The FISA debate as an example of rightward drift in American politics

Discussion in 'Politics' started by Tiassa, Mar 3, 2008.

  1. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Source: Unclaimed Territory
    Link: http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/02/fisa/index.html
    Title: "The 'liberal' position on the Surveillance State", by Glenn Greenwald
    Date: March 2, 2008

    Salon.com commentator Glenn Greenwald writes about something that is a recurring theme of mine, the rightward drift of our political discourse. In this case, the transformation of political outlooks over time may well be a stark indicator of our American future.

    Indeed, as you'll find via that link to the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the FISA courts have apparently rejected five applications. No, not five percent. Five. Out of 22,987 applications presented, only five were explicitly rejected. In 2003, the court rejected four applications. In 2006, the court rejected one.

    There do appear to be withdrawn applications. Some years see more applications presented than approved, while none were noted as rejected. To the other, though, some years see more applications approved than presented. In 1979, for instance, 199 applications were presented, and 207 approved. In 1980, 319 were presented, 322 approved. An interesting footnote on 1980 reads, "No orders were entered which modified or denied the requested authority, except one case in which the Court modified an order and authorized an activity for which court authority had not been requested."

    At any rate, it's just something to think about.
    ____________________

    Notes:

    Electronic Privacy Information Center. "Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act Orders 1979-2006". Updated August 27, 2007. http://epic.org/privacy/wiretap/stats/fisa_stats.html
     
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  3. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    I fail to see how the process could involve more public input, considering the sensitivity of the information involved.

    But I doubt such practical concerns will bother those who wish to impugn the intelligence services or present the Bush administration in another negative, authoritarian light.

    Consider the following passages, taken (and edited for clarity) from a Seymour Hersh story in the New Yorker:

    "'We were not listening to an individual's conversation," a defense contractor said. "We were gathering data on the incidence of calls made to and from his phone by people associated with him and others.'

    The point, obviously, was to identify terrorists.

    One problem, however, was the volume and ambiguity of the data that had already been generated. 'There's too many calls and not enough judges in the world,' a former senior intelligence official said.

    The NSA began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or another.

    'There's a lot that needs to be looked at,' an administration intelligence offical said. 'We are in a technology age. We need to tweak FISA, and we need to reconsider how we handle privacy issues.'"
     
    Last edited: Mar 3, 2008
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  5. pjdude1219 The biscuit has risen Valued Senior Member

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    that the facts the bush admin should be shown in a negative and authoritarian light because frankly that is what they embody
     
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  7. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    Voters? Democrats? Remember them? Oh, right, they don't count.

    You know, it used to be that this sort of government behavior was considered something to fear of the left.

    Yeah. Whatever you say, Counte. Whatever you freakin' say.

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    Seriously, how does a discussion of the rightward drift of the political discourse equal Bush bashing?

    I mean, voters participate in that discourse. So do Democrats. And it's the Democrats who are drifting the most.

    But, of course, they're just voters and Democrats, so they don't count in your book, do they?

    Or, to consider the passage in full:

    I don't think you edited for clarity, Counte. I think you edited for spin. Some of what you omitted—

    "In the old days, you needed probable cause to listen in," the consultant explained. "But you could not listen in to generate probable cause. What they're doing is a violation of the spirit of the law." One C.I.A. officer told me that the Administration, by not approaching the FISA court early on, had made it much harder to go to the court later.

    The Administration intelligence official acknowledged that the implications of the program had not been fully thought out.

    —might actually be important to the story.

    Like the closing paragraph of the article:

    It might, you know, be an important consideration of FISA in general, the administration's decision to skip the FISA process, and the dire need for Congress to forgive criminal activity.

    In fact, that paragraph is also an example of the rightward drift Greenwald was attempting to address. To consider the topic article:

    _____________________

    Notes:

    Hersh, Seymour M. "Listening In". The New Yorker. May 29, 2006. http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/05/29/060529ta_talk_hersh

    Greenwald, Glen. "The 'liberal' position on the Surveillance State". Unclaimed Territory. March 2, 2008. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/02/fisa/index.html
     
    Last edited: Mar 3, 2008
  8. spidergoat pubic diorama Valued Senior Member

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    I don't think we can reject secret surveillence entirely at this point, so there must be some avenue for doing it within the law.
     
