You know, something bothers me about this FISA thing…

There’s been a lot of discussion about the dangers of the FISA non-compromise, and they’re pretty much all correct from what I can see. Pick your reason to hate the bill and you’ve got a good point. It’s an invasion of privacy, it’s dangerous expansion of presidential power, it covers up past crimes, it’s an admission OF past crimes, whatever. But there’s a little more to it and it’s been bothering me lately.

The FISA bill massively expands the executive’s ability to listen in on conversations and intercept communications. Domestic, foreign, whatever. We’re talking an absolutely immense amount of information that’s going to be flowing. Think about how much communicating you do in a day, and imagine if you and a million other people had all of that recorded and logged.

That’s where it starts to lose me. I spend quite a lot of my time online, I end up on the phone a good bit, and lord knows my text messaging bill is higher than it should be. If someone were to record all of my communications for a month and then were charged with the task of finding out if I was doing anything vaguely terrorist-like, it would take a while to sift through it all.

We already know that one of the problems with preventing 9/11 was that there was so much intercepted communication, along with a dearth of translators, that they could not pick out the important parts in time. Even in the archaic pre-9/11 days when the president actually adhered to the laws (as far as we know), not only could terrorists’ communications be found, but there was so much extra shit flying through the wires that pulling out just what they needed made it difficult.

To use an old analogy here, we’re trying to find needles in haystacks and the Bush Administration wants to add hay.

Motivation is important when looking at any decision anyone makes. You have to look at what they SAY is their reason, and what they stand to gain from it. In this case, what they say is obvious. They claim it’ll help them find, capture, and eliminate terrorists. That this is necessary to keep America safe. To protect us and our families.

What they gain is a little more difficult. Given the overabundance of information we’ve had so far, including the various victories Bush has claimed that, presumably, were done without the new provisions included in the FISA bill, it’s difficult to understand just what the benefit is. By their own accounts, they’ve prevented all the attacks that almost happened, and did so before this compromise came around, so either it’s a case of CYA or there’s more.

Most of those “preventions” turned out to be bunk, and they were all (we eventually learned) solved by normal policework. So we have to now add up some other facts: we’ve had no attacks that occurred thanks to a LACK of allowances the new bill covers, the prevented attacks touted before were stopped by normal means, and yet they both fight for these powers and have illegally used them anyway.

This is when that nice dark storm cloud starts to drift overhead. Remember, per the wording of the new bill, as long as the Attorney General says a given surveillance was needed to prevent terrorism, with nothing to double-check it, then it’s “legal”. So, if this bill passes, Bush can order a tap on anyone, at any time, for any reason, and simply tell his AG to verify that it was necessary and not only is it going to be allowed, but it will continue without anyone having to periodically pop up with a “hey, anything from that yet that we can see?”

While I’m worried about giant sweeps of communications, I can’t imagine that’s what they really want. It won’t do them any good to simply start putting entire cities through the filter; they’ll never be able to sift through it all. It’s a terrifying breach of privacy and a clear 4th amendment violation, but the problem there is just principle, not action.

No, what I’m concerned about is targeted surveillance. Yep, back to Watergate. I know, I’ve got my foil hat on pretty tight now, but hear me out. We can stop terrorism without it, swimming through that much information is damn near impossible, and Bush can spy on literally anyone without oversight as long as the AG backs him up.

Frankly, I don’t see what good this could possibly do to a president beyond letting him engage in targeted spying on specific people. I cannot imagine my text messages and emails ever drifting up and out of the terabytes of information collected in the vacuum that it will ever register as a blip on the radar, but if I was a political opponent, specifically someone leading a liberal organization such as Markos or Eli Pariser, well then I’d be a bit concerned.

The problem here isn’t that the government can put spy cameras outside and watch what the world is doing, much of a grievance as I have with that. The problem is that they can put a spy camera in your living room if they feel like it, and don’t have to have a reason to do so. It’s not how many are getting spied on, it’s who.

It’s conceivable, I suppose, that a staff of enough people could wade through AT&T’s entire customer base’s communications, but I doubt it. That strikes me as more of a red herring than anything. Even if they’re going to do it, I don’t see the administration putting much manpower into reading and listening to it all. AT&T alone has about 70 million customers. Assuming each one needs about 750 minutes a month (to pick a random number), that’s somewhere in the vicinity of 875 million hours per month of voice communications. Are we honestly expecting all of that to get listened to?

No, the issue is like what Nixon did, what happened to MLK and others. Activists who were just stamped “dangerous” and got spied on. That’s the only conceivable reason for this power grab, and that’s why it’s gotta be stopped. I wouldn’t trust any president with that ability, let alone George Walker Bush. Lord knows what he’d do with it in his lame duck phase.

Dual-Irony with Karl Rove

Buckle up, this one’s a two-fer! Karl Rove was on O’Reilly recently, and while that’s a pretty good two-fer on its own in terms of making me want to jam a paring knife into my face, the actual great deal came around when Rove started bitching about the New York Times “revealing” a CIA agent.

