I am sure that an investigation will find that other special group includes politician and organized groups like ACLU and that such surveillance was used to blackmail.
I completely agree.
So. What if someone whose arm was twisted (or worse) by Bushco – someone or several someones – would document how this program was used against them and go public in a large way… sacrifice themselves, so to speak. Surely there is evidence. We know the evildoers were incompetents. Someone somewhere must have evidence.

Posted by: Hamburger | Jan 22 2009 13:40 utc | 3

@IntelVet – the principle program is older than the Bush administration. Lichtenblau et al wrote

In the drug-trafficking operation, the N.S.A. has been helping the Drug Enforcement Administration in collecting the phone records showing patterns of calls between the United States, Latin America and other drug-producing regions. The program dates to the 1990s, according to several government officials, but it appears to have expanded in recent years.

That program’s predecessor, ECHELON, is even decades older.
The interesting here is the domestic part, and especially checking out journalists. There will be some furious writers out there who will do some digging one hopes …

Posted by: b | Jan 22 2009 14:20 utc | 5

I’ve been living my life since about 1990 with the belief that anything I said, did, or wrote, was being monitored. It’s easy to forget the sort of power the state possessed during the Cold War, which was followed by the Drug War and now a War on Terror-constant excuses for the state to monitor its citizens.
If the state really wanted to protect its citizens it would require all those in public office to agree to be monitored 24/7 and provide a website so we could check up on what they’re up to. Imagine the fun we could have watching Barak golfing with “the boys” and being able to listen to what they’re talking about. This could lead to some problems as we’d only want attractive people to be politicians…Hmmmm, I guess we’d end-up with a bunch of porn-stars running the show, which might not be such a bad thing… United Nation meetings would be exceptionally delicious, I mean interesting to watch 🙂
I have an entire collection of tinfoil hats from some of the finest haberdashers in the world, this should be proof enough that its easy for me to believe in most government conspiracies regarding censorship, data mining, ect…
That said, I also try to remember that this is a numbers game, and the numbers are stacked against the government being able to focus their evil eye on all of us.
The biggest weapon government has in deterring crimes against it is propaganda. If you believe the government is all-knowing and all-powerful, you’re more likely to fall into line and you’ll feel better about doing it because the government is all-knowing and all-powerful. It works just like religion because you need to have faith in your government for it to function. The bigger the government, the more faith people have in it.
The government needs conspiracy theorist as much as conspiracy theorist need government, one lends legitimacy to the other.
One thing that people should realize about power (hence government) is there are always internal power-struggles being played-out behind the scenes. What protects the masses is that most official skulduggery is directed at weeding out competitors or controlling business interest, not messing with freaks like me who have interest in neither. I’d be more worried about pissing-off a local bigwig who might want to involve me in some political fuckery ’cause I looked at him wrong or other such nonsense.
Now this doesn’t mean I want my tax dollars being spent to feed power-hungry greedhead’s appetites for war and destruction, or their desire to have a wacko police-state. But I know that when my time’s come, it’s come, and I won’t live in fear while I pass the days waiting for then. I think there are many others who have said it, but it is better to keep smiling, even when they’re killing you, because by smiling you leave them wondering…

Posted by: David | Jan 22 2009 15:31 utc | 7

The way secret policing works always follows the same broad outline.
An external threat is claimed and spying is put into place as a way to counter this. Once the secret police mechanism is in place the purpose of surveillance gets broadened to include political opponents of the ruling regime. There is a belief that any group which threatens the status quo is the “enemy” and needs to be watched.
I wrote about this several years ago, using a historical example (Russia starting with the czar forward).
Here’s the short essay, if you are interested:
Surveillance vs Civil Liberties
The claim that an organization like the NSA could find “terrorist” communications by magic computer filtering is absurd. It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack when you don’t even know it is a needle.
However you do know about politically active groups that oppose the administration, they go out of their way to make their positions known. They are thus very easy to track and that’s what happens.
The last step after surveillance is infiltration and the planting of agent provocateurs. These are people tasked with disrupting or discrediting these groups. There were signs of this at the most recent GOP convention where police plants tried to egg people on to violence that had no intention of doing so.
There were pictures of protesters being released after they identified themselves as undercover operatives when arrested.
The Valerie Plame affair is notable only because it was botched. The usual stream of leaks to friendly media personalities goes on without people even wondering where these stories come from. Notice the lame explanation for how Eliot Spitzer got caught.
Obama may have the best intentions of closing down this sort of operation, but it is doubtful he will succeed. How would he know? Since these agencies are opaque and compartmentalized even the agency heads can’t find out all that they ask for.
J. Edgar Hoover kept private files on his political opponents in his office. Only one or two people in the entire FBI knew about it. Things are more sophisticated now.

