Corporate boss can look over your shoulder with a "wearable gadget."

This is from CNN.com:

(CNN) -- If you're a person who hates it when your supervisor looks over your shoulder at work, you may want to stop reading this column right now.

Because what follows is only going to depress you.

Hitachi, the big electronics company based in Japan, is manufacturing and selling to corporations a device intended to increase efficiency in the workplace. It has a rather bland and generic-sounding name: the Hitachi Business Microscope.

But what it is capable of doing ... well, just imagine being followed around the office or the factory all day by the snoopiest boss in the world. Even into the restroom.

And, the thing is, once you hear about it, you just know that, from a management point of view, it is an innovation of absolute genius.

 Apparently, Hitachi has constructed the perfect employee monitoring system to watch and record everything you do, everything you say, every time you take a crap on the toilet, every time to take a drink at the water cooler--your every moment that you are at work!  The device will look like an ID badge, but will contain "infrared sensors, an accelerometer, a microphone sensor and a wireless communication device."  According to CNN.com:

If you get up to walk around the office a lot, the badge sends information to management about how often you do it, and where you go.

If you stop to talk with people throughout the day, the badge transmits who you're talking to (by reading your co-workers' badges), and for how long.

Do you contribute at meetings, or just sit there? Either way, the badge tells your bosses.

The stated intention of this is to increase productivity and get the most out of employees

Management's argument for such a device is supervisors need to keep an eye on how workers are spending their time on the company hours, with employers paying for their workers time.  If the employees do not like wearing the Business Microscope, then they can find another job.   The Business Microscope is an employer's dream 'of maximum efficiency, and Hitachi says that, since the Business Microscope was first developed in its labs in 2007, "over one million days of human behavior and big data" have been collected."'

Corporate slavery has arrived.

When I read this article, I seriously wonder just how much hypocrisy and degradation that corporations have towards their employees.  It is bad enough to look at career pages on a corporate website, and read about how much corporations value their employees, and want to make employees feel like they are working in an exciting career, with great wages, and everyone will be treated like family.  While in reality, employee wages have remained stagnant, while the corporate CEOs pay has skyrocketed.  Corporations want to pay as little as they can on wages, expect complete loyalty from you, and treat you not as an "asset," but as a "cost" and "liability," from which they can fire you at any time and for no reason. 

What is especially amazing is that Hitachi had the crazy idea to design this employee monitoring device to eventually market and sell to such corporations.  And Hitachi is probably right.  There may be a huge market for more corporate-intrusive monitoring on employees.  The problem will be whether employees will abide towards company instructions of wearing such monitoring devices.  When companies treat their employees like crap, you can be employee morale and employee loyalty towards the company will plummet.  If employees can quit and move on towards another company which doesn't use such devices, they will.  If employees can not move on towards better jobs, they may be forced to wear such devices at the company workplace.  But such employees will certainly be resentful, and simply put in their time towards the company store--but they will not put in the extra effort, or desire to improve the company products or services.

Then again, I seriously doubt that corporations would give a damn.

UPDATE:  I'm curious.  If corporations start forcing their employees to wear these Hitachi Business Microscope, will the CEOs and top corporate leaders also be required to wear these devices?  And who will be listening to the CEO's Business Microscope?

More Bush fearmongering....

This is just ridiculous. From The Los Angeles Times:

WASHINGTON -- A day after warning that potentially critical terrorism intelligence was being lost because Congress had not finished work on a controversial espionage law, the U.S. attorney general and the national intelligence director said Saturday that the government was receiving the information -- at least temporarily.

On Friday evening, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell had said in an unusually blunt letter to Congress that the nation "is now more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats" because lawmakers had not yet acted on the administration's proposal for the wiretapping law.

But within hours of sending that letter, administration officials told lawmakers on the House and Senate intelligence committees that they had prevailed upon all of the telecommunications companies to continue cooperating with the government's requests for information while negotiations with Congress continue.

A statement describing the change was released Saturday.

The episode appeared to be another round in the battle between the White House and congressional Democrats over provisions of the proposed new Protect America Act, which would replace one that has expired.

The bill would expand the government's eavesdropping authorities and protect telecommunications companies such as AT&T Inc. from lawsuits over their cooperation with the intelligence community.

I don't know about you, but I'm getting sick and tired of the constant Bush fearmongering to Congress, and the American public, so they can permanently receive their illegal domestic spying powers and get the telecoms off the hook for their own criminal participation in this illegal domestic spying program. I can't wait for this incompetent president to finally leave office.

Senate Judiciary spying bill lacks immunity for telecoms

This is big news. I found this through Americablog, with the source story from Wired Network:

Civil liberties groups got a stunningly unexpected win Thursday as the Senate Judiciary panel passed their version of the new government spying bill out of committee without including a provision giving immunity to telecoms being sued for helping the government secretly spy on Americans.

The biggest winner from the development is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, whose suit against AT&T in federal court would almost certainly have been wiped out by the immunity provision.

The provision - which was part of the version passed by the Senate Intelligence committee in mid-October - was widely expected to make it into the bill, due to the administration's full court press on the issue, the telcos small army of lobbyists and the vocal support of California Democrat Dianne Feintstein. Feinstein's vote was expected to reverse the Dems 10-9 advantage in the committee.

But after a long day of complicated finagling over technical amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and proposed alternatives to total immunity for companies such as AT&T and Verizon, committeee chairman Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont) decided to send the bill out of committee without an agreement on immunity.

UPDATE: Caroline Fredrickson, who heads the ACLU's D.C. legislative shop said via email "We appreciate the work of Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and Senator Russell Feingold (D-WI) to protect the civil liberties of all Americans. We still have reservations with both the House and Senate bills, and will continue to work to improve the legislation. It is heartening to know that people who feel their privacy was violated by the phone companies and by their own government are one step closer to having their day in court."

Without the immunity for the telecoms, the Bush administration cannot keep the details of their illegal domestic spying program secret from the American people. The Bush administration dangled lucrative contracts to the telecoms in exchange for creating this illegal spying program. And the telecoms' greed caused them to ignore the law, and privacy rights of American citizens. The Bush administration has been trying to legislate immunity for the telecoms in order to cover their own ass.

And the Senate Judiciary Committee said no.

Update: I did find some more interesting information on TPM Election Central regarding the inside story on how this bill went through the Senate Judiciary Committee:

Here's a bit more detail on what happened on the Judiciary Committee today. Sources say Senator Russ Feingold offered an amendment that would have stripped telecom immunity from the bill, but it was defeated. Then Senator Arlen Specter, the ranking GOPer on the committee, offered a "compromise" amendment saying that in these lawsuits the Federal government, and not the telecoms, would be the defendants.

But because of a procedural difficulty Specter's amendment wasn't voted on -- and Senator Patrick Leahy, the chair of the committee, essentially went around Specter's amendment and moved to have a vote to report the bill out of committee without any telecom immunity in it. That passed along strictly party lines. And that's where we are.

It seems that Feingold offered and amendment to strip the telecom immunity provision out the bill, but Specter didn't like that. Specter tried an end-run in offering a "compromise" amendment, where the Federal government would be the defendant in these lawsuits, and not the telecoms. With the Federal government as the defendant, the Bush administration could still dismiss the lawsuits, claiming that revealing the details on the domestic spying program will jeopardize the Great War on Terror. The good news is that Leahy saw through Specter's ploy, and voted the bill out of the committee without the telecom immunity provision. Of course, had the bill gotten out of the Senate Judiciary Committee with the telecom immunity intact, it would probably died on the Senate floor with Senator Chris Dodd's filibuster threat.

This is just a must read post through TPM:

Earlier today we flagged that Mark Klein, who uncovered a secret surveillance room run by the NSA while employed as a San Francisco-based technician for AT&T, is in Washington to lobby against granting retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies. In an interview this afternoon, Klein explained why he traveled all the way from San Francisco to lobby Senators about the issue: if the immunity provision passes, Americans may never know how extensive the surveillance program was -- or how deeply their privacy may have been invaded.

