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Skulking in the Eavesdrip: FISA And Intelligence

By Bruce | April 15, 2008

Intelligence is not always in the eye of the beholder.

Everyday, walking-around people need some kind of intelligence to at least pay bills, or open closet doors; the intelligence to at least make it through life. Does intelligence and just old, plain common sense go hand-in-hand?
What’s an ‘intelligent’ choice? 
Is intelligence geared to knowledge?

Another form of intelligence, but yet is still supposedly wedded to having enough sense to comprehend consequences, is that of the military. This intelligence, which leans away from common sense and into the ether of war, has appeared to become near-rabid-important nowadays to reportedly keep America safe.
In warfare, intelligence, or ‘intel,’ is a life-and-death, serious situation. Knowledge of the enemy and the battlefield is essential — good intel is worth its weight in gold (and human life-and-limb).
All armies since the very-first war way back in the ancient, deep-shadows of the past — and conducted most likely around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in modern-day Iraq — depend on military intelligence.
Spying has been around awhile. The Biblical Joshua sent two spies into Jericho before commencing military operations.
In the jargon, it’s called reconnaissance, both a military and medical term indicating a search conducted to gain information, which in early warfare consisted only of scouting parties or reconn patrols. Currently military reconnaissance is just about everywhere, from the lowest-level foot/vehicle reconn patrols in Baghdad, to satellites, unmanned drones and aircraft to electronic tracking and eavesdropping.
It’s the grunt on the ground, however, who has to suffer the consequences of bad intel.

One of the early good users of reconnaissance was Alexander, the historical-famous warrior. In 331 B.C., he led his army out of Egypt and east into the Persian Empire. King Darius, who would eventually get his ass kicked, had gathered a huge army which collided with Alexander’s forces on a vast plain east of the Tigris River between the villages of Gaugamela and Arbela, now called Arbil, a good-sized city about 50 miles east of modern Mosul, Iraq.
Alexander wasn’t called ‘the Great’ for nothing. Although his army was far outnumbered, Alexander implemented some daring tactics during the heat of battle and routed the Persians, causing Darius to flee like a scalded dog.
Use of intelligence prior to the battle didn’t hurt.
The following is from The Anabasis of Alexander: The Battle of Gaugamela (Book III, 7-16), written by ancient Roman historian (and a warror himself) Lucius Flavius Arrianus, who is called Arrian in English. (Translated by EJ Chinnock, courtesy iranchamber.com/history):

Ah, the good old days. Just checking to see if there are any ditches or stakes in the ground.

Today’s warfare is slightly more complicated, to say the very least, but yet remains a much-more bloody business.
The concept of “total war,” in which there are no non-combatants, has been around since the dawn of warfare, but really didn’t come into its own until the 19th century — America’s Civil War is considered an early example. World War I and II were both fought as total wars — carpet bombing of entire cities and regions in the latter conflict, slaughtering thousands of civilians, became an acceptable norm. And then, there’s Hiroshima and Nagasaki — now seemingly seen near-60 years later, the bomb were dropped only to flex muscle and test equipment.
Apparently, as mankind supposedly became more civilized, waging war went in the opposite direction, becoming less and less humane, a trend regrettably lead by the US. Although the horror is buffered by the words “collataral damage,” the carnage is from power and might, not necessarily right.
Intel is more-than-extreme difficult to gain from groups involved with ‘ethnic cleansing,’ an old term with new horrors attached, a movement once practiced/still going on in areas from the Middle East to the Balkans to Africa — all over the globe. A kind of World War, but different.
And in this modern era, war is not only total, but is now shaded by shadow.

In 1978, when the world was still a bit naive and carried somewhat-well-placed boundaries — The Soviet Union was still intact and the Cold War was still active — the US Congress passed the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, or FISA.
The Act itself was a result of Dick Nixon’s Watergate nonsense. All kinds of suffering shit came retching out of the Senate’s 1973 ‘Watergate hearings’ (“there’s a cancer growing on the presidency“) and one particular turd was Nixon’s use of federal agencies for sordid purposes, such as spying on political and activist groups — direct violations of the Fourth Amendment to the US Constitution.
Senate investigations into all these goings-on led to a means of providing judicial and congressional oversight (and supposedly more supervision) on the federal government’s stealthy observations of its citizens who talk to foreigners, while also allowing for high-levels of secrecy.
The Act fixed physical and electronic procedures for surveillance, and collection of “foreign intelligence information” between “foreign powers” and/or “agents of foreign powers.”
FISA allowed warrantless surveillance within the US for no more than a year unless the “surveillance will acquire the contents of any communication to which a United States person is a party.”
If a US citizen is involved, a judicial warrant is required within 72 hours after the spying operation had started.
FISA also created the 11-judge FISC — Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court — where federal authorities get their warrants against suspected foreign agents inside the US. The whole FISA scheme works in near-total secrecy.

