Slate: Prepare for more domestic spying?

[sabra]

http://www.slate.com/id/2170643/

Spy Surge
Prepare for more domestic spying.
By Fred Kaplan


In the National Intelligence Estimate titled "The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland," which was released Tuesday, there's an intriguing section that suggests an impending push for more domestic surveillance.

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Then comes the point:

The ability to detect broader and more diverse terrorist plotting in this environment will challenge current U.S. defensive efforts and the tools we use to detect and disrupt plots. It will also require greater understanding of how suspect activities at the local level relate to strategic threat information and how best to identify indicators of terrorist activity in the midst of legitimate interactions.

One aspect of this is uncontroversial—the need to integrate city and state law enforcement ("suspect activities at the local level") to national watch lists and other databases ("strategic threat information"). This effort falls under the Department of Homeland Security, and it's a disgrace that, with such a large budget, nobody has yet devised a systematic method of doing this.

However, the other part of this passage ("how best to identify indicators of terrorist activity in the midst of legitimate interactions") pushes a very hot button.

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Judging from the NIE (not just from these key passages but from its general assessment of a "persistent and evolving terrorist threat"), the debate over these vast surveillance systems will soon be renewed. So, it's worth making some distinctions that tended not to be made the last time around, at least in much of the public discussion.

[antigop]

1. E-week: Government Seeks Broader Tech Snooping Powers

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2c1895%2c2158541%2c00.asp?kc=EWKNLNAV071607STR1

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The Bush administration is itching to update a snooping law to encompass new technologies, even as a DOJ report shows the FBI is using data mining on a dizzying array of U.S. citizens' non-terrorist activities: Think auto insurance fraud and Medicare claims abuse.

"Today, cellular phones are the size of credit cards, you would be hard-pressed to find a computer with memory less than 512 megabytes and our greatest threats are independent transnational terrorists and terror networks," complained Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, in a May 2007 column published by the Washington Post.

The law that McConnell and others in the Bush administration want to overhaul is FISA, the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The law, originally drafted to prescribe physical and electronic surveillance and spying procedures on foreign powers, came under scrutiny after the New York Times in 2005 chronicled the Bush administration's order for warrantless domestic wiretapping—called the Terrorist Surveillance Program—subsequently carried out by the National Security Agency, following the terrorist attacks of 9/11.
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