If Domestic Spying Did Any Good

Atrios finds the story behind the story of The Administration's domestic spying program:

And Here It Is

How many times has Bush told us that this was a limited program only for people who got phone calls from the Al Qaeda address book?

WASHINGTON, Jan. 16 - In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

F.B.I. officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency, which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic, that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators. Some F.B.I. officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on Americans' privacy.

...
"We'd chase a number, find it's a school teacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed," said one former FBI official, who was aware of the program and the data it generated for the bureau. "After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration."

...
F.B.I. field agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion. A former senior prosecutor, who was familiar with the eavesdropping programs, said intelligence officials turning over the tips "would always say that we had information whose source we can't share, but it indicates that this person has been communicating with a suspected Al Qaeda operative." He said, "I would always wonder, what does 'suspected' mean?"

So, the administration was illegally spying on innocent American citizens. It was not only illegal but a colossal waste of resources. No one has yet to answer the question of why? If they really thought some schoolteacher had ties to international terrorism there's no reason the FISA court wouldn't give them a warrant.

Haven't we been here before...

It's a pretty collosal discrepency to say that you have to monitor domestic and international calls in order to uncover terrorist plots and protect Americans, and then, after 5 years of doing so, have nothing to show for it. Either this means that the program itself should have been evaluated and terminated, made public years ago, or the intentions of having the program are not limited to protecting against terrorism.

By that I mean, the program's primary use for The Administration is one of this power-grab- where they assert that they are no longer accountable to anybody. Not Congress, not the Judicial branch, not the American voter. The only people The Administration wishes to remain in power balance with, are those people of their own choosing.


It should be noted how closely aligned with The Administration's bloodthirst to maintain the practice of torturing detainees this is. Torture itself only very rarely produces good, reliable intelligence- torture is not about gathering intelligence. Torture is about building anarchy, fear, and domination, without being held accountable to any of it. Likewise, this wiretapping program does not produce meaningful intelligence.