Posted by: robertdfeinman | Jan 22 2009 16:20 utc | 9

A few years ago I gave a taxi ride to a North Slope Alaska pipeline worker, and we got to talking about where he could score some good cocaine and hookers on his R&R, that’s what the Anchorage taxi system was at that time, a floating cathouse where you partied in the back seat, so we scored, and he partied, then oh, not too many days later, there he was at the airport, all pissed off, he’d failed the urine test and gotten frog-marched to “wheels up”, a term they use on overseas military bases where a friend of mine reports the base manager was just sent “wheels up”, not for those overtly fascist racist e-mails he was sending out, (which we published here on MoA several years ago and our MoA moderator took it upon himself to immediately contact my superior, who summarily frogmarched me out the door for “misusing public property”, even though he (my supervisor) spent all his working hours daytrading!), but this manager was sent “wheels up” for distributing porn over top-secret government e-mail servers, then you just have to wonder, if you have a fat gig like these poor losers all did, wouldn’t you stay rigidly on the straight and narrow? The secret police are only there to catch mal-doers, and they all have enough work to do, without worrying they’re sleuthing up your bung hole while you’re sleeping.

Posted by: Gob Smack | Jan 22 2009 17:32 utc | 11

[Confidential to all US government personnel to whom this private letter is not addressed and who are reading it in the absence of a specific search warrant: You are violating the law and you are co-conspiring to subvert the Constitution that you are sworn to defend. You can either refuse to commit this crime, or you can expect to suffer criminal sanctions in the future, when Constitutional government has been restored to the United States of America. I do not envy you for having to make this difficult choice, but I urge you to make it wisely.]

[I don’t remember who I got this from but I used to add it to all my emails. sigh.]

Posted by: beq | Jan 22 2009 18:21 utc | 13

and our MoA moderator took it upon himself to immediately contact my superior
No he didn’t. He posted the IP address from where that filth was coming from and the reverse nslookup information to that address in a comment here. Someone else then took it upon him/herself to contact the netadmin of that IP-address.

Posted by: b | Jan 22 2009 19:21 utc | 15

@11, 14, 15 – the facts are in the archive here for anyone to review and judge who is right on that issue.

Posted by: b | Jan 22 2009 19:38 utc | 17

“What is going to happen now?”
A good question that. Another question, that will probably never be answered is, “What really happened?”. The Bushies had all the bells and whistles of a criminal gang put into a position of power, and determined to keep it. Yet they were unable to maintain their grip, despite the spying, the free pass from the media, and the obsequiousness of Congress. In my view, there was a shadow war that was fought, not about the goals and means of the National Security State, but rather between a group that tried to take full possession of that state for their own use and profit, and the rest of the bureaucracy that realized that the Bushies were so corrupt and inefficient that they could bring down the whole edifice.

