting? Not so long ago, Ari was flacking for sports figures, Read more →

Before we crown Michael Chertoff Attorney General, I recommend we pull him before some oversight committee and ask him if he ever used Department of Homeland Security’s Privacy Office to review planned domestic surveillance activities before they’re used to collect data on American citizens. CSM reports that DHS is suspending a massive data-mining program because it has already started using live data without ever putting the program through a privacy review.

From late 2004 until mid-2006, a little-known data-mining computersystem developed by the US Department of Homeland Security to huntterrorists, weapons of mass destruction, and biological weapons siftedthrough Americans’ personal data with little regard for federal privacylaws.

Now the $42 million cutting-edge system, designed to process trillions of pieces of data, has been halted and could be canceled pending data-privacy reviews, according to a newly released report to Congress by the DHS’s own internal watchdog.

[snip]

It failed to incorporate federal privacy laws into its system design.From its earliest days, the system’s pilot programs used "live data,including personally identifiable information, from multiple sources inattempts to identify potential terrorist activity," but without takingsteps required by federal law and DHS’s own internal guidelines to keepthat data from being misused, the DHS Office of Inspector General (OIG)said in a June report to Congress, which was made public Aug. 13.

[snip]

DHS’s delay in addressing data privacy appears to be due to confusion and miscommunication about privacy requirements by ADVISE program managers and DHS’s privacy office, amid the rush to get a system running, the OIG says.

Forexample, ADVISE program managers told OIG investigators they didn’trealize privacy assessments were required for a system still indevelopment. At that stage, the system was just a processing toolwithout data, they argued – a view agreed to by the DHS privacy office.

Indeed, the privacy office mentions the ADVISEsystem only once, in a footnote, in its mandatory report last summer toCongress on data-mining activities. Until the "ADVISE tool" had dataattached to it, it was not a data-mining program needing privacyreview, the office reported.

Unknown to the privacy office, the ADVISE pilot programs had been operational and using personal data for about 18 months before the privacy office made that report to Congress, the OIG found.

And in a letter to Michael Chertoff complaining that he hadn’t been informed of DHS’ plans to use military spy satellites to monitor the US, Congressman Bennie Thompson noted that Chertoff had never subjected the satellite plan to a privacy review.

Via TPMM, the Director of DOJ’s Civil Rights Division has resigned.

Wan J. Kim, Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’sCivil Rights Division, today announced his resignation, effective atthe end of this month. President Bush nominated Mr. Kim to the positionon June 16, 2005, and the Senate unanimously confirmed his appointmenton November 4, 2005. Mr. Kim, whose career in the Department of Justicehas spanned more than a decade, started in the Department of JusticeHonors Program as a trial attorney in the Criminal Division, and laterserved as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the District of Columbia. [my emphasis]

Um, today is August 23. The "end of the month," August 31, is approximately 6 business days away.

Where I come from in the business world, when a top executive quits with less than a month’s notice, he’s trying to hide something, usually the imminent collapse of his business unit. When a top executive quits with less than two week’s notice, that thing he’s hiding may involve legal repercussions.

Mr. Kim is getting out of Dodge in an awfully big hurry.

Wow. I’m with Spencer Ackerman. If transparency is going to kill Americans, Mike McConnell just killed a lot more Americans blabbing to the El Paso Times than a Congressional debate with marginal transparency ever will. Consider this example, where McConnell tries to convince the reporter that the Administration is not data-mining on a massive scale:

Now there’s a sense that we’re doing massive datamining. In fact, what we’re doing is surgical. A telephone number issurgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. Sothat’s, we’ve got a lot of territory to make up with people believingthat we’re doing things we’re not doing.

It’s not a detail we’ve had before, now we have it. And note his disingenuousness. The claim of opponents is not that the Administration is now doing massive data-mining (well, not through the NSA–they’ve just moved that program to the FBI). The claim is that they were doing massive data-mining up until March 2004, when Comey and much of DOJ balked. Which kind of explains the reason why there’s deep distrust.

