Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff gave an interview to Morton
Kondracke of Roll Call magazine, regarding the Data Mining the NSA is
doing [excerpts down below].

It’s an interesting interview because of Chertoff’s candor. Chertoff seems to be a refreshingly straight talker and is obviously very bright and energetic. He was once a Federal Judge, but I guess Chertoff found judging too mundane for his energy.

I’m sure Chertoff can lie and spin with the best of the politicians of all stripes, if he wants to, but when Chertoff makes remarks that are seemingly candid and are not favorable to his boss, you’ve got to presume he is being at least partially honest in the things he actually does say.

We’re going to take Chertoff’s new information [new info to ME anyway], and we’re going to plug it into our Spin Machine and show how the USA is taking on more and more traits of a secret police state.

——

New information from Chertoff about thousands of calls being monitored, where more than 90% are not of intelligence interest, and about secret rulings of a secret court as justification for secret data mining

Chertoff expands a bit on what we know. For example, he admits that the government data-mines thousands of calls [no, the data mining is not “targeted” on known-terrorists’ calls], with a low success rate (less than 10%) in identifying calls of actual interest to the intelligence community: “You’re going to bat well below .100 any time you do intelligence gathering. “. (For non-baseball fans, a batting average of less than .100 means you get a hit less than 10% of the time).

Chertoff’s batting average remark somewhat validates my speculation that government data mining might not result in greater predictive accuracy than the Direct Marketing Association, where direct mailing campaigns are successful at the 2% or 3% level.

So Chertoff confirms that the NSA takes a huge vacuum cleaner approach to screening information, rather than the elegantly restrained highly selective screening that the GOP apologists would have us believe [I’ve heard the apologists say nonsense like the following: “They only listen to calls where one party is a terrorist!”].

Bush himself encourages such nonsense: (per MSNBC) “Bush has recently described the warrantless operation as ‘terrorist surveillance’ and summed it up by declaring that ‘if you’re talking to a member of al Qaeda, we want to know why.’“.

By the way —– see that same MSNBC article just linked to above - it’s pretty detailed, for reporting about how the data mining goes far beyond phone calls, into emails, etc….. Finally, the MSNBC article says that 5,000 persons have been monitored, but only less than 10 have been interesting enough to get warrants to also listen to their domestic calls.

Furthermore, Chertoff provided a new rationale to justify the alleged legality of the secret data mining: Secret decisions of the secret FISA court have given the Adminstration authority for the program.

——

Ok, so we’ve got some new info from Chertoff. Let’s plug it all into our Spin Machine and see what kind of anti-Bush stuff we can come up with. Here’s a summary of a skeptical anti-Bush spin that I think can be placed on the “war on terror” as practiced in the USA by the Bush Administration, in light of new info from Chertoff’s remarks:

The somewat spinful assertions I make below are based on facts that are pretty much common knowledge from media reports. The wording is mine, so the spin is mine. But the facts are not really in dispute.

• A secret court is issuing secret decisions allowing the Government to secretly vastly expand its monitoring of Americans and our communications [until a whistleblower revealed the program]. This is what Chertoff told Kondracke in the interview, as spun by me.
• Persons whom the secret data-mining suggests might be of interest, (with Direct Marketing Association accuracy levels), will [probably] be further investigated, and their employers and libraries and internet providers will then receive secret National Security Letters seeking detailed info about the person’s activities and communications.
• The National Security Letters are secret, too. It’s illegal to reveal that you have received a National Security Letter demanding information.
• The President has his own criteria for deciding whether to act against a person. It is all up to the President as Commander in Chief, to do almost anything he sees fit to protect us, under his inherent Constitutional powers, so he says.
• The President can take the person into custody secretly.
• If the person needs to be abused or tortured in order to cooperate, either the USA will do it (if it is mere abuse) or arrange for torture by giving the person to a friendly foreign country known for engaging in torture. The USA admits it abuses prisoners, but claims the abuse does not technically rise to the level of torture (as defined by Treaty). The USA admits to using a form of waterboarding, which is an abuse or torture tactic appearing in history in several different forms.
• Secret USA detention facilities around the world wait to receive the person who has been identified as a potential threat.
• The identities of those in secret detention facilities are kept secret.
• Those in the secret detention facilities have no rights
• The USA believes it can hold persons in secret detention forever.
• The war on terror is an endless war - it is a chronic state of being for us now, with no expiration date.