"The president has not presented this truthfully," said Klein, a 62-year old retiree. "He said it was about a few people making calls to the Mideast. But I know this physical equipment. It copies everything. There's no selection of anything, at all -- the splitter copies entire data streams from the internet, phone conversations, e-mail, web-browsing. Everything."

What Klein unearthed -- you can read it here -- points to a nearly unbounded surveillance program. Its very location in San Francisco suggests that the program was "massively domestic" in its focus, he said. "If they really meant what they say about only wanting international stuff, you wouldn't want it in San Francisco or Atlanta. You'd want to be closer to the border where the lines come in from the ocean so you pick up international calls. You only do it in San Francisco if you want domestic stuff. The location of this stuff contradicts their story."

That's what's at stake in the telecom immunity provision, Klein believes. If the surveillance-related lawsuits are invalidated by a provision in the intelligence-committee-passed FISA bill, then the extent of the program -- at least between 2001 and 2006 -- will remain the exclusive purview of the Bush administration, the communications firms and the handful of Senators selected to review legal justifications for the program. "These are not babes in woods. They knew what they were doing," Klein said. "The violation of the Constitution is where they split off -- where the splitter splits off full copies of a datastream, and connects to other companies' internet stuff, like Sprint or GlobalCrossing. They don’t want people to understand that. They want to portray it like the president does, that it's a handful of international phone calls. That's the soundbite, and that’s not true. It affects millions of people domestically."

Klein has been public with his insider account for nearly two years, with precious little publicity to show for it, thanks to the relative paucity of national media in San Francisco. Coming to Washington might have changed that: his day was packed with press calls and face time with at least a half-dozen Congressional staffers, mostly from Democratic Senators Joe Biden, Sheldon Whitehouse and Barbara Boxer. Press attention and one-on-ones in the corridors of power might be nice, he said, but it's not enough. "I'm not impressed by people with speeches pretending to be on your side," he said. "I want to see votes. In our favor."

The Senate Judiciary Committee will vote on the surveillance bill tomorrow.

God this is just sickening. And the telecoms want immunity for playing whores to this Bush administration, for lucrative government contracts, in order to impose such an illegal domestic spying program within the U.S.

FBI to follow the terrorist's Falafel trail

I found this CQ Politics story through The Carpetbagger Report. You can also find this story on Firedog Lake, and Laura Rozen.

From CQ Politics:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

The brainchild of top FBI counterterrorism officials Phil Mudd and Willie T. Hulon, according to well-informed sources, the project didn’t last long. It was torpedoed by the head of the FBI’s criminal investigations division, Michael A. Mason, who argued that putting somebody on a terrorist list for what they ate was ridiculous — and possibly illegal.

A check of federal court records in California did not reveal any prosecutions developed from falafel trails.

FBI spokesman Paul Bresson would neither confirm nor deny that the bureau ran such data mining, or forward-leaning “domain management,” experiments, but said he would continue to investigate. “It sounds pretty sensational to me,” he said, upon his initial review of the allegation. The techniques were briefly mentioned last year in a PBS Frontline special, “The Enemy Within”.

And as for my commentary on this story, well....



But reading further into this CQ Politics story, I found this tidbit of information:

As ridiculous as it sounds, the groceries counting scheme is a measure of how desperate the FBI is to disrupt domestic terrorism plots.

The possibility of Iranian-sponsored terrorism in the United States has drawn major attention from the FBI because of rising tensions between Washington and Tehran over Iran’s nuclear program.

“Because of the heightened difficulties surrounding U.S.-Iranian relations, the FBI has increased its focus on Hezbollah,” Bresson said 16 months ago. “Those investigations relate particularly to the potential presence of Hezbollah members on U.S. soil.”

Just this week, analyst Matthew Levitt wrote that “according to FBI officials here, some 50-100 Hamas and Hezbollah members with military training are present in the United States.” An FBI spokesman would not confirm that figure.

[The] groceries counting scheme is a measure of how desperate the FBI is to disrupt domestic terrorism plots. How much do you want to bet that it is the Bush administration that is pressuring the FBI into disrupting domestic terrorist plots? It is all about the politics of fear, by the Bush administration, for political gain. Remember the Nexus of Politics and Terror? See Keith Olbermann's two part story:

Olbermann's Nexus of Politics and Terror, Part One;



Olbermann's Nexus of Politics and Terror, Part Two;



We've got the 2008 presidential elections coming up, and the GOP may just be getting desperate at President Bush's low approval ratings, and the possibility that the Democrats may end up taking control of the White House. Already, we're starting to again see the terrorist fear card being played by the Republican Party against the Democrats. Now CQ Politics is trying to connect this FBI grocery surveillance program with the growing confrontation between the Bush administration and Iran, with the possibility of Iranian state-sponsored terrorism. I'm going to say that is crap! It is about the Bush administration's raising the sense of terrorist fears in Americans--the terrorists want to kill you! It doesn't matter to President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney whether the terrorists are Iraqi terrorists, al Qaeda terrorists, or even Iranian terrorists, just as long as they can use these terrorism threats to further their own political self-interests. And with the 2008 elections coming up, the Bush administration may be worried that the FBI has not yet disrupted any terrorism plots, that they can then politically use. Perhaps that is why the FBI is so desperate that they are investigating Falafel purchases in grocery stores.

Dodd threatens to filibuster telecom immunity bill

The stakes just got a little higher regarding the telecom immunity bill. Senator Chris Dodd is now threatening to filibuster the telecom immunity bill if Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid brings the bill to a floor vote. Here's the story through TPM Election Central:

Amping up his efforts to block the Senate FISA bill containing retroactive immunity for the telecom companies, Senator Chris Dodd's campaign says that he will filibuster the measure if the Dem Senate leadership tries to circumvent the hold he plans to put on the bill.

The Dodd campaign will reveal his plans to filibuster the measure in an email being sent out to supporters by the campaign's Web guru, Tim Tagaris. Election Central obtained an advance copy of the email.

The threatened filibuster, which comes a day after Dodd revealed to Election Central that he will place a hold on the bill, will place Dodd in direct confrontation with the Dem Senate leadership on a hugely contentious issue.

Dodd's filibuster threat comes in response to reports -- based on anonymous quotes from the leadership's office -- which said that Reid's aides think they can get the bill to the floor despite Dodd's hold.

And here is the video of Senator Dodd reiterating his filibuster threat:



Senator Chris Dodd played his cards rather brilliantly here. Dodd realized the disconnect between the anger of Democratic Party's liberal and progressive wing against this telecom immunity bill, and the ignorance of the top Democratic congressional leadership in trying to quietly pass this bill. By opposing the telecom immunity bill, Dodd has caused some major political shifts here. First, Dodd is generating a lot of support from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, and the liberal and progressive blogs. This support could provide a boost in monetary contributions in his presidential campaign. Second, by making this opposition to the telecom immunity bill, Dodd has created a major fracture within the Democratic Party. The Democratic leadership in Congress was suppose to be an opposition party, and an opposition branch of government to provide some type of check against this disastrous Bush administration. Granted, there is not much that the Democrats can do in either passing legislation over a GOP filibuster in the Senate, or even overriding a presidential veto with the less than two-thirds majority they have in both houses of Congress. But the one area that the Democratic leadership has shown themselves to be spineless has been with the Iraq war and the domestic spying programs. The Democrats have continued to give to President Bush whatever he wanted on those two issues. They have continued to fund the Iraq war without any conditions or timetables. The Democratic congressional leadership played rubber-stamp in allowing the illegal wiretappings to continue without court orders. And now the Democratic congressional leadership has again caved to President Bush on the telecom immunity bill. My guess here is that the Democratic congressional leadership is more afraid of President (Mr 24 Percent) Bush, and the Republicans, calling them "weak" and "soft on terrorism, over having their own Democratic constituents calling them spineless. What is really interesting here is that just after Dodd announced his hold against the telecom immunity bill, both senators Barack Obama and Joe Biden have come out against the bill. Dodd's little hold against the telecom immunity bill is providing some cover for big-name Democrats to announce their own opposition to the bill. I'm thinking that if Dodd had not announced his hold, then both Obama and Biden would have kept quiet on the telecom immunity bill for the sake of their own presidential ambitions, rather than taking a personal conviction stand in opposing the bill. This is a huge problem for Reid since he could be facing an open revolt by his own party's senators who oppose this latest cave-in to the Bush White House. Of course, we won't know if such a revolt will occur until Reid attempts to place this bill on the floor, and if Dodd actually goes through his filibuster.