Posted by: Dick Durata | Jan 22 2009 23:54 utc | 19

Frome where I sit at the top of the world in the South Pacific, it seems to me to be a little foolish, maybe even destructive to argue for a witch-hunt against the BushCo minions who authorised data collection of the domestic population.
I know how reactionary that sounds but I’d be very surprised if the changes between the surveillance of the citizenry that occurred under cigar bill and domestic surveillance under shrub was more than what improved technology brought about. As David wrote, most aware people act as if everything thay say read, write, paint or sing is monitored by the state. To do anything else is foolish.
If by some miracle under the new gang, rules were changed to make domestic surveillance even more illegal than it already is, and the agencies concerned were made to actually abide by those rules, we already have a good idea of what happens next.
See the effects the Frank Church Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975) had.
None – apart from making the surveillance harder to counter. CIA activities were farmed out. The Church committee appeared to some to be an enabler of NSA’s voracious appetite for all information. The media emphasis when covering the Church committee, was centered on the CIA.
The result? – even though Church gave NSA a good going over the years following Church’s report were the years that NSA grew the most and wielded the most power.
And I’m sure most of us can recall how the Reagan Admistration swapped arms with Iran for money to fund Nicaragua’s contra murderers and rapists, how the CIA destroyed a generation of african amerikans by selling crack to get more money for their extra legal, unfunded reign of terror throughout Latin America.
As widely as these unpalatable realities were broadcast I can’t remember the subsequent dem administration throwing any of the guilty in prison, can anyone else?
Expecting any cessation of domestic surveillance seems to me to be a waste of energy. As offensive as we may find that program, how many ‘middle amerikans’ won’t – they will rationalise that honest citizens have nothing to fear, and if they don’t? – well another controlled release of anthrax should remind them of the need for vigilant intelligence agencies.
Closing down domestic spying must be an evetual goal of anybody who believes in a truly free society, but no agency is gonna acquiesce to that at the moment. Neither branch of the amerikan empire party would attempt such a thing because even if they truly believed domestic surveillance is wrong, while they permit it, they have a certain amount of control over the intelligence which is gathered.
That would be lost as soon as a clampdown were attempted. Even worse the agencies who are in favour of that program would begin to selectively release ‘product’ about those who oppose domestic surveillance.
Surely it is more sensible to pursue those war criminals whose actions cannot be so easily justified. eg the proponents of torture, the politicians and military leaders who approved the use of white phosphorus at Fallujah. Get them first, and maybe then enough momentum will have built up to go after the others.

Posted by: Debs is dead | Jan 23 2009 2:38 utc | 21

Sabine@22-
Pigeons are also tasty. But only if times get really tough!
One of the pulp-fiction series I really enjoy is written by John D MacDonald and focus on a character named Travis McGee and his buddy Meyer. Most of these books were written in the Fifties and Sixties but some are from the Seventies, and he published a couple in the early eighties. I wish I could remember the name of the story I’m thinking of, because then I could check the exact date it was published.
In the story, the two characters are sitting on the deck of one of their houseboats, talking about the way the world had changed and how fast. Travis was lamenting the loss of freedom and how he needed an ID for this and a bank account for that and in time the government would be scheduling when and where you could defecate. Pretty soon, he figured, there would be no place to hide.
I believe this was one of the stories MacDonald wrote in the Sixties (he could see the direction we were headed back then) The Meyer character replies that the secret wasn’t to hide but to try and get your name on every possible computer you could, apply for credit, travel, contact government offices, but spread your name liberally around. Then if someone is looking for you, they wouldn’t know where to start because by being so prolific, they wouldn’t believe all of those names could possibly belong to the same person…
I like the idea, even if it isn’t very realistic by today’s standards.
And Deb is dead– You’re right about prosecuting the obvious violations first and then worry about things like information gathering and domestic spying, which will continue to be part of our lives as long as we have computers (and government).
It seems there are plenty enough reasons to hang the bunch for war crimes, why not keep it nice and simple. I’d imagine if we could get an honest prosecutor to begin looking into the mess, one who was actually willing to prosecute the fiends, then the whole ugly truth would come out.

Posted by: David | Jan 23 2009 4:54 utc | 23

It seems that Russ Feingold has decided to take up this question, albeit in a rather narrow context. This punctilious approach may, in the long run, be more effective than (premature?) calls for deep and wide ranging reform. One can hope that Feingold has made merely the initial opening of doors and windows to the kind of sunlight and fresh air needed to fumigate deeply immersed “bugs”. With luck many moew will emerge from the governmental woodwork and begin scuttling for new protection.
It is also of interest, and quite in line with b‘s comments, that the legal cover for this raid on Americans’ right to privacy lies under the meretriciously misnamed PAA (Protect America Act). Someone should take the time to “re-interpret” those acronyms in a more truthful way, just as TARP is now rightfully parsed as the “Taxpayer Anal Rape Program”.

Posted by: Hannah K. O’Luthon | Jan 23 2009 7:53 utc | 25