[Infowarrior] - Spying Fight about Emails, Not Phone Calls, DOJ Reveals

[Richard Forno]

Spying Fight about Emails, Not Phone Calls, DOJ Reveals
By Ryan Singel EmailMarch 04, 2008 | 4:47:36 PMCategories: NSA
http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/03/spying-fight-ab.html

nsa_blgIn the end, it turns out it's all about the emails.

The fight in Congress and the big push for expanded wiretapping powers has
nothing to do with intercepting foreign-to-foreign phone calls inside the
United States without a court order. In fact, it turns out that the nation's
secret wiretapping court is fine with that.

That extraordinary admission came from Assistant Attorney General for
National Security Kenneth Wainstein at a breakfast on Monday, according to
the Washington Post.

    At the breakfast yesterday, Wainstein highlighted a different problem
with the current FISA law than other administration officials have
emphasized. Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, for example,
has repeatedly said FISA should be changed so no warrant is needed to tap a
communication that took place entirely outside the United States but
happened to pass through the United States.

     But in response to a question at the meeting by David Kris, a former
federal prosecutor and a FISA expert, Wainstein said FISA's current
strictures did not cover strictly foreign wire and radio communications,
even if acquired in the United States. The real concern, he said, is
primarily e-mail, because "essentially you don't know where the recipient is
going to be" and so you would not know in advance whether the communication
is entirely outside the United States.

That would make sense since email doesn't go directly to a device in most
cases, it goes to a server that holds the email until the recipient(s) come
to pick up the email -- which could be and often is from different parts of
the world -- think of any business traveler.

But that also means all the hysterical screaming and the dire scenarios
constructed by right-wing spying proponents based on very thin evidence of
what the secret court actually ruled -- all of it is just wrong.

And more to the point, the Justice Department and the Office of the Director
of National Intelligence allowed them to be wrong for months. They allowed
and facilitated their supporters to scare freedom loving people with
phantoms of lost wiretaps.

DNI Michael McConnell, the serial exaggerator who claims to be a
non-political straight shooter, himself kept saying the NSA lost 70 percent
of its capabilities after the ruling.

If that's the case, that means that 70 percent of what the NSA does is
collect emails inside United States telecom infrastructure and service
providers.

Really?  If that's what tens of billions of dollars are going to the NSA for
annually, we don't need to give them more power to read emails, we need to
get them to learn to do real intelligence collection.

It's no wonder the nation's intelligence services decided that Iraq had
weapons of mass destruction.

The EFF's Kurt Opsahl has more.

And finally THREAT LEVEL is pretty sure this means it won the $1000 bet
about what the court ruled -- too bad no one took me up on the offer.

I'd hate to say that means that every one who spouted the "all wiretapping
has to go through the court now" rhetoric knew that was false, but one does
wonder...