Turns out Hatch's 'tinfoil hat' crowdmay have been right

[helderheid]

Wiretapping » Feds overreached in intercepting Americans' calls and e-mails, The New York Times reports.

By Thomas Burr

The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 04/17/2009 07:57:31 AM MDT




Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah

Washington » During last year's debate over the Bush administration's wiretapping program, Sen. Orrin Hatch derided critics worried about domestic spying as feeding into the fear of people who "wear tinfoil hats around the house and think that 9/11 was an inside job."

Now, it turns out, the conspiracy theorists may have been right.

The New York Times reported Thursday that the National Security Agency overreached in its so-called terrorist surveillance program by intercepting private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans beyond what was approved of by Congress.

Congressional Democrats plan hearings on the revelation.

Hatch -- a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who was a leading voice for legislation giving immunity to telecommunications companies who had engaged in the wiretapping for the government --- slammed accusations that the government might tap Americans' phones or email.

"Painting this type of picture only feeds the delusions of those who wear tin foil hats around their house and think that 9/11 was an inside job," Hatch said in a Senate debate, according to the Congressional Record. "Do we think so little of the fine men and women of our intelligence community that we assume they would rather target college kids in Europe than foreign terrorists bent on nihilistic violence?"

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[villager]

1. so there's an inference here about 9/11, then....?

n/t

[seemslikeadream]

2. It's the new bar for theories

[NeedleCast]

3. Theres a difference between intercept and use

As a former member of the intelligence community, I have little doubt that surveillance programs - even the legal ones not founded under the Bush Admin/Patriot Act - often intercept messages beyond what's approved. That's the nature of the beast in many cases. Question is whether those commuinications that shouldn't have been picked up are actually being listened to or used in any way.

[Old and In the Way]

4. That is the question.

"Question is whether those communications that shouldn't have been picked up are actually being listened to or used in any way."

With Karl Rove in the White House, I have no doubts that selective wiretapping of Congressional and media targets could have been used to gain leverage on administration opponents.

[NeedleCast]

6. That would surprise me at all (n/t)

[TahitiNut]

7. There's an aspect to this that is almost totally ignored in all the furor over 'wiretapping.'

There's a difference between tracking the FACT of a communication and the CONTENT of that communication. Based on my somewhat limited understanding of research work done during the 90's in indexing massive information bases, it appears that the primary focus of the intel community's massive data collection effort has been in creating a topological network index ... essentially a map of "who's talking to whom." I think of it as a "Degrees of Separation" index -- an information base that can depict associations between "persons of interest." Given massive amounts of data that merely capture the instances of who communicated with whom and the nature of that commuincation, including 'message drop' nodes such as internet forums and usenet newsgroups, the computer technology exists whereby an analysis of 'proximity' (in terms of communication) of one person (or entity) to another can be performed. Such an index can be presented visually, portraying clusters of people within which information is shared in a topological fashion ... with 'drill-down' functionality that can acquire whatever diads are recorded AND the 'content' of some of the connections where preserved.

Stated more simply, it offers a guide to the intel community for closer scrutiny. The potentials for abuse are extreme, particularly in economic and commercial ways.

[Ghost in the Machine]

5. Orrin Hatch is an ignorant piece of shit who needs to be publicly flogged on the steps of Congress..

Hatch knew they were wiretapping *before* 9-11. What did he know and when did he know it?

"On September 11, 2001, Hatch said in an interview that the United States government's proof of al-Qaeda involvement in the day's attacks came from intercepted communications: "They have ... some information that included people associated with bin Laden who acknowledged a couple of targets were hit."<10> For several days thereafter, Hatch came under fire from members of both parties for speaking so loosely about intelligence-gathering techniques." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orrin_Hatch#9.2F11_comments