In fact, FISA appeared to have performed so well the past near-30 years, few people outside the intelligence community, maybe a few journalists, among others, even knew for certain such a program existed. The every-day, walking-around guy in the street hadn’t a clue.
Until December 2005: The New York Times revealed President George W. Bush’s administration, in conjunction with the National Security Agency, had been operating its own warrantless eavesdropping program for two years, or longer.
Although FISA was available, the Bush people circumvented it and established procedures outside of any oversight whatsoever in the name of national security.
Any claim that US agents have to move quickly to get the ‘intel’ without being hampered by procedure is bogus as FISA has that 72-hour window to get a warrant “after” surveillance has been instigated. President Bush and his team appear to equate fear with national security.

FISA was amended by the USA Patriot Act of 2001 to include terrorists not specifically backed by a foreign government.
Last August, Bush signed the Protect America Act of 2007, but the bill expired in February without gaining support in Congress. The Protect America Act was to refurbish FISA, but the entire scheme seems to be the Bush administration attempting a version of the old CYA — ‘Cover Your Ass’ — to try and close any investigative/legal doors on the program.
The question of immunity for all those telecomp companies for participating in an outlaw surveillance program for nearly five years is the heart-of-the-matter in the dangling Protect America Act: Bush and team want immunity.
FISA is fine. And it’s federal law.
(After Bush is out of office next year, as they’re sued, the telecoms can regroup their losses by then suing the living shit out of citizen George W).

The real fright is not terrorists, not Osama bin Laden, but the federal government as it has been hacked and corrupted these past seven-plus years. 
Terrorists seemed to be extremely smart at using very-low-tech devices. And its been difficult to gain usable military intel about those so-dubbed ‘terrorist organizations,’ from al-Qaeda to the Taliban, because these guys are way-tight lipped.
According to a group of US and European intelligence officials, who gathered for a conference last month in Barcelona, Spain, the al-Qaeda network has been harder to penetrate than the Kremlin during the Cold War.
A different kind of enemy, a different kind of war, a war students of military call “asymmetric warfare,” where unconventional tactics are used against a much larger and better-equiped adversary.
Vietnam should have been a learning experience for the US, but apparently the lesson wasn’t taken to heart. 

And now President Bush has called for surveillance everywhere. Last week, Michael Chertoff, director of the Department of Homeland Security, announced the unwieldy and incompentent DHS will soon have its own domestic satellite surveillance office connected to the NSA courtesy of a quietly-ordained order by Bush in January.
The NSA seems to have its fingers in all kinds of ‘surveillance.’
One cannot imagine Chertoff, probably the least-secure acting guy in government, running any kind of sensitive spying process. He’s claimed the DHS program will not intercept communications.
Rep. Jane Harman (D-Calif.), feels rightfully a slight twitch from such ideas.

And to add to the good intel on America’s government and also from the Washington Post: The Federal Bureau of Investigation has been routinely monitoring the e-mails, instant messages and cell phone calls of suspects across the United States — and has done so, in many cases, without the approval of a court.
The operation “allows authorized FBI agents and analysts, with point-and-click ease, to receive e-mails, instant messages, cellphone calls and other communications that tell them not only what a suspect is saying, but where he is and where he has been, depending on the wording of a court order or a government directive..”
Sloppy, near-criminal work of government.

 An example of the absolute failure of the Bush adminstration’s attempt at gathering military/national security intelligence, as it is referenced by FISA (gaining intel by torture as referenced this week by President Bush and all his top-advisors, from the vice president on down, is another totally-different-but-all-the same can of worms) has to be the recent performance of US Attorney General Michael Mukasey.
And Mukasey’s recital allows a peep-hole into an arrognant, incompetent mindset with it comes to gathering intelligence.

Mukasey is just another Alberto Gonzales or a David Brown or a Donald Rumsfeld or a Scooter Libby. He’s waffled on issues before, from waterboarding to Bush’s stonewall-stand on executive privilege, but last week he confessed to lying.
In March, during an appearance at a San Francisco public affairs forum, Mukasey remarked that a telephone call made prior to Sept. 11, 2001, from the Middle East to the US could have the factor in saving lives.
He was making a pitch, of course, for the passage of Bush’s Protect America Act, which if in place during the summer of 2001, the attack on the World Trade Center could obviously been prevented. Mukasey’s act was high drama: “We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn’t know precisely where it went…”
And he appeared to almost start crying: “We’ve got three thousand people who went to work that day and didn’t come home to show for that,” he said. (News reports indicated he then ‘struggled to maintain his composure’).

Just an act for an act.

The Afghan phone call was bogus. There is no record of any such communitication in 9-11 Commission files. No record of any such call. And last Thursday, Mukasey appeared at a Senate Appropriations subcommittee hearing and again waffled away the remark.
Although the exchange between Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and Mukasey didn’t make news, the incident displayed both the use of law and FISA.
(The following courtesy of legaltimes.typepad.com, April 10)

Eavesdropping actually comes from the literal. The eavesdrop or eavesdrip is the width of ground around a house or building which receives the rain water dropping from the eaves, so, if anyone found lurking about the eavesdrip was most likely up to no good — listening in on a private conversation, or spying through a window.
Ancient Anglo-Saxon law punished eavesdroppers, those found/seen creeping along the eavesdrip of another’s man’s home. The guilty were slapped with a fairly-good-sized fine. Those were the days of ‘a man’s home is his castle.’

No more.

 

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