Illegal Wiretapping For Dummies - Part II

For all you gluttons for wiretapping, here's more of the exciting details about your friendly cabal's top secret illegal spy tactics: Coming soon, to a computer, e-mail, cell phone or land phone near YOU!

1. Wiretaps said to sift all overseas contacts
   By Charlie Savage
   The Boston Globe

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   Vast US effort seen on eavesdropping

   WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency, in carrying out President Bush's order to intercept the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of links to Al Qaeda, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA.


2. Pentagon Spying on Anti-War Activists
   By Lisa Myers, Douglas Pasternak, Rich Gardella and the NBC Investigative Unit
   MSNBC & t r u t h o u t

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   Secret database obtained by NBC News tracks "suspicious" domestic groups.

   A year ago, at a Quaker Meeting House in Lake Worth, Fla., a small group of activists met to plan a protest of military recruiting at local high schools. What they didn't know was that their meeting had come to the attention of the US military. A secret 400-page Defense Department document obtained by NBC News lists the Lake Worth meeting as a "threat," and one of more than 1,500 "suspicious incidents" across the country over a recent 10-month period.


3. Senate Judiciary to Probe Bush Spying Scandal
   By Jennifer Loven
   The Associated Press & t r u t h o u t

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   "Friday 16 December 2005
   Washington - A key Republican committee chairman put the Bush administration on notice Friday that his panel would hold hearings into a report that the National Security Agency eavesdropped without warrants on people inside the United States."


4. At the Times, a Scoop Deferred
   By Paul Farhi
   Washington Post

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   The Times said it agreed to remove information that administration officials said could be "useful" to terrorists and delayed publication for a year "to conduct additional reporting."
   
   The paper offered no explanation to its readers about what had changed in the past year to warrant publication. It also did not disclose that the information is included in a forthcoming book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," written by James Risen, the lead reporter on yesterday's story. The book will be published in mid-January, according to its publisher, Simon & Schuster.


5. Daschle: Congress Denied Bush War Powers in U.S.
   By Barton Gellman
   Washington Post

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   The Bush administration requested, and Congress rejected, war-making authority "in the United States" in negotiations over the joint resolution passed days after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, according to an opinion article by former Senate majority leader Thomas A. Daschle (D-S.D.)....


6. Crypto Man
   Michael Scherer
   Salon & t r u t h o u t

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   After reporting on America's spying operations for 25 years, James Bamford is speaking out against Bush's FISA runaround. He says the wiretapping is illegal. [...]
   
   Over 25 years, Bamford has tracked the dramatic evolution of NSA's technological abilities. He says that such advances both increase the civil liberties danger and the likely pressures to skirt the FISA process. When the FISA warrants were first established, computers were still in their infancy and much of communication was analog. "I could very easily see that they would say that we have a new advance in data mining, and we need to speed up the process, the FISA court is too slow," Bamford says. Still, he won't accept that as an excuse. "There is a law there," he says. "If you just read the law, it's very clear."
   
   The law also has a purpose. Twenty-three years after publishing "Puzzle Palace," Bamford still likes to quote Sen. Frank Church of Idaho, who warned in 1975 of the vast powers of NSA's signal intelligence operation. "That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such [is] the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversation, telegrams, it doesn't matter," Church declared then. "There would be no place to hide."