  9. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    5,590
    I edited for clarity and brevity. I was not interested in posting the entire article, precisely because much of what I didn't post echoes what you had already posted. Why would I pile on to ideas already being presented? Instead, I took the opposing views in that story and posted them here to advance the discussion.

    Also, for honesty's sake, I will point out that I have gone back and edited this post, given that you edited your earlier post, to reflect what you inserted...

    It's a practical concern, and as such, has to be considered.

    In other words, get your head out of your ass. You can't have public hearings about proposed wiretappings, as such hearings would inevitably notify the people we want to secretly listen to that we are considering listening to them. In this situation, the warrant, if approved, would be worthless. Greenwald seems to not realize this obvious fact in his complaint. Do you?

    Try not to act like an asshole this time around, Tiassa. Just try. That's all I'm asking.

    It doesn't have to, and if you read what I wrote, you'll notice I didn't say you were Bush-bashing. I said: "I doubt such practical concerns will bother those who wish to impugn the intelligence services or present the Bush administration in another negative, authoritarian light."

    So if someone wants to impugn the intelligence services or someone wants to attack Bush, they'll ignore the practical concerns I've tried to spell out in the majority of my last post and just have at it. You haven't really done either.

    You can continue making assumptions about me and my politics and continue your tiresome habit of affixing crude labels all you like, but it hardly advances the conversation.
     
    Last edited: Mar 3, 2008
  10. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    We don't need no stinkin' FISA

    Two words: FISA Ombudsman.

    Three words: Bribery, extortion, corruption.

    I think part of the seeming paradox we're engaging here is that, while fears about what FISA have come at least partially true, the only discussion that seems to be politically acceptable right now is that the fears are unfounded, unpatriotic, un-American, &c.

    Tack the telecoms to the wall. If we don't, there's no point in maintaining FISA or its rubber-stamp court.

    And, hey, as Mukasey decided about refusing Congressional subpoenas: he won't prosecute because they were acting under advice from Department of Justice. All anyone at the Bush administration has to say is, "Well, a lawyer said it was okay."
     
  11. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    5,590
    There is. The problem is nobody at the relevant organizations have the political guts to put forward such a plan, and the administration, as the Hersh piece notes, hasn't done much better. The result is that most of what's going on now is haphazard and off-the-cuff.

    A larger concern is how the press, politicians and people of certain ideology have combined to create an environment where administrations and agencies will likely continue to "do" and then ask forgiveness for practices, rather than "ask" permission beforehand and set them up with Congressional support.
     
  12. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    The way we have dealt with it in the past was not to rely on the law. We simply relied on the people who were doing the surveillance to be good Americans and restrain themselves in the performance of their difficult duties.

    Few people object strenuously when a little wiretapping occurs. We all know that the world isn't perfect and in some instances rules must be broken in the interest of common sense. What we object to is the wholesale tapping of private conversations on the off chance that ten of them might be from really stupid Al Qaeda operatives who aren't better trained in clandestine operations. We all know from personal experience how inept the average government employee is and how often he screws up. We don't want our lives ruined because his screw-up is beyond the scrutiny of anyone but his boss, who has a vested interest in not letting it be known that there have ever been any screw-ups on his watch.

    We must remember that all of this effort, money, and shredding of the Constitution is occurring for the purpose of curtailing an activity that has claimed 3,000 American lives during this century. During that same period, 140,000 Americans have been killed by drunk drivers.

    Even though it would be far easier to curtail drunk driving (we know where almost all of them live without having to tap any phones) and far cheaper (a breathalyzer ignition interlock in every car would take care of most of it), we don't do it because we're uncomfortable about abridging the rights of all those people, many of whom are us.

    In that context it's understandable that we also don't support an anti-terrorism program--which will have much less of an impact on our safety!--that is going to abridge the rights of everyone with a telephone.
     
  13. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    5,590
    As the Hersh comments detail the number of calls we're talking about here is tens of thousands. That sounds like a lot, but it isn't. There are millions — if not billions — of phonecalls made by Americans every day.