Alright, the above spin is somewhat over the top, isn’t it? Yes it is, but only in its implications. I think the steps listed above are reasonably accurate. The overall message of the steps is that we have entered into a scary era, where the government has put in place some frighteningly repressive secret-police-state steps.

Cautions and Questions

Now that the USA government has put in place some of the traits of secret police states, what are the chances that the government will somehow avoid the historical tendency of governments to abuse their powers? Has the USA government done anything to suggest that it is immune from the tendency toward abuse?

Even if you trust the Bush Administration with such awesome abusable power, will those powers be abused by those who follow Bush? Will our way of life and freedoms be protected by the administrations that follow Bush?

Many would say that our way of life will be destroyed by terrorists UNLESS we give the President secret police state powers. I wonder, do we have any evidence that this is a realistic fear? I will blog about this philosophical topic soon. My initial feeling is that our way of life CAN co-exist with a dangerous world, and that we CAN cope with the dangers and remain true to our principles of freedom, and that we CAN resist our natural tendency to cede power to government in times of fear.

So far at least, I have not seen much convincing evidence that the government is clearly abusing its powers on the home front (other than the Data Mining program itself). For example, we don’t have any proof that Bush is using data mining to target and punish his political enemies. And we have no proof that Bush is imprisoning peaceful dissidents. If anything like that is occurring, we hope Congress will discover it in the hearings coming up, or that whistleblowers will come forward.

I should note that Bush does seem to be intolerant of mere peaceful dissent - for example, he has a long history of forcibly preventing peaceful dissenters from attending his speeches. Those private citizens who disagree with Bush must disguise themselves as Bush Supporters in order to get a ticket for a Bush speech, and furthermore they must make sure to continue the charade while standing in line to get into the facility, because if they are ever drop their charade and are identified as NOT being a Bush supporter, they will be forcibly ejected. Bush’s agents even watch the cars in which attendees arrive, looking for signs of NOT being a Bush supporter, such as anti-Bush bumper stickers. I’ve blogged about Bush’s fear of dissent several times. Search my site for links.

Since we already know about Bush’s hostile attitude toward dissent, it makes people very nervous at giving him awesome new power to repress dissent.

Below are some excerpts from the Michael Chertoff interview.

Morton Kondracke interviews Michael Chertoff

While refusing to discuss how the highly classified program works, Chertoff made it pretty clear that it involves “data-mining” — collecting vast amounts of international communications data, running it through computers to spot key words and honing in on potential terrorists.

[snip]
“It’s hard to talk about classified stuff,” he said, “but suffice it to say that if you have a large volume of data, a large number of (phone) numbers you’re intercepting, the typical model for any kind of warrant requires you to establish probable cause (that one party is a foreign agent) on an individual number.”

FISA warrant applications are inches thick, he said, and “if you’re trying to sift through an enormous amount of data very quickly, I think it would be impractical.” He said that getting an ordinary FISA warrant is “a voluminous, time-consuming process” and “if you’re culling through literally thousands of phone numbers … you could wind up with a huge problem managing the amount of paper you’d have to generate.”

[snip]

What I understood Chertoff to be saying is that when data-mining produces evidence of a terrorist contact, the government will then seek a FISA warrant to actually tap the person’s phones or “undertake other kinds of activity in order to disrupt something.”

As legal authority for the program, Chertoff cited a 2002 decision of the FISA Court of Review, which is one level down from the U.S. Supreme Court, holding that a president has “inherent (constitutional) authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence information.”

[snip]

What about the assertion in The New York Times on Tuesday that virtually all of the thousands of NSA leads sent to the FBI in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks led to dead ends or innocent persons?

Chertoff said, “You’re going to bat well below .100 any time you do intelligence gathering. That’s true even in conventional law enforcement. If you get even a small percentage of things to pan out, you’ve succeeded to a significant degree.