Democrats tapping into sanity on electronic surveillance

Whether they came down with an attack of common sense or were just finally bludgeoned into submission in a fight they were not going to win, House Democrats have given the White House pretty much the electronic surveillance bill it has demanded for many months.

Why, even Barack Obama, heretofore an immutable opponent of the measure, has now decided he's fine with it - much to the howling dismay of the anti-war left that likes to think of him as their main man.

The House action moves U.S. intelligence closer to full and unquestioned authority to eavesdrop on conversations in foreign countries - without having to jump through impractical judicial hoops. The Senate must now give its imprimatur. Which it doubtless will.

The legislation has come to be known as the warrantless wiretap bill, suggesting that the measure would allow federal agents to listen in on phone calls between Americans, no questions asked. Wrong.

Instead, the bill would empower the U.S. to tap communications overseas - between, say, Pakistan and Afghanistan - under anti-terror programs okayed by a special intelligence court. As has always been the case, authorities would need a warrant to eavesdrop on any specific American, here or abroad.

And so, Mr. and Mrs. Everyday People, unless you're a terrorist or happen to be on the line with a terrorist overseas, government snoops will not be listening in on your every chat with Grandma.

What, then, was the issue? President Bush had insisted, properly, on giving immunity from lawsuits to telecommunications companies that complied with requests to turn over phone records in the frantic, desperate hours after 9/11.

Democrats in the House - as opposed to their more level-headed colleagues in the Senate - had balked. They held to their position, which threatened to discourage telecoms from helping with vital intelligence, until the White House gave them a way out:

The telecoms would get immunity as long as the government had asked them in writing to do post-9/11 wiretapping. And there went the last stubborn obstacle to a bill that should have been quickly passed long ago.

Your harder-core ACLU types are, of course, screeching loud and long - "Wholesale giveaway of our Fourth Amendment rights," squalls the ACLU Washington office - but, with even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Majority Leader Steny Hoyer now in the camp that finds the bill satisfactorily fair and balanced, nobody's paying much attention to them.

I think they're doing this only because they want to push this through:

Bill Requires All Credit Card Companies to Report ALL Transactions to the Government
Hidden deep in Senator Christopher Dodd's 630-page Senate housing legislation is a sweeping provision that affects the privacy and operation of nearly all of America's small businesses. The provision, which was added by the bill's managers without debate this week, would require the nation's payment systems to track, aggregate, and report information on nearly every electronic transaction to the federal government.

As a guy who knows something about electronic communications and the law, I have to say this has been a great kabuki that the Rats and ACLU have been running for the lamestream (lazy, ignorant, low-IQ) press not to mention the impossibly thickheaded, near Neanderthal DUmmies.

Since it’s a top secret program, one has to infer certain practices and methods from what very little IS known. That’s not speculation, it’s just logical deduction.

First, there never was any “wiretapping”. Wiretapping is legally the interception of VOICE communications, which this program was never alleged to be.

Second, the program by ALL descriptions most closely resembles a “trap and trace” or “pen register” program, both of which have been used in America for many decades and traditionally ***receive the lowest level of judicial warrant scrutiny or review***!!!! Both programs collect only the numbers calling and being called, which most closely resembles the methods employed by the NSA in this case.

In point of fact, T&T and PR programs are generally taken by the courts to be de facto approvable because (a) they’re innocuous, (b) because SCOTUS ruled decades ago that **you don’t own your phone number**, and (c) by the mere act of making a telephone call you reveal that information to at least one and probably several third parties.

Bottomn line is that the NSA program was collecting sets of **phone numbers** not conversations, and mapping connections, frequency, locations of those numbers. If Achmed in Illinois has 200 phone calls from Afghanistan something is curious. If this guy in Munich get 5 calls daily from Pakistan, and sudddenly starts calling a number in Chicago (which had previously received calls from Iraq), the something might be up there.

The ACLU and the Rats have done a great job of muddying the waters and inflating the legal improprieties of the NSA programs, which are minimal to nonexistent. We can only assume that’s due to the simplicity and effectiveness of th program.

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