Glenn Greenwald on the telecom immunity mess

Glenn Greenwald writes an incredible post through Salon about the entire telecom immunity mess:

The fact that this was completely predictable does not make it any less reprehensible:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources. . . .

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.

Let's just describe very factually and dispassionately what has happened here. Congress -- led by Senators, such as Jay Rockefeller, who have received huge payments from the telecom industry, and by privatized intelligence pioneer Mike McConnell, former Chairman of the secretive intelligence industry association that has been demanding telecom amnesty -- is going to intervene directly in the pending lawsuits against AT&T and other telecoms and declare them the winners on the ground that they did nothing wrong. Because of their vast ties to the telecoms, neither Rockefeller nor McConnell could ever appropriately serve as an actual judge in those lawsuits.

Yet here they are, meeting and reviewing secret documents and deciding amongst themselves to end all pending lawsuits in favor of their benefactors -- AT&T, Verizon and others. Let me quote again from that 1998 Foreign Affairs essay by Thomas Carothers helpfully outlining the steps required to install the "rule of law" in third-world, pre-democracy countries:

Type three reforms aim at the deeper goal of increasing government's compliance with law. A key step is achieving genuine judicial independence. . . . But the most crucial changes lie elsewhere. Above all, government officials must refrain from interfering with judicial decision-making and accept the judiciary as an independent authority.

The question of whether the telecoms acted in "good faith" in allowing warrantless government spying on their customers is already pending before a court of law. In fact, that is one of the central issues in the current lawsuits -- one that AT&T has already lost in a federal court.

Yet that is the issue that Jay Rockefeller and Mike McConnell -- operating in secret -- are taking away from the courts by passing a law declaring the telecoms to have won ("Senators this week began reviewing classified documents . . . and came away from that early review convinced that the companies had 'acted in good faith' in cooperating with what they believed was a legal and presidentially authorized program"). They are directly interfering in these lawsuits and issuing a "ruling" in favor of AT&T and other telecoms that is exactly the opposite of the one an actual court of law has already issued.

Read the rest of Greenwald's essay--it is that devastating.

Senator Chris Dodd places a hold on telecom immunity bill

Talk about a monkey wrench here. This is from TPM Election Central:

Senator Chris Dodd plans to put a hold on the Senate FISA renewal bill because it reportedly grants retroactive immunity to telephone companies for any role they played in the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program, Election Central has learned.

Dodd will send a letter to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this afternoon informing him of his decision. Dodd also plans to put up a page today at his campaign Web site where opponents of the immunity provision can register their opposition.

“Later today Senator Dodd will be sending a letter to Majority Leader Reid informing him that he plans to put a ‘hold’ on a bill that would provide for retroactive amnesty for telecom giants that were complicit in the Bush Administration’s assault on the United States Constitution," Dodd spokesman Hari Sevugan told Election Central. "Senator Dodd said that he would do what he could do to stop this bill, and with this announcement he has again shown that he delivers results.”

By doing this, Dodd can effectively hold up the telecom immunity bill, because bills are supposed to have unanimous consent in the Senate before going forward. One Senator can make it very difficult to bring a bill to the floor by objecting to allowing it to go to a vote.

Dodd's planned action comes amid reports that the Senate Intelligence Committee has reached a deal with the White House on the legislation that would give telephone carriers legal immunity for whatever role they played in the National Security Agency’s domestic eavesdropping program, which was approved by President Bush after 9/11. The White House and the phone companies have been lobbying aggressively for immunity, and the announcement of the immunity deal today dismayed many opponents.

The bill is getting marked up by the Senate Intelligence Committee this afternoon.

Dodd, who has aggressively courted the liberal blogosphere as part of his Presidential run, was being loudly appealed to by top liberal bloggers today to put a hold on the bill. Dodd has for some time now spoken out against the immunity provision but had stopped short of saying that he would exert his power as a Senator to hold up the legislation.

Now, however, he is going to do just that.

So Senator Chris Dodd has thrown a huge monkey wrench into stopping this supposed "bipartisan" deal in allowing the telecoms immunity against legal action in supplying the government customer phone records without a warrant. The problem with the Democratic leadership here is that they are so afraid of the Republicans calling them wimps and accusing them of being "soft on terrorism," that the Democrats are so willing to sign away Americans' civil rights to stop this GOP name-calling. And the Democratic leadership still has not yet learned that the Republicans will still call the Democrats "weak" and "soft on terrorism" anyways. It is why there is a lot of anger against the Democrats on the liberal and progressive blogs in that the Democrats still refuse to stand up for anything--even against a president with a 24 percent approval rating! Dodd basically told both Senators John D. Rockefeller IV, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and Christopher S. Bond, the ranking Republican, that they could take their compromise bill and stick it up their wahoos. This is where politics can get really fun. Because Dodd is acting the way the congressional Democrats should be acting with serious brass balls, and a desire to pull this country away from the cliff that both President Bush and the Republicans have been happily sending us over. Had the telecoms been granted immunity from civil lawsuits for their own role in Bush's illegal domestic spying program, not only would have negated the hundreds of civil lawsuits that the telecom industry is currently facing, but it would have also clamped down on future discoveries regarding the details of this illegal Bush spying program. In other words, the telecom immunity makes the Bush spying program secret from the courts.

Good work Dodd.

Democrats cave on telecom immunity bill

This is just disgusting. From The Washington Post:

Senate Democrats and Republicans reached agreement with the Bush administration yesterday on the terms of new legislation to control the federal government's domestic surveillance program, which includes a highly controversial grant of legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the program, according to congressional sources.

Disclosure of the deal followed a decision by House Democratic leaders to pull a competing version of the measure from the floor because they lacked the votes to prevail over Republican opponents and GOP parliamentary maneuvers.

The collapse marked the first time since Democrats took control of the chamber that a major bill was withdrawn from consideration before a scheduled vote. It was a victory for President Bush, whose aides lobbied heavily against the Democrats' bill, and an embarrassment for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who had pushed for the measure's passage.

The draft Senate bill has the support of the intelligence committee's chairman, John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), and Bush's director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell. It will include full immunity for those companies that can demonstrate to a court that they acted pursuant to a legal directive in helping the government with surveillance in the United States.

Such a demonstration, which the bill says could be made in secret, would wipe out a series of pending lawsuits alleging violations of privacy rights by telecommunications companies that provided telephone records, summaries of e-mail traffic and other information to the government after Sept. 11, 2001, without receiving court warrants. Bush had repeatedly threatened to veto any legislation that lacked this provision.

The real victory here for the Bush administration is that it wipes out the civil lawsuits against the telecom companies for providing the phone records to the government without warrants. The danger for the Bush White House is that had these lawsuits continued through the courts, the details regarding the telecom industry's cooperation with the illegal domestic spying program would have been publicly revealed. In other words, more of this Bush spying program would been revealed, which the Bush administration wants to keep secret. This immunity program is another CYA for the Bush administration to keep this illegal domestic spying operation secret from the American public.

And the Democrats caved in--AGAIN!

Is Arlen Specter finally growing a backbone?

I found this TPM story reporting that Senator Arlen Specter (R-PA) is opposed to granting retroactive immunity to the telecoms over the illegal Bush spy program:

As the ACLU worries that Senate Democrats in the intelligence committee will give retroactive immunity to telephone companies for collaborating with the administration's warrantless surveillance program, the two senior members of the judiciary committee say they won't entertain that without knowing what the telecoms did.

