Spitzer Bust Provides a Warning Regarding NSA Spying By Dave Lindorff

[Demeter]

Original Content at http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_dave_lin_080311_spitzer_bust_provide.htm


I have no sympathy for New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, the hot-shot prosecutor of call-girl operations who was hoist on his own petard, as it were. I mean, what a jerk! And aside from the hypocrisy, what a fine message he was sending to his three teenage daughters about the role of women...Having said that, Spitzer's bust should give pause to those in Congress who are ready to hand President Bush a free pass to continue his six-year campaign of warrantless spying on Americans.

We now know from yesterday's Wall Street Journal article that the spying Bush has been doing through the National Security Agency since early 2001 has included vast computer sweeps of not just internet and phone activity, but also bank and credit card transactions. These are sweeps of ordinary everyday people, with computers looking for odd transactions, or for codewords, or for transactions involving specific targeted organizations or addresses...What nailed Spitzer, we now learn, was a series of bank transactions he had with the bank account of the Emperor's Club VIP callgirl operation.

Now reportedly, this particular investigation was being conducted by the IRS, which allegedly was investigating the Emperor's Club. Once the IRS discovered it had caught the New York governor in its web, it forwarded the case to the US Attorney General's Office, where it was pursued by the FBI, apparently on the instructions of AG Michael Mukasey. The investigation moved from monitoring the bank to monitoring phones, and Spitzer was captured talking to the Emperor's Club dispatcher. Bingo. Promising Democratic political career ruined.

Now the monitoring of the Emperor's Club was reportedly done with a court-ordered warrant. That's fine. But this case shows us how people can get caught up by this kind of investigation really quickly...Now imagine that instead of a call-girl operation, this had been a mosque or an international charity organization, and suppose you were someone who had made a call to ask about making donations to help the victims of the last earthquake in Indonesia? If that mosque, or charity, happened to be on the list of outfits being monitored by the NSA's computers, your call might well have been picked up. Then the focus would shift to your phone and your internet server, and conceivably every communication you made would be watched...This is the America we now live in. According to the Wall Street Journal, after a wave of national outrage forced the Bush administration to shut down its Total Information Awareness project at the Pentagon, Bush and Cheney simply moved their scheme to subject all telecommunications and bank transactions to computer monitoring over to the NSA. Since none of this spying activity is subject to court supervision and warrant requirements, we are left having to trust the personnel at the NSA, the so-called Justice Department, and the president and his administration, not to abuse it.

Right. And think of the temptations!.... With that kind of power, unchecked in the hands of an intensely political administration, it's almost a certainty that it is being used and used inappropriately for political ends.

_____________________________

DAVE LINDORFF is a Philadelphia-based journalist and columnist. His latest book is "The Case for Impeachment" (St. Martin's Press, 2006 and now available in paperback). His work is available at www.thiscantbehappening.net







Authors Website: http://www.thiscantbehappening.net

Authors Bio: Dave Lindorff, a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the Disintegration of American Democracy" and "Killing Time: An Investigation into the Death Penalty Case of Mumia Abu-Jamal"). His latest book, coauthored with Barbara Olshanshky, is "The Case for Impeachment: The Legal Argument for Removing President George W. Bush from Office (St. Martin's Press, May 2006). His writing is available at http://www.thiscantbehappening.net

[acmavm]

1. EXACTLY!! And Spitz like wire taps. Wonder if he learned anything

here?

I doubt it.

[Joanne98]

2. Are they listening yet?

[Peace Patriot]

3. I would put it a lot more strongly than this...

"With that kind of power, unchecked in the hands of an intensely political administration, it's almost a certainty that it is being used and used inappropriately for political ends." --DL

With that kind of power, unchecked in the hands of an intensely political AND COMPLETELY LAWLESS, FASCIST JUNTA, it's (almost) (NOT "almost--a complete)... certainty that it is being used and used inappropriately for political ends AND FOR RAMPAGING CRIMES--blackmail, black ops, massive theft, killing people, scaring people into silence, lying, disinformation, setting people up, conspiracies to cover up previous huge crimes, and conspiracy to start new oil wars (Iran, South America).

