The Bush administration is currently contesting a Senate Judiciary Committee subpoena for documentation establishing Program X's history -- in essence, trying to ensure that the public never learns more about the program and the internal deliberations over it than what President Bush chooses to reveal.


Analysis: Gonzales Testimony Part of Broader Effort to Conceal Surveillance Program
By Spencer Ackerman and Paul Kiel - July 26, 2007, 6:54 PM

Alberto Gonzales' testimony that there was "no serious disagreement" within the Bush Administration about the NSA warrantless surveillance program has left senators sputtering and fulminating about the attorney general's apparent prevarications. But a closer examination of Gonzales' testimony and other public statements from the Administration suggest that there may be a method to the madness.

There's a lot of evidence to suggest that Gonzales's careful, repeated phrasing to the Senate that he will only discuss the program that "the president described" was deliberate, part of a concerted administration-wide strategy to conceal from the public the very broad scope of that initial program. When, for the first time, Program X (as we'll call it, for convenience's sake) became known to senior Justice Department officials who were not its original architects, those officials -- James Comey and Jack Goldsmith, principally -- balked at its continuation. They did not back down until the program had undergone as-yet-unspecified but apparently significant revisions. But when President Bush announced what he would call the "Terrorist Surveillance Program' in December 2005, he left the clear impression that the program had always functioned the same way since its 2001 inception.

...................

In essence, the issue is this: if Gonzales succeeds in convincing the committee that there really is a material distinction between the program as it existed before and after Comey’s intervention, he won't just save himself from perjury. He will perhaps have preserved an administration strategy of concealing the scope of Program X from the public and most of Congress -- making it appear that the program that Bush disclosed in December 2005, incorporating Comey's objections, is the same program that existed since October 2001, long before Comey put the brakes on at least some aspects of it. That may be at the heart of the White House's claim of executive privilege to prevent the Senate Judiciary Committee from seeing documents detailing the genesis of Program X.

We may be about to learn whether a perjury investigation will pierce the obfuscations and begin to explore the extent of Program X -- a program the American public was never supposed to know about.

WAY MORE AT:
http://www.tpmmuckraker.com/archives/003787.php

The sparse record suggests that substantial changes were made to Program X after March of 2004. Precisely what they were, we don’t know. The initial reports, which drew no distinction between the program before and after that crucial month, described a program that surveilled the communications of Americans, including some purely domestic communications, without the issuance of warrants by a court. Prior to 9/11, such surveillance had to be approved by a FISA judge so as not to violate the 4th Amendment.

This is the closest thing to the truth that I have come across

Us out here in the unheartland, and pretty much everywhere else in the country were okay with almost anything after 9/11 and there really wasn't any good reason not to admit what they were doing and say My bad if it was that awful. Put it down to overzealousness in the defense of freedom.

And Congress has been delighted to go along because no ox of their was being gored. But when Congress found out their right of approval on attorneys had been destroyed in the Patriot Act, they undid it. FAST.

And I remember all sorts of stuff about untrustworthy congressmen who leak things at various times. I think they were doing Congress. After all, it's not like the rest of us would think less of them. We don't count, literally. But Congress still has the vote.

"sweep everything". And EVERYTHING was in the sweep, and it just kept on goin' and goin', like the Energizer bunny.

to empty the trashcans then

By 2004, the technology and political will existed to do the folowing: using private sector contractors and telecoms, DHS, NSA, CIA, DIA combined their files and intercepts with all the commercially available data to create one enormous database containing all known electronic records of all the people in the United States and in a host of foreign countries.

This data was then fed into a series of NSA supercomputers programmed to produce a profile and social link chart that was supposed to measure and predict the probabilities that any individual is willing, able and capable of carrying out terrorist acts.



You may have seen Spielberg's adaption of Philip K. Dick's, MINORITY REPORT, about the near-future where all murders are predicted in advance, and those found capable of them are arrested and put into permanent lockup. It's something like that, only using computer algorithms instead of clairvoyance.



The major problem with this program is that it's more effective at drawing up lists of the Bush Administration's political enemies, and spying on them, or 'neutralizing' them in various ways, than detecting and preventing actual terrorism.

All computer (and government) programs reflect the biases of their creators:

so there !

mmm mmmmmph mmms mmmmrt !!!!!

Thank god we have the {REDACTED}.

God bless DU, and the USA.

:patriot:

I tried to tell the leaders of "Project X", yes I did. "We ought to copyright this," I said. "No," they said, "copyrighting it would amount to an admission that there IS a 'Project X'." So we didn't copyright it. I agreed with their logic, but now I'm stuck with an apartment full of homing chickens that were being trained to fly and lay eggs in mid-air, just for Chucklenuts' next outdoor appearance. They're getting in the way of my testing equipment to try to find the exact frequency that will induce violent, uncontrolled, explosive diarrhea for DICK ("Iron Sphincter") Cheenee's next appearance in the light of day. No rest for the weary, I tell ya.

the Dems of the Committee of Eight. Bushco is made up of common criminals - pathological liars.

Not the program that evolved later and was approved by whatever toady they found to sign off on it.

So it really doesn't matter that some later program was approved because the matter being discussed was the program and all of its parts as it existed at the time that Gonzalez and Card left the White House, made their trip, and then walked into the room - not what came later.

(all 3 times), his answers were rehearsed, rehashed and recited without ever missing
a beat - EXCEPT when he was asked specifically about the "program." Then he would
stutter and fidget and fuss with his cufflinks until he got the wording exactly right. That's
a sure sign of someone with something to hide.

And Mueller did exactly the same thing when it came to a question about the 'program.'

In Jan. 2008, the day before Inauguration, it may take every Republican in DC to help
move Pandora's Box.

While it may be controversial for the NSA to have spied on Americans due to laws forbidding such, there is a plethora of other spy agencies without the same legal restrictions;

The FBI's NSL-GATE: more National Security Letter abuses than the IG's report had originally found

It seems that truth is a big problem with the DoJ, if not total amnesia.

=========
THREAD: Conyers: New FBI Report Confirms "Worst Fears" on FBI abuse of NSLs
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x1123651

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June 14, 2007 - http://judiciary.house.gov/newscenter.aspx?A=818
FBI officials briefed House Judiciary Committee staff on a new draft audit report detailing the bureau's use of National Security Letters (NSLs). The briefing served to update and correct prior statements to Congress, since the release of an earlier Inspector General report. The FBI confirmed that they found more abuses in the use of NSLs than the IG's report had originally found. ...

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) had the following statement:

“The Patriot Act and its renewal was rammed through Congress with the repeated claim that there was not one instance in which the Act had been abused. We now know that information on law abiding Americans was illegally obtained and kept in secret files. This confirms some of our worst fears about what happens when you give the government too much power with too little oversight.”

FROM: http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=389x983282

Look out when legal scholars go to work uncovering facts.
Laura K. Donohue, JD, PhD, is a Fellow at CISAC and at the Center for Constitutional Law at Stanford Law School

"... National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency is collecting data from 133 U.S. cities; intelligence sources told the Los Angeles Times that, when collection is completed, the agency would be able to identify occupants in each house, their nationality and even their political affiliation..."