O’REILLY: Well, now, last week, The New York Times outed a CIA agent. I’m not going to mention his name, who interrogated Khalid Sheik Mohammed. Now the CIA asked The New York Times not to do that. It obviously puts the CIA agent in danger because al Qaeda knows who he is. And they say well, we’ll out anybody unless they’re undercover. Since you were involved with this, how could you respond to that?

ROVE: Well, look, The New York Times has a double standard. It is deeply concerned when Richard Armitage outed Valerie Plame. Of course, they were only concerned until the point that it became apparent that it was Richard Armitage, not Karl Rove. [...] I read their explanation. And basically, it sounded to me like they were saying we put his name out there because we decided we could. And I mean, they didn’t have a good explanation for it.

That “explanation” by the way, is that he was neither undercover nor was his identity even a secret.

After discussion with agency officials and a lawyer for Mr. Martinez, the newspaper declined the request, noting that Mr. Martinez had never worked under cover and that others involved in the campaign against Al Qaeda have been named in news stories and books. The editors judged that the name was necessary for the credibility and completeness of the article.

So let’s re-cap that. Karl Rove has a hand in the outing of a CIA agent who was undercover and whose identity was a secret, and that’s fine. The Times mentions the name of a CIA agent who is not undercover and who had been “revealed” before, Rove and O’Reilly go on a rampage.

That’s certainly bad enough. It’s on the level of hilarity that if it showed up in a movie the audience would complain that no politician could be THAT ham-fistedly evil. But Rove, always the overachiever, decided to gild the lily and make himself look like even more of a jackass.

The New York Times has a habit, they did this. They previously, against the objection of all of our intelligence agencies, revealed the existence of programs to monitor the electronic communications of known and suspected terrorists abroad.

You know, those programs that were perfectly legal. They were so legal that the Bush Administration had to propose rewrites of the laws so they could continue what they had already been doing legally; an action that (I believe) counts as admission of guilt. When you’re discovered doing something and then rewrite the law, it’s hard to claim you weren’t breaking the law before.

But that’s how twisted these guys’ values are. When they’re found doing something illegal, they think it’s okay because, hey, they’re the good guys. Even if it’s true that their actions were, oh, just a little south of the legal line, they were only doing it for a good cause! It’s the damn MEDIA who should be punished for screwing it all up for them!

Nader is a moron.

Ralph Nader has been a non-entity over the past, oh, eight years. Really he just seems to show up in order to get a few hyper-liberals motivated, then once in a while run for something and get obliterated, only to vanish from whence he came for a few years.

He’s apparently still desperate to be a heavy hitter, otherwise I can’t figure out his little diatribe about Obama and “white guilt”.

“There’s only one thing different about Barack Obama when it comes to being a Democratic presidential candidate. He’s half African-American,” Nader told the paper in comments published Tuesday.

“Whether that will make any difference, I don’t know. I haven’t heard him have a strong crackdown on economic exploitation in the ghettos. Payday loans, predatory lending, asbestos, lead. What’s keeping him from doing that? Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn’t want to appear like Jesse Jackson? We’ll see all that play out in the next few months and if he gets elected afterwards,” Nader added.

I’m amazed that Nader, of all people, would dive onto the “Obama’s just a safe negro” bandwagon that the right has so effectively inhabited.

But the most disturbing thing is this little thing that kept popping up:

“I mean, first of all, the number one thing that a black American politician aspiring to the presidency should be is to candidly describe the plight of the poor, especially in the inner cities and the rural areas…”

Read that again. The number one thing a black politician should talk about is the poor. Because obviously that’s where the blacks are. They’re scraping for food stamps in the ghettos while us whites are the ones in nice houses with jobs. I’m honestly surprised he didn’t start saying Obama isn’t black enough because he isn’t talking about welfare for single moms and importation prices on watermelons.

The hilarious part is that this all comes out in an effort to prove that it’s Obama’s supporters that are racists, not jerkoffs like Nader and Rush.

Most Israelis and Arabs want co-existence

Something I both appreciate and am annoyed by is when I’m hit with something that completely alters my impression of a given issue.

I’m no expert on foreign relations, and the Israel/Palestine dynamic is no exception. I have my opinions and I believe them to be grounded, I’m definitely not speaking without doing my research. That said, I was quite surprised to find out just how many Israeli citizens, both Jews and Arabs, want an integrated country. Highlights:

• 77 percent of Israeli Arabs would rather live in Israel than in any other country in the world.
• 73 percent of the Jews and 94 percent of the Arabs want Israel to “be a society in which Arab and Jewish citizens have mutual respect and equal opportunities.”
• 68 percent of Jewish citizens support teaching conversational Arabic in Jewish schools to help bring Arab and Jewish citizens together.
• More than two-thirds of Israeli Jews (69 percent) said they believed that contributing to co-existence was a personal responsibility.

How’s that, then? I’d figured that most citizens didn’t want to fight and would prefer everyone just get along, but not to that extent. Our media outlets, just about all of them, paint the region as racked by conflict where no one gets along; the Arabs and Jews are at each other’s throats all day every day. But look at that. It’s 6% of the Israeli Arabs that want this fight to go on.

Again, that really alters my opinion of the situation.