And here’s another reason for that distrust.

Now the second part of the issue was under thepresident’s program, the terrorist surveillance program, the privatesector had assisted us. Because if you’re going to get access you’vegot to have a partner and they were being sued. Now if you play out thesuits at the value they’re claimed, it would bankrupt these companies.So my position was we have to provide liability protection to theseprivate sector entities.

What McConnell all but admits is that those lawsuits have merit–that there is a real possibility that having cooperated in the Administration’s ill-conceived spying program will bankrupt big telecom. Again, if those suits have merit, there’s a reason for the deep distrust–it’s because BushCo encouraged the telecoms to violate the privacy of their customers on a massive scale.

And finally, one more reason for the distrust.

We submitted the bill in April, had an open hearing1 May, we had a closed hearing in May, I don’t remember the exact date.Chairman (U.S. Rep. Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas) had two hearings and Ihad a chance to brief the judiciary committee in the house, theintelligence committee in the house and I just mentioned the Senate,did not brief the full judiciary committee in the Senate, but I didmeet with Sen. (Patrick Leahy, D-Vt.) and Sen. (Arlen Specter, R-Pa.),and I did have an opportunity on the Senate side, they have a traditionthere of every quarter they invite the director of nationalintelligence in to talk to them update them on topics of interest. Andthat happened in (June 27). [my emphasis]

McConnell did not give a private briefing to the Senate Judiciary Committee. And if his description is accurate, he didn’t give one to the Senate Intelligence Committee, either. The former, of course, has been reviewing these issues for a year and a half and has subpoenaed documents from the Administration on precisely this program, only to be denied. The notion that McConnell didn’t brief them (was he afraid they’d demand subpoenas?)–and that Leahy didn’t demand that he brief them–is a ridiculous affront to the legislative process. And to think Cheney would tell such a good ally as Leahy to go fuck himself.

Finally, one last reason for distrust. McConnell also revealed the reason the Administration refused the Democratic bill: because it provided a real mechanism to the minimization procedures (which are what ensure your side of the conversation is not kept when you’re calling to Pakistan).

So I walked over to the chamber and as I walkedinto the office just off the chamber, it’s the vice president’s office,somebody gave me a copy. So I looked at the version and said, ‘Can’t doit. The same language was back in there.’

Q: What was it?

A: Just let me leave it, not too much detail, there were things withregard to our authorities some language around minimization.

The Administration refused the Democratic bill because it required the someone besides McConnell and Alberto Gonzales to review the minimization procedures of the taps themselves, rather than just buying off on the minimization procedures as a general plan. And the Administration refused that minimum level of oversight.

And note–the decision that the Democratic bill was unacceptable occurred in Cheney’s Senate office.

Several people noted the announcement that DOD was shutting down the TALON database, wondering if the database was just going to be renamed down the line, as TIA seems to have morphed. Apparently they missed this detail:

It will be closed on Sept. 17 and information collected subsequently on potential terror or security threats to Defense Departmentfacilities or personnel will be sent by Pentagon officials to an FBIdatabase known as Guardian, according to Army Col. Gary Keck, aPentagon spokesman.

Give credit to William Arkin, who actually listed this database when he appeared on Democracy Now to talk about the Talon database:

AMY GOODMAN: Does this concern you?

WILLIAM ARKIN: What do you think? Of course, itconcerns me. I mean, I think that this is just one tiny picture of theactual amount of information which is collected by the F.B.I. and theintelligence community. We know that there are dozens of thesedatabases, Cornerstone, TALON, [inaudible], the Coast Guard ICCdatabase, the F.B.I. Guardian database, the F.B.I. TRRS database, theJoint Intelligence Task Force Counterterrorism Homeland Defensedatabase, the SSOMB database, the BTS summary, the C.I.A. TD database,the NSA traffic database called Criss-Cross. I mean, we know that thesedatabases are out there and that they all deal with domestic Read more →