    The notion that the NSA has the time or the capacity to monitor massive amounts of private calls is as silly as the notion that Tiassa's source made about politicians using the intelligence services for political purposes. There's very little chance of that happening today, too.

    In other words, whenever this issue comes up, there's a lot of hyperbole people get into when discussing it. "Shredding" the Constitution? Some perspective would be nice...
     
  14. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    (Insert title here)

    Where, exactly, did Greenwald call for public hearings about proposed wiretappings?

    I read what you wrote. It was irrelevant. Why did you bother going out of your way to make this about impugning Bush?

    That's a different discussion, Counte. It only matters here because you decided to bring it up.

    Let us be specific: I haven't ignored what you wrote or the Hersh material. Rather, I accused you of changing the subject and deliberately misrepresenting the Hersh material.

    Which conversation? The one at hand, about the rightward drift of the political discourse, or the one you tried to raise about impugning the intelligence services and the president?

    What do you want? They broke the law. Even Congressional Democrats are doing what they can to try to clear the administration and the telecoms.

    The emergence of that fringe to become the dominant voice of the current debate is troubling. Look, we're not all going to die if the president has to go through the FISA process in order to tap your phone. It didn't help before 9/11.

    You mean William Safire, the self-acknowledged libertarian conservative? In 1978?

    Didn't you just complain about something like "ignoring the substance" of writing?
     
    Last edited: Mar 3, 2008
  15. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    And since there are no warrants, and therefore no accountability, we'll just be taking the word of guys like that from now on. We'll be assuming they are completely informed, and not only understand but agree with our priorities. And then we'll be calling their claimed benign motives "obvious".
    A strange reaction to the problem of too much data about terrorists - collect even more data about unrelated people, and mix it in.

    Strange, that is, if one assumes that lack of accountability is not an issue with government surveillance, nobly motivated and uncorruptible as we know it "obviously" to be. If one assumes that the reason we require warrants for government searches is that all governments are dangerous to their own citizens, and must be diligently held to account in their exercises of police powers, creeping employment of warrantless phone surveillance is not strange at all - one might even recognize it as a likely original motive for the whole operation, given its lack of value in anti-terrorism operations (in which warrants are easily obtained for the limited data gathering that can be usefully analysed).

    All in all, I wouldn't call this a "right" shift, but an "authoritarian" one, on the standard scale.
     
  16. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    He said: "But for decades, the FISA court -- for obvious reasons -- was considered to be one of the great threats to civil liberties, the very antithesis of how an open, democratic system of government ought to function." This implies he wants something that is more open, that is more democratic. Such a system could not work and maintain the level of security needed. This seems obvious...

    I didn't. It was the second part of a two-part statement I wrote in anticipation of what will surely follow, given my experiences on this site in debates about this very subject. Invariably, people will make this about Bush, because he is the person cheerleading for FISA changes. And, to some degree, he will deserve his bashing, as the Republicans have tried to make this a political issue by running about beating their chests and talking about patriotism. What we should all be talking about is practical security concerns, something both parties never seem to consider in their rush to stake out ideological turf.

    I have addressed both these concerns. In the first case, you went back and edited your initial post, which I have acknowledged. I explained my editing in a previous post. There was no intent to misrepresent, merely an intent to address issues that challenge the piece that started this conversation.

    I want a serious and honest debate about how our intelligence services can conduct surveillance, but I don't think either party will let this happen.

    And this is where you need to consider the practical arguments I excerpted from the Hersh story (time, judges, etc). FISA was written before cell phones even existed. The notion that it still works seems childish to me. What, for example, is a NSA operator to do if they stumble onto OBL calling an American resident from a satellite phone? Stop listening, rush down to the courthouse and hope to catch the next call?
     
  17. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    Not obvious at all. There are several ways the FISA court process could be made more open and less politically manipulable without seriously compromising the workings of honest terrorist surveillance.

    Instead, even the small accountability we have has been ignored, and warrantless wiretapping instituted as government policy.
    They are to start wiretapping immediately, and sometime in the next few days send a secretary down to apply for a retroactive warrant - available 24/7 from the FISA court.
     
  18. Asguard Kiss my dark side Valued Senior Member

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    23,049
    Im always baffled that while you guys vote for the most positions in the world you seem to have the least democrasy.