Here is the YouTube video:



And here is Specter's quote:

I certainly would not give them immunity retroactively on programs that we don’t know what they are…. I think it’s unreasonable to ask us to give them immunity for things we don’t know what they did. If there was a need for it at the time, and if the telephone companies were good citizens and if they supplied information which was important, then I’d be prepared to look at it. But I’m not going to buy a pig in a poke, and commit to retroactive immunity when I don’t know what went on. They’ve kept that from us. That’s a big problem, Wolf.

While I'm happy that Specter has started growing a backbone against the Bush White House for their criminality, I wish he grew this backbone so much earlier. There is so much corruption and scandals in this administration, and Arlen Specter was a party to the scandals during the time he was chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and refused to even investigate these scandals. Now all of the sudden, he opposes immunity for the telecoms? I seriously wonder if Arlen Specter is performing a legacy CYA of his own ass here. Specter may know that his complacency in performing congressional oversight against the Bush administration on the domestic spying program will not look good for history. So instead of actively criticizing this Bush administration on the spying program, Specter may be trying to make an end-run around by joining the criticism of refusing to give immunity to the telecoms for their involvement in the domestic spying program, while conveniently ignoring the Bush administration's central role in creating the program in the first place.

Cheney’s office, White House subpoenaed

This is off MSNBC News:

WASHINGTON - The Senate Judiciary Committee subpoenaed the White House and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office Wednesday for documents relating to President Bush’s controversial eavesdropping program that operated warrant-free for five years.

Also named in subpoenas signed by committee Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., were the Justice Department and the National Security Council. The four parties have until July 18 to comply, according to a statement by Leahy’s office.

The committee wants documents that might shed light on internal disputes within the administration over the legality of the program, which Bush put under court review earlier this year.

“Our attempts to obtain information through testimony of administration witnesses have been met with a consistent pattern of evasion and misdirection,” Leahy said in his cover letters for the subpoenas. “There is no legitimate argument for withholding the requested materials from this committee.”

Echoing its response to previous congressional subpoenas to former administration officials Harriet Miers and Sara Taylor, the White House gave no indication that it would comply.

“We’re aware of the committee’s action and will respond appropriately,” White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. “It’s unfortunate that congressional Democrats continue to choose the route of confrontation.”

We've got another confrontation here. The Bush administration has been stalling every which way they can to avoid providing information on their illegal warrantless spying program for the past six years. And it doesn't surprise me that the Bush White House is blaming the congressional Democrats for their own confrontational approach to the congressional oversight into the Bush White House. If anything, this story really shows the contempt that the Bush administration, and especially Vice President Dick Cheney, have for both the rule of law and the system of oversight. This Bush White House will ignore this subpoena, inviting an even greater constitutional confrontation within the courts between the legislative and executive branches. President Bush probably believes this latest stare-down with the Democrats in Congress.

We'll find out on July 18th.

Some more on Bush reversal in domestic spying

I found this New York Times article that provides even more details on the Bush reversal in the NSA domestic spying program:

In a four-paragraph letter on Wednesday announcing that the Bush administration had reversed its position and would submit its domestic surveillance program to judicial supervision, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales used one phrase three times. A secret court, he said, had fashioned a way to allow the program to be monitored by the judiciary without compromising the need for “speed and agility.”

That phrase also captures, some critics say, the administration’s moving-target litigation strategy, one that often seeks to change the terms of the debate just as a claim of executive authority is about to be tested in the courts or in Congress.

On Wednesday, the administration announced that an unnamed judge on the secret court, in a nonadversarial proceeding that apparently cannot be appealed, had issued orders that apparently both granted surveillance requests and set out some ground rules for how such requests would be handled.

The details remained sketchy yesterday, but critics of the administration said they suspected that one goal of the new arrangements was to derail lawsuits challenging the program in conventional federal courts.

Haven't we seen this Bush behavior before? Remember the White House visitor logs and Jack Abramoff? Let's go back to the January 6, 2007 CNN News story:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The White House and the Secret Service quietly signed an agreement last spring in the midst of the Jack Abramoff lobbying scandal declaring records identifying visitors to the White House are not open to the public.

The Bush administration did not reveal the existence of the memorandum of understanding until last fall.

The White House is using it to deal with a legal problem on a separate front, a ruling by a federal judge ordering the production of Secret Service logs identifying visitors to the office of Vice President Dick Cheney.

In a federal appeals court filing three weeks ago, the administration's lawyers used the memo in a legal argument aimed at overturning the judge's ruling. The Washington Post is suing for access to the Secret Service logs.

The five-page document dated May 17 declares that all entry and exit data on White House visitors belongs to the White House as presidential records rather than to the Secret Service as agency records.

Therefore, the agreement states, the material is not subject to public disclosure under the Freedom of Information Act.

The memo last spring was signed by the White House and Secret Service the day after a Washington-based group asked a federal judge to impose sanctions on the Secret Service in a dispute over White House visitor logs for Abramoff.

The chief counsel to another Washington-based group suing to get Secret Service logs calls the creation of the memo "a political maneuver couched as a legal one."

"It appears the White House is actually manufacturing evidence to further its own agenda," Anne Weismann, a Justice Department lawyer for 19 years and now chief counsel to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, said Friday.

The Bush administration signed a secret memo with the Secret Service, transferring the White House visitor logs from the Secret Service control to the White House control, de-railing any legal challenges to these visitor logs in relation to the Jack Abramoff scandal. And now the administration is presenting this letter written by Attorney General Gonzales, claiming that an unnamed judge on the secret court has granted the administration a blanket legal authority for the NSA to spy on anyone, and that this unnamed judge's decision cannot be appealed. And finally, we're told of this unnamed judge's decision just before lawsuits challenging this warrantless spying program is about to go to court. Continuing with the NY Times article:

Shortly before the Supreme Court heard a set of three detainee cases in 2004, the administration reversed course and allowed two Americans held incommunicado by the military to meet with their lawyers, mooting that issue.

After the court ruled that one of the men, Yaser Hamdi, could challenge his detention in court, the administration instead freed him and sent him to Saudi Arabia.

And just as the Supreme Court was considering whether to review the case of the second man, Jose Padilla, he was transferred to the criminal justice system last year, mooting his appeal.

[....]

In the case of the eavesdropping program, the administration continues to maintain that it is free to operate without court approval. Its decision to submit to the secret court, administration lawyers said, was voluntary. At a briefing Wednesday, almost as an afterthought, a senior Justice Department official said, “There’s obviously an advantage to having all three branches involved.”

The announcement about the surveillance program came two weeks before a federal appeals court in Cincinnati was to hear the first appellate argument about the lawfulness of the program. Government lawyers now say that case is moot, but their claim is open to question.

The usual rule is that cases seeking relief in the future are indeed moot when the relief they seek is granted. But there is an exception, said David Cole, a lawyer with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which has challenged the program in a separate lawsuit filed in New York.

He cited a series of Supreme Court decisions in which the defendants had voluntarily done what the lawsuits were seeking. Such cases are moot, the court ruled in 1968, for instance, only if it is “absolutely clear that the allegedly wrongful behavior could not reasonably be expected to recur.”

[....]

A third case, from Oregon, is almost certainly not moot. In addition to asking the court to stop surveillance without warrants in the future, that suit asks for money as damages for past surveillance.

The Oregon case, brought by an Islamic charity and two of its lawyers, differs from the Cincinnati appeal and the New York suit because the plaintiffs in it say they have seen a classified document confirming that their communications were actually intercepted.

What else can I say? The Bush administration will flaunt the law, change the law to their benefit, and even manufacture evidence favorable to their case. And they are doing it again here with the warrantless spying program.

What do you expect with a bunch of criminals?