I don't care one goddamn what was happening between Eliot Spitzer and other consenting adults--whether money changed hands or not. It is none of my business, and has zilch to do with my well-being, or that of any other Americans. Furthermore, the Bush-purged FBI and Department of Justice--under these criminals' thumbs for eight years--are guilty until proven innocent. I have good reason for 100% skepticism of ANY charges they make against ANY Democrat, and reason enough to distrust their prosecutions of Republicans--because they always involve LESSER PLAYERS, not the Master Criminals in the White House. Look at this crap they pulled on Seigelman in Alabama! The governor of Alabama is IN JAIL on cooked evidence!

Here's what I would like to see: I would like to see Spitzer stick it out, and New Yorkers rally behind him, on the issue of legalization of prostitution--and take it all the way to the Supreme Court, and argue that laws against prostitution are unconstitutional on the 1st, 14th and a number of other Amendments. What can he lose? And what he can gain is a constituency against the waste and ruination of Puritan morality laws, and our multi-trillion dollar police state for putting innocent people in jail for crimes that harm no one.

[Igel]

4. Ok, let's look at his reasoning.

"We now know from yesterday's Wall Street Journal article that the spying Bush has been doing through the National Security Agency since early 2001 has included vast computer sweeps of not just internet and phone activity, but also bank and credit card transactions."

He essentially describes it accurately: it's used for cluster analysis. But he doesn't leave it at that.

"Now reportedly, this particular investigation was being conducted by the IRS...."

Which comes across as "I have no reason to doubt it, as far as I know." It doesn't affirm so much as dispute.

"Now imagine..."

I can do that. My imagination isn't completely dead.

"this had been a mosque or an international charity organization, and suppose you were someone who had made a call to ask about making donations to help the victims of the last earthquake in Indonesia? If that mosque, or charity, happened to be on the list of outfits being monitored by the NSA's computers, your call might well have been picked up. Then the focus would shift to your phone and your internet server, and conceivably every communication you made would be watched..."

First off, strike the word "focus". There really isn't much of a focus in cluster analysis; apparently step 1 in imagining is to imagine that some other sort of analysis is being used, that we need to shift what we understand him to have said earlier.

Secondly, "would be watched". This is intriguing because it asserts a level of (imaginary) attention that cluster analysis doesn't support.

Thirdly, let's see what would actually happen. I call a mosque to donate money for tsunami relief in Afghanistan and because the mosque was on a list of phone numbers included in the cluster analysis, they append my data. What do they see? Well, nothing, because the computer's doing the data chunking. What does the computer kick out? It kicks out a phone call to the mosque. It kicks out that I call my wife, my parents, various stores. The computer looks for any connection between my wife, my parents, and those stores and the mosque. It's a weak link, when the cluster analysis print-out is viewed by a human, all they see is a small cluster weakly linked to anything they're interested in ... if that much. The software may well prune the diagram before it gets to that step. They may associate the data that I've looked up some webpages that involve explosives or the like, but these wouldn't form a coherent terrorist-like pattern: It would also pick up that I was looking at a news story mentioning these things immediately prior to looking them up, and there was no long-term interest in them.

To imagine anything else also imagines a much bigger security apparatus than the American population could staff.

Now, it may be that instead of just scooping up data they've actually tapped the mosque's phones. In that case, when they listen to the tape they simply realize I have no clue about Afghanistan's geography ... unless I've lapsed into some sort of code. Then the lack of relevance in the cluster analysis tells them to look elsewhere, pending more information about me.

"With that kind of power, unchecked in the hands of an intensely political administration, it's almost a certainty that it is being used and used inappropriately for political ends."

Having imagined something, we now assert it's true. Why? Because the president and some political appointees are inherently evil people. Forgotten are the people that would actually be looking at the cluster analyses; these are not political appointees. Having known some NSA folk, it bears to keep in mind that there are simply fellow Americans--even fellow dems--doing all the things we so blithely assume an all-knowing and all-powerful political cadre does. Notice how the Seligmann thing went, involving a small number of people. NSA ... much bigger.

edited to add an adjective

[Doctor_J]

5. Only if you're a Democrat

Repukes have nothing to fear. If a Dem is in the WH next year and uses a wiretap for political gain, he/she will be impeached so fast there won't be time for the newspapers to cover it.