NYT’s At It Again

I gather the NYT’s figured they had not divulged enough of our terrorist fighting secrets so they decided to spew some more out into the public domain:

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 – The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

The government’s collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic have raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.’s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic “switches,” according to officials familiar with the matter.

“There was a lot of discussion about the switches” in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. “You’re talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that’s on a switch that’s carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that.”

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.’s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to Al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

The current and former government officials who discussed the program were granted anonymity because it remains classified.

Bush administration officials declined to comment on Friday on the technical aspects of the operation and the N.S.A.’s use of broad searches to look for clues on terrorists. Because the program is highly classified, many details of how the N.S.A. is conducting it remain unknown, and members of Congress who have pressed for a full Congressional inquiry say they are eager to learn more about the program’s operational details, as well as its legality.

Officials in the government and the telecommunications industry who have knowledge of parts of the program say the N.S.A. has sought to analyze communications patterns to glean clues from details like who is calling whom, how long a phone call lasts and what time of day it is made, and the origins and destinations of phone calls and e-mail messages. Calls to and from Afghanistan, for instance, are known to have been of particular interest to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11 attacks, the officials said.

[…]A former technology manager at a major telecommunications company said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the leading companies in the industry have been storing information on calling patterns and giving it to the federal government to aid in tracking possible terrorists.

“All that data is mined with the cooperation of the government and shared with them, and since 9/11, there’s been much more active involvement in that area,” said the former manager, a telecommunications expert who did not want his name or that of his former company used because of concern about revealing trade secrets.

Such information often proves just as valuable to the government as eavesdropping on the calls themselves, the former manager said.

“If they get content, that’s useful to them too, but the real plum is going to be the transaction data and the traffic analysis,” he said. “Massive amounts of traffic analysis information – who is calling whom, who is in Osama Bin Laden’s circle of family and friends – is used to identify lines of communication that are then given closer scrutiny.”

I just don’t understand these people. Do they not understand that publishing this kind of information makes it more difficult to find and kill the very terrorists who want our Nation destroyed? 3 years ago the whole nation was up in arms about the failure of our intelligence agencies. In particular the intelligence gathering and analysis of that intelligence.

But now the left want’s our Government to stop the perfectly legal gathering of intelligence that has already proven useful. Not only that, they want the fact that these classified programs exist spread throughout the world.

I don’t know about you but I WANT our Government to fight back against the terrorists.

UPDATE

Check out AJStrata‘ post on the NYTs other recent revelation about our Government checking mosques for radiation. How dare they!

WTF is going thru the heads of the left?

UPDATE

Media Lies writes about his anger in this well written post:

Since December 16th I have been angry. So angry that I could not blog about it, because whatever I wrote would have been an insult to my readers and an embarrassment to me. It is only now that I feel comfortable putting my thoughts into words.

[…]On Thursday, December 15th, 2005, a momentous event, one that comes along once in a lifetime, took place. The Iraqis voted, for the first time in their lives, for a government of their choosing less than three short years after they had suffered under the malevolent hand of the madman Saddam Hussein. (Readers should note that this is the second such event in the past three years ? the first being Afghanistan.)

On the very next day, cynically timed to (a) dominate the weekend news cycle, (b) steal the headlines of the Iraqi victory, (c) contribute to the defeat of the Patriot Act’s extension and (d) promote the release of a book authored by one of their own (and which they did not disclose!), the New York Times published an article entitled, Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts, co-authored by the same man who expects to profit from the release of the book that follows his article.

The Times admitted that they sat on the story for a year, after the administration had asked them not to publish due to the national security implications. If there were any doubt of the Times’ bias or any belief in their pretentious claims of neutrality, those are surely gone for all but the most partisan of Americans.

[…]No such compunction seems to regulate the behavior of present day intelligence agents and government “officials”, whose cowardly actions, cloaked in anonymity to avoid prosecution, are clearly and undeniably blatant violations of their oaths. In the past four years we have seen repeated violations of secrecy oaths, with details of ongoing operations leaked to the press in an attempt to influence policy or compromise operations in a way that renders them useless.

The behavior of these unscrupulous “officials” is nothing short of insubordination and treason and they should pay a high price for their actions.

Those who revealed this information are not “whistle-blowers.” They are traitors. I’m old-fashioned, so I prefer a public hanging or firing squad in response. After a speedy trial at which they were given their full rights to legal representation and a jury of their peers of course.

I’ll gladly volunteer to pull the lever or trigger.

[…]Media and the left characterize the Times’ revelations as “illegally spying on US citizens”, as if the administration was prying into people’s lives trying to unearth dirt without any compelling reason to do so.

Yet the Times article makes it clear that this is not at all the case.

The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists’ computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.

If my phone numbers were found on the captured laptop of a known Al Qaeda terrorist, I would fully expect my phones to be tapped and my life to be investigated. If my neighbor’s phone numbers were found there, I would want the government to aggressively investigate them using every legal means possible.

[…]One thing is clear. The overreaction by some on the left and by Senators who seek to take political advantage is just that. It is not based upon solid legal reasoning nor is it realistic in light of the need to know why terrorists are contacting persons within the geographical boundaries of the US. Much more light and much less smoke is needed, but in today’s political atmosphere, that is unlikely to be forthcoming.

I just don’t understand these people. Do they not understand that publishing this kind of information makes it more difficult to find and kill the very terrorists who want our Nation destroyed?

Curt

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