Pruning Shears

I meant to get to this last week but neglected to:

In a major shift, the National Security Agency is drawing up plans for a new domestic assignment: helping protect government and private communications networks from cyberattacks and infiltration by terrorists and hackers, according to current and former intelligence officials.
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Current and former intelligence officials, including several NSA veterans, warned that the agency’s venture into domestic computer and communications networks — even if limited to protecting them — could raise new privacy concerns. To protect a network, the government must constantly monitor it.

“This will create a major uproar,” predicted Ira Winkler, a former NSA analyst who is now a cybersecurity consultant.

“If you’re going to do cybersecurity, you have to spy on Americans to secure Americans,” said a former government official familiar with NSA operations. “It would be a very major step.”

At what point will Americans decide we’ve gotten a little too close to recreating the Stasi?  Our fear of terrorism seems to have made us irrational.  I’m sure Osama bin Laden is pleased.

My quickly-formed poor opinion of Mike McConnell seems well grounded.  Now it turns out the NSA is sweeping up enormous amounts of data on innocent Americans:

“You may not even realize it’s in the database because you do lots of collection,” Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said, referring to the “inadvertent collection” of Americans’ communications through a vast surveillance program instituted after 9/11.
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The intelligence director then insisted that a “small” number of Americans had been spied on — purposefully or not — although he noted that designation should be judged in context of the “billions of transactions” monitored by the NSA.

Two notes:  First, if you wondered what could possibly go wrong with item #1 on this post see item #2.  Second, some quick math.  A small number out Americans spied on out of billions of transactions.  I’d say is 1/10th of 1% is a small number so that’s what I’ll use.  And “billions” of transactions covers anything up from two billion.  I’ll say 10 billion.  1/10th of 1% of 10 billion is 10 million.  Until you hear otherwise figure the NSA has collected roughly 10,000,000 records on innocent Americans.  Your tax dollars at work.

David Ignatius shows why conventional Beltway wisdom has evolved into a lazy and dishonest embrace of “balance” and “bipartisanship” even when one side is clearly deceptive or even outright lying.  I hope I’ve convinced you by this point that Mike McConnell is not an honest broker, yet Ignatius makes the following comment about him: “As near as I can tell, the only ax he has to grind is catching terrorists.”  All that tells me is that David can only see very near indeed.  He goes so far as to say McConnell “fanned the flames” by saying Americans would die if we discussed why we shouldn’t turn into a police state.  That isn’t fanning flames, it’s arson.  Ignatius is so invested in his “on the one hand on the other hand” outlook he won’t call out even the worst actions by the administration.

This isn’t strictly about executive power but Dmitri Chernik sent a good link about America’s Police Brutality Pandemic.  It’s interesting that tasers were originally heralded as an alternative to lethal force but seem to be much more commonly used as an alternative to less pain-inducing methods.  Some of the worst offenders seem to use it almost casually and enjoy doing so.

I’ll try to leave a good taste in your mouth with this:

Key provisions of the USA Patriot Act, which allow a secret court to authorize wiretaps and searches in criminal cases if the government says foreign intelligence is involved, violate constitutional standards that are more than 200 years old, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.

 Let’s hope it stands.  Overall the judiciary has really stood up to a lot of the worst post-9/11 developments.  Good on ‘em.