Bush reverses himself--warrantless spy program now under FISA court

I should say something about the Bush administration's sudden reversal of taking the NSA warrantless spying program and placing it under the FISA court. This is from Newsweek.com:

Jan. 18, 2007 - The Bush administration announced Wednesday that a secret court has authorized intelligence agencies to monitor suspected Al Qaeda phone calls into and out of the United States. As a result, administration officials said that President Bush will now put his controversial warrantless surveillance program, which he authorized without court approval after 9/11, under judicial supervision. The officials say he will abide by secret rules set down by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The news, made public in a letter sent by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee, certainly seemed politically convenient for the White House. Today, Gonzales is scheduled to make his first public Judiciary Committee appearance before the new Democrat-controlled Senate, where he was expected to face tough questioning about warrantless wiretapping.

Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy and ranking minority member Arlen Specter have both criticized the Bush administration’s surveillance programs, and pledged to try to constrain such eavesdropping. The Justice Department’s letter to the Judiciary Committee indicated that the foreign intelligence court had actually issued its orders authorizing the eavesdropping program on Jan. 10. Privately, some congressional Democrats speculated that the administration held back word of the court rulings for a week so that it could be released for maximum impact right before Gonzales’s Capitol Hill appearance.

One Capitol Hill official familiar with Democratic thinking—who, like others quoted in this story didn’t want to be named talking about sensitive intelligence issues—said that the decision to put the program under court supervision amounts to “a significant reversal by this administration ... They’ve been telling us for more than a year that [the courts] aren’t flexible enough.” This official said congressional critics, including prominent Democrats, will want to know why the administration’s attitude toward working with the secret court changed—and why they did not work things out earlier. Congressional committees were also likely to ask tough questions about the domestic side of the surveillance program—including how it is run, who runs it and who decides which people to monitor, the official said.

In a conference call with journalists Wednesday, two senior Justice Department officials talked about the court rulings on condition of anonymity. They acknowledged that in light of the court decision, the administration hopes congressional critics will slow down or abandon efforts to curtail or regulate the surveillance programs.

Maybe I'm being a little suspicious here, but this administration does not back down lightly from a fight. And there is a fight brewing here. Congressional Democrats were planning to open hearings and investigations into Bush's warrantless, domestic spying program. And these investigations would include congressional subpoena power of White House documents--I'm not sure if the Bush White House would have been able to win a constitutional fight with Congress on this one issue. So the Bush White House throws a bone at the congressional watchdogs. The Bush administration agrees to place this NSA wiretapping program under the FISA courts, while hoping that the watchdogs would cut back on their investigations. This makes me wonder what else is the NSA spying on here, especially in terms of the internet, web browsing, keystrokes, emails, or who knows what else?

Here is a copy of Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee. Through Talking Points Memo.

More Domestic Spying!

Welcome to the United Fascist States of America! I am just so amazed at how our democracy has been destroyed--turned into a totalitarian dictatorship. President Bush has been using the Constitution and Bill of Rights as toilet paper for the past six years! It is just incredible how low this country has sunk down into disaster.

Let's start with the stories. Here is a January 14, 2007 New York Times story, titled Military Is Expanding Its Intelligence Role in United States:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 13 — The Pentagon has been using a little-known power to obtain banking and credit records of hundreds of Americans and others suspected of terrorism or espionage inside the United States, part of an aggressive expansion by the military into domestic intelligence gathering.

The C.I.A. has also been issuing what are known as national security letters to gain access to financial records from American companies, though it has done so only rarely, intelligence officials say.

Banks, credit card companies and other financial institutions receiving the letters usually have turned over documents voluntarily, allowing investigators to examine the financial assets and transactions of American military personnel and civilians, officials say.

The F.B.I., the lead agency on domestic counterterrorism and espionage, has issued thousands of national security letters since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, provoking criticism and court challenges from civil liberties advocates who see them as unjustified intrusions into Americans’ private lives.

But it was not previously known, even to some senior counterterrorism officials, that the Pentagon and the Central Intelligence Agency have been using their own “noncompulsory” versions of the letters. Congress has rejected several attempts by the two agencies since 2001 for authority to issue mandatory letters, in part because of concerns about the dangers of expanding their role in domestic spying.

The military and the C.I.A. have long been restricted in their domestic intelligence operations, and both are barred from conducting traditional domestic law enforcement work. The C.I.A.’s role within the United States has been largely limited to recruiting people to spy on foreign countries.

Carl Kropf, a spokesman for the director of national intelligence, said intelligence agencies like the C.I.A. used the letters on only a “limited basis.”

Pentagon officials defended the letters as valuable tools and said they were part of a broader strategy since the Sept. 11 attacks to use more aggressive intelligence-gathering tactics — a priority of former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld. The letters “provide tremendous leads to follow and often with which to corroborate other evidence in the context of counterespionage and counterterrorism,” said Maj. Patrick Ryder, a Pentagon spokesman.

[....]

Usually, the financial documents collected through the letters do not establish any links to espionage or terrorism and have seldom led to criminal charges, military officials say. Instead, the letters often help eliminate suspects.

So the government is spying on your bank, credit card, and financial records--certainly without any warrant. And what has all this domestic spying on your financial records have achieved? Nothing! These investigations of the financial records have not lead to any charges of espionage, or terrorism here--no criminal charges have been filed. And yet, the Pentagon wants to expand this program:

But even when the initial suspicions are unproven, the documents have intelligence value, military officials say. In the next year, they plan to incorporate the records into a database at the Counterintelligence Field Activity office at the Pentagon to track possible threats against the military, Pentagon officials said. Like others interviewed, they would speak only on the condition of anonymity.

Military intelligence officers have sent letters in up to 500 investigations over the last five years, two officials estimated. The number of letters is likely to be well into the thousands, the officials said, because a single case often generates letters to multiple financial institutions. For its part, the C.I.A. issues a handful of national security letters each year, agency officials said. Congressional officials said members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees had been briefed on the use of the letters by the military and the C.I.A.

We've got the No-Fly list, databases showing your website searches, cell phone recordings, so why not continue with a financial records database? And as for America's rights to privacy and civil liberties--screw them! That's the Bush administration's thinking here.

And the Bush administration just doesn't want to just screw you with their overt domestic spying here. They also want to eliminate your right to counsel, if you're picked up as a terrorist or enemy combatant. This is also from the January 13, 2007 New York Times story, titled Official Attacks Top Law Firms Over Detainees:

WASHINGTON, Jan. 12 — The senior Pentagon official in charge of military detainees suspected of terrorism said in an interview this week that he was dismayed that lawyers at many of the nation’s top firms were representing prisoners at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the firms’ corporate clients should consider ending their business ties.

The comments by Charles D. Stimson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for detainee affairs, produced an instant torrent of anger from lawyers, legal ethics specialists and bar association officials, who said Friday that his comments were repellent and displayed an ignorance of the duties of lawyers to represent people in legal trouble.

“This is prejudicial to the administration of justice,” said Stephen Gillers, a law professor at New York University and an authority on legal ethics. “It’s possible that lawyers willing to undertake what has been long viewed as an admirable chore will decline to do so for fear of antagonizing important clients.

“We have a senior government official suggesting that representing these people somehow compromises American interests, and he even names the firms, giving a target to corporate America.”

Mr. Stimson made his remarks in an interview on Thursday with Federal News Radio, a local Washington-based station that is aimed at an audience of government employees.

The same point appeared Friday on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, where Robert L. Pollock, a member of the newspaper’s editorial board, cited the list of law firms and quoted an unnamed “senior U.S. official” as saying, “Corporate C.E.O.’s seeing this should ask firms to choose between lucrative retainers and representing terrorists.”

In his radio interview, Mr. Stimson said: “I think the news story that you’re really going to start seeing in the next couple of weeks is this: As a result of a FOIA request through a major news organization, somebody asked, ‘Who are the lawyers around this country representing detainees down there?’ and you know what, it’s shocking.” The F.O.I.A. reference was to a Freedom of Information Act request submitted by Monica Crowley, a conservative syndicated talk show host, asking for the names of all the lawyers and law firms representing Guantánamo detainees in federal court cases.

