[Infowarrior] - Rockefeller Lets Slip the Spying Truth: Drift Nets To Be Legalized

[Richard Forno]

Sen. Rockefeller Lets Slip the Spying Truth: Drift Nets To Be Legalized
By Ryan Singel EmailFebruary 05, 2008 | 3:27:32 PMCategories: NSA
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/02/sen-rockefeller.html

In a Senate floor speech, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia)
inadvertently made plain that the proposed changes to the nation's spying
laws radically expand how the government wiretaps inside the United States.
Rockefeller was decrying an amendment that would require the government to
discard non-emergency evidence if a court later finds that the spying
methods violate the law.

Rockefeller makes clear that the impending changes to the law aren't about
making it easier for the National Security Agency to listen in on a
particular terrorism suspect's phone calls. Instead, the changes are about
letting the nation's spooks secretly and unilaterally install filters inside
America's phone and internet infrastructure.

Rockefeller, the chief Democratic architect of the changes, explains:

    Unlike traditional [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] application
orders which involve collection on one individual target, the new FISA
provisions create a system of collection. The courts role in this system of
collection is not to consider probable cause on individual targets but to
ensure that procedures used to collect intelligence are adequate. The
courts' determination of the adequacy of procedures therefore impacts all
electronic communications gathered under the new mechanisms, even if it
involves thousands of targets.

In short, the changes legalize Room 641A, the secret spying room inside
AT&T's San Francisco internet switching center that was outed by former AT&T
employee Mark Klein. That room sits at the center of a lawsuit against AT&T
for its alleged illegal participation in the government's secret,
warrantless spying program.

Under the new rules, secret spying court judges will no longer be evaluating
whether the government has probable cause to eavesdrop on a spy or a
terrorist who is inside the United States or to wiretap a particular
foreigner via wiretaps inside the United States.

Instead the judges will simply evaluate descriptions of how NSA filters in
the infrastructure are designed to not catch purely domestic traffic.  They
can also approve or disapprove of how the spooks 'disguise' or reveal the
identities of Americans who are one of the parties in any communication that
involves a foreigners.

Rockefeller outlined the differences between the old legal architecture and
the new one to argue against a amendment from Sen. Russ Feingold. That
amendment would require the government to throw out non-emergency
communications that were caught by filters if judges later found the filter
to be illegal (and which the spooks didn't fix in 30 days).

Feingold argues that without such a penalty the NSA won't care at all what
the courts say since there's no penalty for intercepting purely domestic
phone calls in the current bill.
   

This marks a radical legal shift in how the nation's spooks interact with
the nation's communication infrastructure. And by infrastructure, I mean
telephone switches for your landline, the server farms that serve up your
Google search results, and the computers that handle and store emails for
your Yahoo account.

The nation's current batch of politicians -- save for a handful like Rep.
Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) -- see no
problem in handing this unchecked power to the nation's spooks. They
collectively have bought into the lies, FUD and politically-expedient
exaggerations deployed by the administration in order to legalize the
President's rogue warrantless spying on Americans.

Hell, even one of Dem's blog fathers -- Markos Moulitsas Zuniga of DailyKos
-- called opening the nation's infrastructure to the NSA a "single
uncontroversial technical correction."

For years, NSA watchers and former employees swore that NSA employees lived
by the mantra 'Don't target Americans.'

But as former White House General Counsel Alberto Gonzales publicly admitted
in December 2005, that rule secretly went out the window after 9/11 when the
President ordered the NSA to point its surveillance equipment at Americans.

The NSA complied and so did the nation's phone companies, with the noted
exception of Qwest, which later seems to have been punished for its belief
in the nation's laws.

Now that same NSA is going to be granted by Congress virtually unchecked
ability to order the nation's internet providers, phone companies and email
providers to let the spooks build permanent filters inside their
communication flows.

That NSA reports to a president who stands by his lawyers' arguments that
nothing - not even the Constitution - limits his authority during the
permanent war he unilaterally declared against 'terrorism.'

And for the record, Sen. Jay Rockefeller denies that intriguingly-timed AT&T
and Verizon contributions to his re-election campaign bought his support for
amnesty for spying telcos.

Hat Tip to emptywheel for noting Rockefeller's remarks.