    Here the people who deal with stuff like this are a) the auditor general who audits ALL goverment departments b) the telicomunication obudsmen and c) the national securitys obudsmen who has access to EVERYTHING that ASIS (no not the mental health service in SA, the other one) ASIO and the Federal police do as well as alot of defence inteligence work like the national signals directot. Also the federal courts have a large roll to play in all of this as do the high court if needed.

    It seems that satitory bodys work much more effectivly to protect inderviduals rights than do elected officals who are willing to sway with current public mood
     
  19. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    What the hell?

    You're taking what seems a narrow view of Greenwald's perspective. The larger theme of the article is a discussion of the rightward drift of the American political discourse. Your isolation of a single sentence—

    But for decades, the FISA court -- for obvious reasons -- was considered to be one of the great threats to civil liberties, the very antithesis of how an open, democratic system of government ought to function.

    —invokes a contextual shift in order to achieve the implication you seek. It is, as written in the article, part of an historical perspective suggesting, in its appropriate context, a measure of comparison to the current "liberal" outlook regarding FISA:

    Only by isolating the sentence outside its original context can we begin to find what seems obvious to you. Because when we take those three paragraphs and contrast them against what comes next—

    —the larger theme begins to emerge through the particular example put before us.

    Left————(—X—)————Right

    Left—————X——(——)—Right

    That simple illustration is what Greenwald is talking about. The discourse takes place within the parentheses. Anything outside of them deemed more and more extreme. The top scale suggests a center keyed on the FISA debate in the late 1970s. The bottom suggests where the discourse is taking place in relation to the earlier center.

    Indeed, as Greenwald noted, opposition among conservatives (e.g. Safire) in 1978 did not focus on the restrictions imposed on wiretapping, but, rather, the broad power to spy on American citizens without any real check on the system. Relying on the good faith of politicians has been unwise for how many years, Counte? Surely, you're not suggesting our cynicism toward political institutions is only recently justified? To consider again the historical comparison:

    Now, how we might feel about the rightward drift of the political discourse is of course left to each of us. But the thesis at hand is that it is happening. Quite obviously, I find this troubling, and it has to do with far more than George W. Bush or the intelligence community in and of itself.

    It's an interesting premise, I admit. You fear the conversation will go in a certain direction, so you rush to try and make sure it does?

    The thing is that while Bush certainly has earned a certain measure of our scorn for his role in this, the situation before us is hardly unexpected for the New Imperium. This is the kind of thing people were called out as terrorist sympathizers for worrying about in 2001-02, when the nation was still having knee-jerk seizures in the wake of 9/11.

    Of Bush's need for ever-greater executive power, what disturbs me about it is how much he and his cohorts are willing to lower the standard for political discourse. To the other—and this is the more important thing, Counte—I'm more worried about how tractable the voters seem to be on this issue, and how spineless is the Democratic congressional leadership. It's a disaster. It's a disgrace. It's a betrayal.

    We will, I'm sure, come back to that point shortly. In fact, we'll combine it with this part:

    Serious and honest? Okay. We'll be back to that point shortly.

    I find that explanation—

    —lacking. But, hell, whatever you say, Counte. I'm sure the butchering of the Hersh article you performed and the omission of any link or specific reference for readers of the print magazine were purely accidental.

    I admit, thought, this is one of those journalism things. I mean, you claim to be a journalist, and I'm aware that it's pointless to argue that notion. And you're very critical of the "MSM" for its piss-poor reporting. I would just think that you, of all people, would be aware of the dangers of that kind of a chop job. Turning a Hersh article into an argument on behalf of the behalf of the Bush administration is, well, pretty damn obvious. Maybe you're transcribing by hand, and that's fine. But in that case, would a parenthetic note like, say, "(May, 2006)", like, kill you?

    It's just that you destroyed an important aspect of the narrative, a suggestion of how a program that seemed legal got out of hand. The Hersh article is a pretty good one, and worrying about who to crucify would be well beyond the point. I mean, even I can see the situation sympathetically. By tailoring the condensation as you did, you politicized it, reduced its value tremendously.

    Now, this would be disappointing if I took your statements about practical security concerns and serious and honest debate at face value. Because this isn't a practical example. It's not a serious example. It's political tripe.