Mr. Stimson, who is himself a lawyer, then went on to name more than a dozen of the firms listed on the 14-page report provided to Ms. Crowley, describing them as “the major law firms in this country.” He said, “I think, quite honestly, when corporate C.E.O.’s see that those firms are representing the very terrorists who hit their bottom line back in 2001, those C.E.O.’s are going to make those law firms choose between representing terrorists or representing reputable firms, and I think that is going to have major play in the next few weeks. And we want to watch that play out.”

You've got to love the audacity of this administration--if you're a lawyer at a major law firm, and you're representing a Gitmo detainee, well the Pentagon wants your law firm to fire you for providing counsel to these terrorists and enemy combatants.

I should feel angry about these two stories, but I don't. I've seen so much crap coming out of this Fascist Bush White House than I could ever imagine, or even dream of. And the Bush administration just keeps going further into absurdity. President Bush is the Deciderer--he's going to do whatever he damn well pleases, and he's given Congress the big FU. The Bush White House is domestically spying on American citizens without any constitutional safeguards. Who knows who they're spying on--political opponents? Anti-war groups? The Democratic Party? The Bush administration couldn't legally keep the Gitmo terrorists from having legal counsel and hearings, so now the administration wants to pressure those lawyers to drop their services to the Gitmo detainees, or forcing these lawyers to be fired by their corporate offices for providing such legal counsel.

What else is out there?

Judge dismisses phone records lawsuit

Here we go back to Wing-Nutty Land. This is from Yahoo News:

CHICAGO - Citing national security, a federal judge Tuesday threw out a lawsuit aimed at blocking AT&T from giving telephone records to the government for use in the war on terror.

"The court is persuaded that requiring AT&T to confirm or deny whether it has disclosed large quantities of telephone records to the federal government could give adversaries of this country valuable insight into the government's intelligence activities," U.S. District Judge Matthew F. Kennelly said.

Kennelly ruled in a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois on behalf of author Studs Terkel and other activists who said their constitutional rights were violated because of a National Security Agency program of gathering phone company records.

Justice Department attorneys had argued it that would violate the law against divulging state secrets for AT&T to say whether it had provided telephone records to the supersecret spy agency.

The ACLU argued that the practice was no longer secret, because numerous news reports had made it clear that phone records had been given to the agency.

But the judge said the news reports amounted to speculation and in no way constituted official confirmation that phone records had been turned over.

He also said Terkel and the other plaintiffs in the lawsuit, which sought class-action status, had not shown that their own records had been provided to the government. As a result, they lacked standing to sue the government, he said.

I just love this judge's reasoning. Since the disclosure of AT&T's giving domestic phone records to the NSA for domestic spying was actually speculation created by the news media, no official confirmation of this illegal government program was confirmed by the government, and no phone records were ever turned over to the NSA by AT&T. As a result, this lawsuit should be dismissed because if it would go on, it would endanger American lives and the Bush administration's GWOT by divulging classified information through this lawsuit trial and the media coverage of this trial. This insane logic of the old Soviet Union's Pravda news stories, where Pravda would twist the details of a news event to fit their government-sponsored propaganda--propaganda that nobody believed in. Now we've got this dismissal of a lawsuit based on a line of reasoning that borders on the absurd.

Welcome to Wing-Nutty Land.

Bush blocked Justice Department's anti-terror probe

I don't know when the madness will stop here. I found this off Yahoo News:

WASHINGTON - President Bush personally blocked a Justice Department investigation of the anti-terror eavesdropping program that intercepts Americans' international calls and e-mails, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Tuesday.

Bush refused to grant security clearances for department investigators who were looking into the role Justice lawyers played in crafting the program, under which the National Security Agency listens in on telephone calls and reads e-mail without court approval, Gonzales told the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Without access to the sensitive program, the department's Office of Professional Responsibility closed its investigation in April.

"It was highly classified, very important and many other lawyers had access. Why not OPR?" Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., the committee chairman, asked Gonzales.

"The president of the United States makes the decision," Gonzales replied.

Later, at the White House, spokesman Tony Snow said the eavesdropping program is reviewed every 45 days by senior officials, including Gonzales. The president did not consider the Justice unit that functions as a legal ethics watchdog to be the "proper venue," Snow said.

"What he was saying is that in the case of a highly classified program, you need to keep the number of people exposed to it tight for reasons of national security, and that's what he did," Snow said.

So the Justice Department lawyers, who were suppose to look into constitutional violations by senior Justice Department lawyers and White House officials that created this program, were denied security access to information regarding this eavesdropping program by President Bush himself on the grounds of national security. And the people who are reviewing this eavesdropping program are the same lawyers and White House officials who crafted this program in the first place. In other words, there is no ethical watchdog looking into whatever this administration is doing. Congress has refused to perform any investigations into the Bush White House, under a cowed Republican leadership. The Supreme Court has avoided taking any of these cases. Whatever rulings the Court has handed down--especially regarding the Gitmo prisoner's lack of counsel and trial, the Bush administration has pretty much ignored them. And now any Justice Department watchdog investigations into White House constitutional and ethical violations are being quashed by the same White House on the grounds of "national security."

Can you say George Bush = Der Fuhrer.

Waas: Rove Was Novak's Source; Two Men May Have Planned Cover-Up

I found this story off TMP Muckraker, and I found it incredibly fascinating. The actual source of the story is from National Journal's Murray Waas. Here is the National Journal article:

On September 29, 2003, three days after it became known that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to investigate who leaked the name of covert CIA officer Valerie Plame, columnist Robert Novak telephoned White House senior adviser Karl Rove to assure Rove that he would protect him from being harmed by the investigation, according to people with firsthand knowledge of the federal grand jury testimony of both men.

Suspicious that Rove and Novak might have devised a cover story during that conversation to protect Rove, federal investigators briefed then-Attorney General John Ashcroft on the matter in the early stages of the investigation in fall 2003, according to officials with direct knowledge of those briefings.

Ashcroft oversaw the CIA-Plame leak probe for three months until he recused himself and allowed Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald to be named to take over the investigation on December 30, 2003. Ashcroft received routine briefings about the status of the investigation from October to December of that year.

Sources said that Ashcroft received a special briefing on the highly sensitive issue of the September 29 conversation between Novak and Rove because of the concerns of federal investigators that a well-known journalist might have been involved in an effort to not only protect a source but also work in tandem with the president's chief political adviser to stymie the FBI.

This is fascinating. If Novak contacted Rove, and the two men actually did devise a cover story to protect Rove, then both Novak and Rove could be charged with obstruction of justice. The timing of this phone call seems especially suspicious--three days after the CIA asked the Justice Department for an investigation into the Valerie Plame leak. Both Novak and Rove would have known that they could have been targets in the investigation. So what did they talk about in that September 29 phone call? There are some very interesting details regarding this story:

Foremost among the reasons that federal investigators harbored suspicions about the September 29 conversation was its timing. Three days earlier, NBC broke the news that the CIA had asked the Justice Department to launch a probe into the leaking of Plame's identity. During the noon news briefing at the White House on September 29, various reporters asked spokesman Scott McClellan repeatedly whether Justice was indeed investigating the Plame leak.

"If someone leaked classified information of the nature that has been reported, absolutely, the president would want it to be looked into," McClellan responded. "And the Justice Department would be the appropriate agency to do so."

In fact, Justice was already preparing to announce such a criminal probe, and the department made the formal announcement the following day, September 30.

A second reason that federal investigators were suspicious, sources said, is that they believed that after the September 29 call, Novak shifted his account of his July 9, 2003, conversation with Rove to show that administration officials had a passive role in leaking Plame's identity.

On July 22, 2003 -- eight days after the publication of Novak's column on Plame -- Newsday reporters Timothy Phelps and Knut Royce quoted Novak as telling them in an interview that it was White House officials who encouraged him to write about Plame. "I didn't dig it out, it was given to me," Newsday quoted Novak as saying about Plame. "They thought it was significant. They gave me the name, and I used it."

If Novak's interview with Phelps and Royce was accurate, sources said, it suggests that Rove was actively involved in trying to expose Plame's CIA job.

