Mining of Data Prompted Fight Over Spying

[Zensea]

Source: New York Times

WASHINGTON, July 28 — A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program.

It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues.

The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation.

The confrontation in 2004 led to a showdown in the hospital room of then Attorney General John Ashcroft, where Mr. Gonzales, the White House counsel at the time, and Andrew H. Card Jr., then the White House chief of staff, tried to get the ailing Mr. Ashcroft to reauthorize the N.S.A. program.

Read more: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/29/washington/29nsa.html...

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Well, well, well

Also check TPM's Josh Marshall and his take on this.

http://talkingpointsmemo.com /

"To put this into perspective, remember that the White House been willing to go to the public and make a positive argument for certain surveillance procedures (notably evasion of the FISA Court strictures) which appear to be illegal on their face. This must be much more serious and apparently something all but the most ravenous Bush authoritarians would never accept. It is supposedly no longer even happening and hasn't been for a few years. So disclosing it could not jeopardize a program. The only reason that suggests itself is that the political and legal consequences of disclosure are too grave to allow."

[Zensea]

1. This post is an unintentional dupe of someone else's - original post here>

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.ph...

[jimshoes]

2. What is needed right now

is the 2007 version of Deep Throat. Someone to rat out the crooks so they can be tried for treason.

[Stalwart]

3. It is Becoming Obvious

The government is recording citizens emails and conversations and storing them to be mined for content at some future time when a person is identified to be involved in something that gives probable cause sufficient to legally obtain a warrant to actually look at what was recorded in the past that they said or wrote in an email.

There is not enough storage capacity to store everything now so it is probably applied to "usual suspects" citizens. For example; anyone in the USA with their browser set to an arabic language (easy to do). Lots of ways to narrow the volume of data to more likely targets to fit the capacity to store the data for long periods.

There are ways to anonymize the data until it is used to safeguard it. IBM has developed systems to do this in the medical record area.

The government will justify the retention of communication. They will say the crime is looking at it without a warrant and if they did not look at it and took steps to protect it with an anonymizer until such future time that they stumbled across a reason sufficient to look at it with a warrant then that is acceptable to protect the rights of citizens and still protect us from the bad guy terrorists.

I can hear Gonzalez trying to justify it now.

If the real time flow of citizens communications was a river that the government can fish in with a warrant as things go by then all the government is doing is building a dam to contain the flow of that river so they can fish in it later with a warrant when the time comes that they know what to fish for and are authorized to fish for it.

[Trillo]

5. That could really blow a hole in property ownership laws.

If you don't own your private conversation, then how can it be held against you(?): if you own your private conversation, then why does an aggregator have a stored recording of it, both without permission and with failure to pay royalties?

[Sam Ervin jret]

4. Data Mining in Vegas off AT&T + casino software + Patriot Act = ?

What you do in Vegas, what you say in Vegas, goes right from Vegas to Uncle Sam in D.C.

Unlike the Vegas hype, you are, and have been, ever since the passing of the Patriot Act an open book to Uncle Sam in Vegas. They have not only got they ability to directly data mine right from the AT&T phone lines, but also a "six degrees of separation" type software program. This program, created originally for cheaters in gambling, has the ability to take one name and see if it has ever been "associated with" another name through several degrees of separation. Originally it was meant to find out if dealers or other workers in the casinos were "associated with" any big "winners.

Now you can take that game + the Patriot Act + Data Mining = Free + Easy + unsupervised by any court access to any and all of us. Now that would be something to talk about in the middle of the night. It MIGHT also be something that goes a little to far even for the former Attn. General.

[Stalwart]

7. Same guy that wrote the program to catch the cheaters

Also wrote the anonymizer program for IBM.

A genius that might not like how his programs are being used by the government.

[Supersedeas]

10. apparently, there are still some career officials who made the LAW an issue

[cal04]

6. WP:Data Mining Figured In Dispute Over NSA

Report Links Program to Gonzales Uproar

A fierce dispute within the Bush administration in early 2004 over a National Security Agency warrantless surveillance program was related to concerns about the NSA's searches of huge computer databases, the New York Times reported today.

The agency's data mining was also linked to a dramatic chain of events in March 2004, including threats of resignation from senior Justice Department officials and an unusual nighttime visit by White House aides to the hospital bedside of then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, the Times reported, citing current and former officials briefed on the program.

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, one of the aides who went to the hospital, was questioned closely about that episode during a contentious Senate hearing on Tuesday. Gonzales characterized the internal debate as centering on "other intelligence activities" than the NSA's warrantless surveillance program, whose existence President Bush confirmed in December 2005.

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III contradicted Gonzales, his boss, two days later, testifying before the House Judiciary Committee that the disagreement involved "an NSA program that has been much discussed."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/20...

[Pachamama]

8. Total Information Awareness (TIA) never was dismantled...it just was renamed and taken underground

TSP = TIA

[Sparkly]

9. This raises a whole lot more questions

They need to have Gonzo back to testify and make him start over from the beginning.

[Up2Late]

11. Daniel Schorr did a nice commentary about this Pro-Gonzo leak today on NPR...

Selective 'Leaks' from the Bush Administration

By Daniel Schorr

Listen to this story...

All Things Considered, July 30, 2007 · NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr talks about selective leaking by the Bush administration, and what it tells us.

<http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12... >