    First, odds are we're going to find out we have OBL on record after the fact. In that case, you turn around and monitor the relevant line while your lawyers go down to FISC and get the warrant. There is no way in hell FISC would refuse that application. Now, just imagine if some defense lawyer on behalf of his American client actually got those intercepts thrown out during a subsequent trial. When it came to figuring out who to crucify for that, the government prosecutor would be at the top of the list.

    Secondly, what you're proposing is so clear-cut that it is ridiculous to presume that public enemy number one isn't on the list. If by some statistical accident beyond lightning thrice striking your anus on a clear blue day, we actually do have a real-time intercept of OBL, the proposition that the FISA process and its permissions regarding immediate demand would not accommodate such a situation is absolutely false. Chairman Rep. Silvestre Reyes wrote to President Bush last month:

    So please put aside the futile, fearmongering what-ifs. It is hardly honest, serious, or practical to depend on such distortions in order to make an argument, especially one so serious as whether or not the American people should abandon their Constitution. As Fraggle Rocker pointed out, there are far greater, far more immediate threats facing the lives and livelihoods of American citizens, and we are unwilling to give over to preventative measures that could very well save a tremendous number of lives. Our government exists for us, and not vice-versa.

    Thus, we can only hope that there are enough people in Congress who share Congressman Reyes' perspective, and who are willing to hold themselves to their obligations under the Constitution:

    ____________________

    Notes:

    Greenwald, Glenn. "The 'liberal' position on the Surveillance State". Unclaimed Territory. March 2, 2008. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/03/02/fisa/index.html

    Reyes, Rep. Silvestre. "Letter to the President of the United States of America". http://atrios.blogspot.com/2008_02_10_archive.html#6229571246195545757

    See Also:

    Greenwald, Glenn. "McConnell/Mukasey: Eavesdropping outside of FISA is 'illegal'". Unclaimed Territory. February 23, 2008. http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/02/23/mcconell/
     
  20. countezero Registered Senior Member

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    Tiassa, I tried, but it's obvious this is a waste of my time. I won't bother reiterating what you can do with yourself, as I'm sure you remember my thoughts along those lines...
     
  21. Mr. G reality.sys Valued Senior Member

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    5,191
    Tiassa offers: "The FISA debate as an example of rightward drift in American politics".

    T:

    You're so far to the left of the rest of us that you can't see that elastic rebound (rightward drift) of public consensus is so much more a democratic response to new information than your stuck-in-the-mud, inbred intransigence.

    It's only natural that you abhor yet another form of self-stimulating abandonment.

    I'll Paypal your therapist just for the kicks.

    I'll need you to sign the PI release form, though.
     
  22. Pandaemoni Valued Senior Member

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    The issue I struggle with is how much leeway do I want to give the federal government in light of the somewhat limited threat terrorists really pose. Terrorists are not nearly the threat that the Soviets were, for example. The Soviets could have, at least in theory ended the United States. Terrorists have the potential to be mass murderers, but not on a scale that the nation would collapse. Even living in Manhattan, I am *far* more likely to be killed by a slip and fall in the bathtub or falkling out of bed than I am by terrorists, and I'm confident that I don't want federal monitoring of my home for mishaps. In fact, we're all much more likely to commit suicide, so would need a "War on Ourselves" to stop us.

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    My apprehension of terrorism seems to be strongly related to the spectacularity of the deaths, but I have not yet convinced myself that that is a reasonable criterion (though I could make the argument that my family would be more deeply pained were I struck down willfully by another than in a slip and fall). There is also the ancillary prioperty damage involved in terrorism than mighty justify the greater federal response, but I can say that the risk of property damage doesn't resonate strongly with me.

    So it's a strange dilemma. On the one hand, I want the government to do something about terrorism and am willintg to sacrifice freedoms for it. On the other hand, there are far greater threats to me and my well being with respect to which I'm not willing to sacrifice anything.
     
  23. iceaura Valued Senior Member

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    30,994
    While you're sacking your own freedoms for the amelioration of an all but unfounded panic, could you leave mine alone ?

    I'm more in the mood to increase my freedoms. It seems to be a low-risk, high payoff option, terrorism notwithstanding.
     

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