Novak did not speak publicly on the matter again until September 29 -- later on the same day as his conversation with Rove in which he assured the president's chief political aide that he would protect him in the forthcoming Justice Department investigation. What Novak said publicly was different from the earlier account in Newsday:

"I have been beleaguered by television networks around the world, but I am reserving my say for Crossfire," Novak said on his own CNN program, which is no longer on the air. "Nobody in the Bush administration called me to leak this. In July, I was interviewing a senior administration official on Ambassador [Joseph C.] Wilson's report [on his Niger trip], when [the official] told me the trip was inspired by his wife, a CIA employee working on weapons of mass destruction. Another senior official told me the same thing.

"As a professional journalist with 46 years' experience in Washington, I do not reveal confidential sources. When I called the CIA in July, they confirmed Mrs. Wilson's involvement in a mission for her husband on a secondary basis, who is -- he is a former Clinton administration official. They asked me not to use her name, but never indicated it would endanger her or anybody else."

In explaining the discrepancy between what he told Newsday a week after he outed Plame and everything he said later regarding Plame, Novak has said that Phelps "badly misquoted" him. Phelps, who is Newsday's Washington bureau chief, denied that, saying he took accurate notes of his interview with Novak and reported exactly what Novak told him.

A third reason that investigators are said to be concerned about a possible cover story was the grand jury testimony of both Novak and Rove about their July 9, 2003, conversation. On that day, Novak was still reporting for his July 14 column.

Novak and Rove have testified that it was Novak, not Rove, who raised the subject of Plame's CIA job and Wilson's trip to Niger, according to people familiar with the testimony of both men.

Rove has testified that he simply told the columnist that he had heard much the same information about Plame, which perhaps was nothing more than an unsubstantiated rumor. Novak's account of the July 9 call matched Rove's. Investigators were suspicious that, if this version was true, the columnist would have relied on Rove as one of his two sources to out Plame as an "agency operative."

Ashcroft was advised during the briefing that investigators had strong reservations about the veracity of the Novak and Rove accounts of the July 9 conversation. If Rove had simply said that he heard the same information that Novak did, investigators wondered why Novak would have relied on such an offhand comment as the basis for writing the column. Investigators also wondered why Novak had not at least asked Rove about what else he knew about Plame, sources said.

There is a lot of contradictions within this story--Rove's contradictory grand jury testimony and Novak's contradictory public statements regarding the Valerie Plame scandal. It is certainly enough for investigators to put some serious heat on both Rove and Novak. There is even some interesting speculation as to why Ashcroft recused himself from this investigation. Did Ashcroft even know that Vice President Cheney's chief of staff Scooter Libby or even Vice President Cheney himself was involved in the Valerie Plame affair, and thus Ashcroft had to recuse himself? Of that question, I'm not sure. But I do find it interesting that a secret briefing took place between FBI agents and Ashcroft regarding the September 29th phone call between Novak and Rove. I don't think John Ashcroft was involved in the Valerie Plame scandal. But I think that after Ashcroft had his secret briefing on the September 29th phone call between Novak and Rove, Ashcroft knew that Karl Rove was behind a White House campaign to discredit Ambassador Joe Wilson through outing his wife, Valerie Plame, as a CIA agent. And Ashcroft also realized that if he was directly involved in the CIA leak investigation, and if Karl Rove's involvement had been revealed, then the resulting scandal of a White House political operative trying to stop a DOJ investigation could have sunk the hopes of a Bush administration's 2004 re-election. So Ashcroft recused himself from the investigation.

There is so much more in this story that I have not figured out yet. Stay tuned.

Suit Seeks to Stop Phone Records Release

Well, the lawsuits are starting now. This is from Yahoo News:

CHICAGO - A lawsuit filed Monday on behalf of author Studs Terkel and other professionals seeks to stop AT&T from giving customer phone records to the National Security Agency without a court order.

The plaintiffs, who also include a doctor and a state lawmaker, said they rely on confidentiality in their work and are worried their clients will be less likely to phone them if they think the government collects lists of the numbers they are calling.

The six plaintiffs, whose legal team includes lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union, claim the telephone giant violated the federal Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which prevents phone companies from releasing records to the government unless there is an emergency.

The lawsuit, filed in federal district court, seeks to include all Illinois AT&T customers as plaintiffs in a class action. The plaintiffs are not seeking monetary damages.

"Having been blacklisted from working in television during the McCarthy era, I know the harm of government using private corporations to intrude into the lives of innocent Americans," Terkel said in a statement. "When government uses the telephone companies to create massive databases of all our phone calls it has gone too far."

Harvey Grossman of the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois said the NSA program could interfere with the ability of lawyers to deal with their clients and doctors to communicate with patients.

The plaintiffs besides Terkel are State Rep. Barbara Flynn Currie, D-Chicago; Rabbi Gary Gerson of Temple B'nai Abraham Zion in Oak Park; Diane Geraghty, a Loyola University law professor; attorney James Montgomery, former corporation counsel for the City of Chicago; and Dr. Quinten Young, a doctor and advocate for health care reform.

The action follows similar lawsuits filed in other states.

The first thing to note here is that the ACLU is throwing its support in this lawsuit. This could negate the telecom's desire to have this lawsuit tossed out due to its "frivolous" nature. Also with the ACLU involved, we could expect their PR department to push their own spin on this issue. Already we now have the impression that the NSA could use its program to spy on doctors and lawyers in their dealings with clients. Finally, we've got some noteworthy individuals suing the telecoms here--an oral historian, a state representative, a law professor, and a corporate attorney. These are professional citizens--not your average blue collar factory workers here. So this is going to be an interesting lawsuit, especially if they can combine this suit with the other state lawsuits filed against the telecoms.

BellSouth to USA Today: NSA story is bogus

This is off CNN.Com:

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- The company has already denied it. Now, BellSouth is demanding that the newspaper that accused it of providing private phone records to the National Security Agency retract its article.

The telecommunications giant sent a letter to USA Today on Thursday asking it to retract last week's story that BellSouth and two other companies helped the NSA compile a massive database of records on domestic phone calls.

BellSouth faxed the letter to the attention of Craig Moon, the newspaper's president and publisher, and its general counsel, said BellSouth spokesman Jeff Battcher. The letter calls for the paper to retract the "false and unsubstantiated statements the paper made regarding BellSouth."

USA Today has not yet responded to the letter. It said earlier this week it stands by its story, but that it would investigate the denials issued by BellSouth and Verizon.

AT&T, the third company named in the article, has not denied the story outright, but said it would not provide such information without legal authorization.

USA Today reported that the NSA doesn't record or listen to conversations. Rather, the article said, the agency uses the data -- including phone numbers, times and locations -- to look for patterns that might suggest terrorist activity.

The Bush administration has neither confirmed nor denied the existence of such a program.

My question to BellSouth is this: Why are you just now demanding a retraction of the USA Today story? In the original USA Today story, BellSouth--along with AT&T and Verizon--was asked to comment on their involvement in providing these private phone records to the NSA. Here is what the three telecom companies said in the original story:

AT&T, when asked about the program, replied with a comment prepared for USA TODAY: "We do not comment on matters of national security, except to say that we only assist law enforcement and government agencies charged with protecting national security in strict accordance with the law."

In another prepared comment, BellSouth said: "BellSouth does not provide any confidential customer information to the NSA or any governmental agency without proper legal authority."

Verizon, the USA's No. 2 telecommunications company behind AT&T, gave this statement: "We do not comment on national security matters, we act in full compliance with the law and we are committed to safeguarding our customers' privacy."

The simple fact here is that all three of these telecom companies have gotten caught in bed with the NSA. The three telecom companies happily provided phone records to the NSA without asking for court orders. And what is more, the NSA was willing to pay the telecom companies for these phone records. Consider this in the original USA Today story:

The NSA's domestic program began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the sources. Right around that time, they said, NSA representatives approached the nation's biggest telecommunications companies. The agency made an urgent pitch: National security is at risk, and we need your help to protect the country from attacks.

