No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Honest question because I don't know: how intertwined is the NSA with the FBI?

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Can you call the UMC what it is here, SMC? Because calling it "U" when it is really just yours (well thought out, but nonetheless not universal) makes it kinda repugnant on its face and impairs your credibility.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Can we all just agree that Spanky's Moral Code is and should be the Universal Moral Code? Is there anyone here who disagrees with that? Unless I hear from anyone in the next 15 seconds, I will take it that everyone agrees with that. Anyone who disagrees is a moron.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Less handwringing? please.

Okay. We all agree not getting warrents seems dumb. Captain and i agree they're not dumb, so it can't be that.

I say "maybe because there is something so sensitive about the source they cannot risk a leak."

then I ask for any other reasons- look at all reasons and eliminate those that cannot be, then you'll know the real reason.

wonk is the only one to answer- he says "they didn't have sufficient grounds to get the warrent."

Problem there is that they're 1700-0. how could they have too little, plus if the thing is worth being reauthorized 30 times, they're getting some solid info from it. so they could have met whatever standard is set to get to 1700-0.

Thus, I am okay with this. in a very limited case they felt they had to act this way.

Captain says he is uncomfortable w/o Judge's review. guess what? they ain't really reviewing shit- 1700-0!
plus, now that it has leaked there will be congressional hearings- the target of the tap will be disclosed. The reason and probably the target will be leaked by some Dem staffer next summer, so you'll all know. Oh, and a really good source of information will be gone.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

The problem with your 1700-0 (or whatever) is that requests for warrants may get withdrawn when/if it becomes clear that they aren't going to get the warrant. And a really, really clean record on getting the FISA warrants makes me think that if they didn't think they could get one, they didn't even bother using that route and just did them as "emergency" or whatever ones.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

They are not intertwined at all. Probably trying to work together more since 9/11.

The National Security Agency/Central Security Service (new name) are the high-tech cryptographers, cryptoanalysts, signal intelligence guys, etc. They are more or less under the DoD umbrella -- and thus have historically been quite separate from the CIA, FBI, etc. The HQ is located about 20 miles from downtown DC, on Fort Meade, Md.

If you recall the movie "Good Will Hunting" -- he turned down their job offer.

www.nsa.gov

S_A_M

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Our laws concerning justice can't be taylored for every specific situation otherwise our legal books would fill fifty libraries and no one would ever be sure if they were breaking the law. But our innate sense of right and wrong (the UMC) can be taylored to every situation.

If a battered wife, with children, knows that the next time her husband beats her up he is going to kill her and her children, then if she breaks into his house and shoots him in the back as he is running out the door she has not violated the UMC. However, she has violated the law and needs to be prosecuted. There is no way to write in our legal code an exception for women who know they are going to be killed as a justification for murder, especially if the victim did not do an overt act. She may know from living with the guy for twenty years how he behaves and may know the next time is the final time. So she has a moral imperative to protect her children. However, there is no way we can put an exception that taylors to that situation in our law books. Only she and the victim really know if she did the right thing. We can never really know and our legal system can't figure that out.

Another example is torture. If you are holding a person who has buried some children who sill suffocate if you don't get to them in time, then of course it is OK to torture that person to find out where the children are. But you can't put a section in your legal code that allows torture because that provision will be abused.

So you can't taylor the legal code to exactly replicate the Universal Moral Code. But we all instinctually know what the code says.

When it comes to our own citizens we err on the side of caution. We make broad rules which sometime let criminals go free in order to prevent government abuses. When it comes to foreign nationals we don't need to make the same accomodation. Our soliders in the Military definitely have less rights than you and I. If the rights the average citizen gets in the US are universal then members of our armed forces should get them, but they don't. So clearly such rights are not universal. At different times different people get different rights.

Foreign nationals get different rights than US citizens and that in no way violates the concept of a universal moral code.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Okay- you're aligned with tax wonk......again.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Am I on ignore?

That is fine except for one thing, Hank -- no one in the administration has ever offered this explanation. Period. You are the only one saying that they can't trust the federal judges with Top Secret clearances wrt these anti-terrorism taps -- as opposed to the spying on regular old foreign agents (NK, Chinese, Russians, Iranians, etc.)

So that is probably not it.

The only other explanation left -- aside from malfeasance -- is administrative convenience and the desire to be able to get approval in an hour or two rather than a day or two. That may be a good or valid reason (we don't know) -- but in my mind does not excuse the failure to seek the legal right to do such things.

S_A_M

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

those aren't reasons that make sense. convenience- they doing 1700 of them a year. What SHP said about a macro is probably the case. This is not it.

And saying to the NYT "umm we don't trust a judge with this because it's really secret" is going halfway to disclosing it.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Ding. We have a winner. Like they say, even a broken clock is correct twice a day.

The Intelligence community cannot wait around for some fat judge to review a file. Once tipped, they need to react and intercept with immediacy. Otherwise, people die. It's that simple.

In the real world, Hammad and Azari aren't going to just conveniently recreate a phone conversation.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

I agree, actually, that it doesn't make much sense, but I still think convenience is it -- combined with a sprinkling of distaste for oversight. This convenience, or the need for "agility", is the precise reason publicly stated by a former (I think) General who is currently on the NSC and the former head of the NSA.

Why else would shift supervisors at the NSA be the ones authorizing the warrantless taps?

The big jump in FISA numbers since 2001 shows that they are still using that court a lot -- probably use the warrantless procedure when they feel it is necessary to act really quickly. I think that they should still seek retroactive approval.

Now _that_ doesn't make sense.

S_A_M

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

What about "we don't have enough to get a warrant, but we have a really good hunch we should be listening in on this guy a little further because he used some words that drove our surveillance computer's algorithms crazy? No judge is going to accept our tailing this guy for a few days based on the four words that triggered the system, and 72 hours isn't enough to figure out if he's a hit or a miss. We've got to systematically follow up on all of the hits because we've had a 30% success rate in finding legitimate terrorists this way, but we're pretty damned sure that rate isn't high enough to justify our tapping the phones the other 70% innocent guys."

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

how did you hear the words? they have 1700 people to listen to already. they don't need to churn the file. some low grade "hit" wouldn't justify this, and surely wouldn't justify have bush sign his name 30 times, unless something more was there.

No surprize here but I am confused again.....
 

Do you have SAM on ignore? Bush reauthorized the "emergency"-ness of the type of action 30 times. No one knows how many wiretaps were done under the "emergency" authority and authorization of each wiretap was done by low-level people. They didn't individually go to Bush.