The Bush “Domestic Surveillance” program is NOT laser-beam focused on “terrorism”.

A Bush functionary, in a speech and Q and A session, reportedly admitted that Bush’s anti-terrorism surveillance program is causing prosecutions for a broad range of possibly criminal activities, rather than directly focusing on prosecuting “terrorism”. Do you care that Big Brother is watching nearly everything we do, under the pretext of “anti-terrorism”, and is prosecuting for non-terrorism crimes uncovered in the huge dragnet?

The functionary is Deputy Attorney General Paul McNulty. He gave a speech and answered questions at the American Enterprise Institute. See the American Enterprise Institute’s page about the speech here: Successes and Challenges in Terrorism Prosecutions. I can’t yet find an official transcript.

A diarist over at DailyKos reported on the speech and Q and A here. My commentary is based on the diarist’s report.

As reported, McNulty listed the following things as being looked-for in the terrorist-surveillance programs:

• immigration laws
• identity theft
• identity related laws
• financial support
• security access

McNulty reportedly described the above categories as being “vital systems” to securing our country, and said that so many prosecutions were possible that the US Attorneys have to prioritize what they want to prosecute due to lack of manpower. His data further tell us that the majority of prosecutions are not for “terrorist” activities. Surprise!

Think for a minute about WHAT INFO the government would have to scrutinize in order to uncover a questionable activity in connection with the vague “identity-related laws”. The government would have to pretty much look at Everything, and then cross-reference it with Everything Else. We know about data mining, we know that our phone calls and internet activities are being monitored even within the USA. The only thing the Bush Administration denies is that our conversations are being listened to without a warrant. Otherwise, all of our electronic communications and activities are being monitored.

Big Brother really IS Watching Nearly Everything We Do - everything we do electronically anyway. Are we OK with that?

Totalitarian police states are VERY GOOD at finding criminal activity. It’s pretty clear that if the government watches everything we do, the government will find a lot of bad guys. Here are some things to think about:

• Do we approve of this major transformation of our society, from a society respecting of privacy and fearful of big government, to a society where Big Brother watches Everything and everyone is always under suspicion?
• Should we be demanding better accountability and oversight from Congress?
• Should we be allowed to VOTE on this transformation of our society?
• Should there be a law that warrantless data mining is OK, but limit the kind of prosecutions that can occur for any crimes uncovered through data mining?

Further evidence that the Bush people are thinking of themselves as favored members of a totalitarian regime:

See this news report: Bush justice department invaded Congress to raid the office of a dirty Congressman, causing Constitutional crisis.

Republican and Democratic leaders all felt that the Bush Administration had crossed a Constitutional barrier. The FBI (part of an Executive Branch agency) can’t just invade Congress - they must work with the Congressional Leadership. We have Separation of Powers, separate co-equal branches of government. We aren’t a dictatorship, at least officially on paper, yet, anyway.

The uproar from Congress was so severe that Bush backed away and ordered the seized documents frozen for a time while the parties work something out.

Even Republican leaders are now seeing that the Bush Administration seems to be viewing itself as something like a dictatorship, rather than a “co-equal” branch of government. We live in interesting times, where the biggest threat to our way of life seems to be ourselves.