The agency told the companies that it wanted them to turn over their "call-detail records," a complete listing of the calling histories of their millions of customers. In addition, the NSA wanted the carriers to provide updates, which would enable the agency to keep tabs on the nation's calling habits.

The sources said the NSA made clear that it was willing to pay for the cooperation. AT&T, which at the time was headed by C. Michael Armstrong, agreed to help the NSA. So did BellSouth, headed by F. Duane Ackerman; SBC, headed by Ed Whitacre; and Verizon, headed by Ivan Seidenberg.

With that, the NSA's domestic program began in earnest.

The telecoms never expected their involvement to be publicly revealed, nor did they expect a major backlash by American consumers. All they saw were dollar signs of government contracts to pad their profit margins--money was more important to them than American citizens' basic rights.

So what has happened to cause BellSouth to go on the attack against USA Today? The answer is money. According to this CNN.Com story, Verizon, AT&T, and BellSouth have been named in a class-action lawsuit, alleging the companies participated in an illegal NSA domestic spying program:

NEW YORK (CNN) -- BellSouth and AT&T were added to a class-action lawsuit against Verizon Communications that alleges the companies illegally participated in a National Security Agency domestic surveillance program.

The complaint, filed in Manhattan District Court, is asking that the companies pay $200 billion in fines to their 200 million subscribers.

Attorneys Carl Mayer and Bruce Afran said that since the lawsuit was filed Friday they have been overwhelmed with calls from people wanting to join the suit.

"They are violating federal law, which mandates a minimum penalty of $1,000 for every person whose records have been disclosed," Afran said, adding that many who have called his office are "outraged" by the government's and phone companies' actions.

This class-action lawsuit is a threat to the telecom profits--and BellSouth knows it. That is why they are trying to attack USA Today, and to force the retraction of the story. If they can force USA Today to retract the story, then BellSouth can claim they never violated any federal or privacy laws, and force this lawsuit to be dismissed.

One final little detail to this story. Both Verizon and BellSouth have now denied that they even gave the NSA customer phone records. AT&T has refused to comment on the story.

I am amazed at the hypocrisy of these three companies.

Hayden Insists NSA Surveillance Is Legal

President Bush's CIA nominee, Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, listens to a question during his Senate confirmation hearing on Capitol Hill in Washington Thursday, May 18, 2006. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)

Well, I can tell you that Hayden will be confirmed by a rubber-stamping Senate, along the usual party-line vote. Reading this Yahoo News story, shows that the Bush administration is using the same political strategy of having the nominee answer the question by not answering the question. It is even giving me a headache:

WASHINGTON - CIA nominee Gen. Michael Hayden insisted on Thursday that the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program was legal and that it was designed to ensnare terrorists--not spy on ordinary people.

"Clearly the privacy of American citizens is a concern constantly," the four-star Air Force general told the Senate Intelligence Committee at his confirmation hearing. "We always balance privacy and security."

This is just the start of the spinning, but it is the same type of spin from this Bush White House for the past five months. But it gets better. Because now Hayden is introducing a new term in this warrantless spying program--probable cause! This is fun:

Hayden said he decided to go ahead with the then-covert surveillance program, which has been confirmed by Bush, believing it to be legal and necessary.

"When I had to make this personal decision in October 2001 ... the math was pretty straightforward. I could not not do this," Hayden said.

He said the surveillance program used a "probable cause" standard that made it unlikely that information about average Americans would be scrutinized.

The domestic spying program used a "probable cause" standard that made it unlikely that information about average Americans would be scrutinized? I looked up the definition of probable cause in Wikipedia:

In United States criminal law, probable cause refers to the standard by which a police officer may make an arrest, conduct a personal or property search or obtain a warrant. It is also used to refer to the standard to which a grand jury believes that a crime has been committed. This term comes from the Fourth Amendment of the United States Constitution:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized. -- 4th Amendment

So in order to search a person's property, papers, effects, law enforcement officials must obtain a warrant based on some type of evidence that a crime has been committed. They need to have something to give to a judge for a warrant, rather than just have a suspicion of a crime committed. However, I think the Bush administration is using an even looser definition of probable cause here. In the same Wikipedia article, I found this:

The most widely held common definition would be "a reasonable belief that a crime has been committed" and that the person is linked to the crime with the same degree of certainty. An alternative definition has been proposed, "reason to believe that an injury had criminal cause", which is claimed to be more protective of individual rights as was intended by the authors of the Bill of Rights. See the critique below.

In the context of warrants, the Oxford Companion to American Law defines probable cause as "information sufficient to warrant a prudent person's belief that the wanted individual had committed a crime (for an arrest warrant) or that evidence of a crime or contraband would be found in a search (for a search warrant)." "Probable cause" is a stronger standard of evidence than a reasonable suspicion, but weaker than what is required to secure a criminal conviction. Even hearsay can supply probable cause if it is from a reliable source or is supported by other evidence.

In other words, the Bush administration is basing their warrantless domestic spying programs on their own definition of "probable cause," by saying it is a reasonable belief that a crime has been committed, and that a person is linked to a crime. Therefore, that person can be spied upon using these NSA spying programs, without asking a judge for a search warrant. Finally, the Bush administration is claiming that the details of the NSA spying program are classified, so that the extent of the program is not revealed to the American public. We don't know how far this program goes, or how many people have been spied upon by this program, or even if this program is used for other results than fighting terrorism. Continuing with the Yahoo story:

But he [Hayden] declined to openly discuss reports that the NSA was engaged in even broader surveillance, including a story in USA Today that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone-call records of tens of millions of U.S. citizens.

Under questioning from Democratic Sen. Carl Levin (news, bio, voting record) of Michigan, Hayden said he would only talk about the part of the program the president had confirmed.

"Is that the whole program?" asked Levin.

"I'm not at liberty to talk about that in open session," Hayden said. A closed-door session was planned for later in the day.

There is so many more end-run arounds in this first day of confirmation hearings, that you might as well watch it, sitting on your old "Sit-And-Spin" toy. Consider how Hayden responded to the inquiry that another military man would be heading up another spy agency, thus bringing together all of the nation's spy agencies under the Pentagon:

Some critics have suggested that Hayden, 61, who remains an active general, is too closely aligned with the Pentagon to objectively run the civilian CIA.

Asked whether he is considering retiring from the military to take the CIA post, Hayden, dressed in his Air Force uniform bearing a host of medals, told the panel: "The fact that I have to decide what tie to put on in the morning doesn't change who I am."

Or how about U.S. intelligence in Iran:

Asked about U.S. intelligence on Iran, Hayden said, "Iran is a difficult problem."

Or how about the perennial favorite--Iraqi WMDs:

He [Hayden] suggested U.S. intelligence-gathering on Iran's weapons program was more complex and detailed than that done on Iraq.

Hayden said questions raised included, "How are decisions made in that country? Who are making those decisions? What are their real objectives?

Hayden acknowledged a series of intelligence failures in the run-up to the U.S. decision to invade Iraq and promised to take steps to guard against a repeat of such errors.

"We just took too much for granted. We didn't challenge our basic assumptions," he told the Senate Intelligence Committee at his confirmation hearing.

Look at that sidestep! Intelligence gathering for Iranian WMDs are more complex than Iraqi WMDs, with Hayden answering senator's questions with his own questions, while promising the sun, moon, and sky, in future intelligence-gathering missions. Yes, we've made some mistakes, but we've corrected them. How? By raising new questions on how intelligence decisions are made.

And now I can't leave this posting without including this one final little Hayden remark:

Hayden declined to answer a string of questions by Sen. Dianne Feinstein (news, bio, voting record), D-Calif., saying he would answer them later in a closed-door session.

They included whether he believed that "waterboarding," in which prisoners are strapped to a plank and dunked in water until nearly drowning, was an acceptable form of interrogation. He also declined to say publicly how long he believed the United States could hold terror suspects without a trial.

"He didn't answer any of them," Feinstein said into an open mike as the hearing recessed for lunch.

So now Hayden's a surfer dude! RIGHT ON!