Samuel Johnson remarked that a second marriage is a triumph of hope over experience. Another such triumph is evident in Mathew Cooper's piece in Time Magazine.
To date, the Bush administration has enjoyed public support for a slew of policies — including detentions without trials and new methods of eavesdropping — that critics describe as an encroachment on civil liberties. Last year, the Democrats tried to make renewal of the USA Patriot Act an issue, but in the end they buried their objections and passed a bill that Bush could sign. When the NSA's policy of warrentless eavesdropping on some domestic calls was revealed by The New York Times in December, Democrats along with many Republicans also screamed from the rafters, but the program proved popular with the public. Presidential advisers thought it was such a winner that they put it in Bush's State of the Union address. Despite calls to investigate the program and shut it down, what the White House dubs the "terrorist surveillance program" continued unabated. Will the new revelations about the NSA tip the balance? Perhaps.
Perhaps not. The last time the NSA surveillance programs became an issue, Bush gained ten points in the polls. I wouldn't hold my breath for a repeat, but neither do I expect this story to make a difference either way. To begin with, the recent revelations aren't recent. They were already reported in the New York Times. Secondly, what is revealed is not exactly shocking news. John Hinderaker at Powerline has this:
Liberals are jumping up and down about USA Today's publication of another leak relating to the National Security Agency. It's considered a news flash that the NSA is collecting data on phone calls, with the cooperation of almost all of the major telecom companies, to look for suspicious patterns. This is a "data mining" project that does not involve listening in on conversations, but merely identifying phone numbers involved in possible terrorist communications. . . .
[I]t's obvious that what the NSA does with this vast amount of data is to run it through computers, looking for suspicious patterns, especially involving known or suspected terrorist phone numbers. I did a quick calculation: assuming that there are 200 million adult Americans, each of whom places or receives ten phone calls a day (a conservative estimate, I think), it would require a small army of 35,000 full-time NSA employees to pay a total of one second of attention to each call. In other words, lighten up: the NSA obviously isn't tracking your phone calls with your friends and relatives.
In other words, the NSA is using data analysis to try to find communications between terrorists. How important is this? Hinderaker draws our attention to this story from Macleans Canada:
LONDON (AP) - The suicide bombers who killed 52 passengers on London's transit system had a string of contacts with someone in Pakistan just before striking, Britain's top law enforcement official said Thursday. . . .
Thursday's report by the Intelligence and Security Committee concluded that intelligence agents had been alerted to two of the suicide bombers before the attacks but limited resources prevented them from uncovering the plot.
The committee said intelligence agents did not concentrate on the two terror suspects - Siddique Khan and Shazad Tanweer - because they were not believed to be an urgent threat and investigators decided to focus on "known plans to attack the U.K."
[Home Secretary John] Reid, speaking of the contacts in Pakistan ahead of the attacks, said authorities did not know what was discussed. Authorities have long held that the four bombers were homegrown terrorists who acted alone.
"There are a series of suspicious contacts from an unknown individual or individuals in Pakistan in the immediate run-up to the bombings," Reid said after his department released its narrative of the attacks. "We do not know their content."
Because the Brits were already monitoring phone communications, they had the information they needed to foil the London bombing, if only they had had the resources to exploit it. It appears that they have since foiled several would-be attacks. Maybe NSA data mining can help remedy the limited resources of Western Intelligence Agencies, and so prevent the next atrocity. If so, shouldn't it have access to vast databases of phone numbers that might have tipped us off to the last major attack?
Hinderaker points out that the data handed over to the NSA by major telecom firms is data they already share with one another. Here is some interesting information from Qwest's "Privacy Policy" webpage.
The information we obtain from you is generally necessary for us to provide your services and design new services for your future use. For example, we need to know your name, address and the services you buy from us to properly provide and bill for those services. When you call us, our representatives pull up account records and may refer to your bill, your calling patterns, and other information we have to answer questions you may have or recommend how we can best serve you.
We may also use information in our records to protect our customers, employees or property — for instance, to investigate fraud, harassment or other types of unlawful service activities involving Qwest or other carriers that we do business with. In some cases, it may be necessary to provide this information to the government or third parties who make a lawful demand for it.
Okay. Who else gets information about "calling patterns"?
We share information within our Qwest companies to enable us to better understand our customers' product and service needs, and to learn how to best design, develop, and package products and services to meet those needs.
And? Come on, who else?
As a general rule, Qwest does not release customer account information to unaffiliated third parties without your permission unless we have a business relationship with those companies where the disclosure is appropriate. For example, we may hire outside companies as contractors or agents; or we might be engaged in a joint venture or partnership with a company. Upon occasion, Qwest may decide to stop providing a service or may decide to sell or transfer parts of our business to unaffiliated companies. When this happens, we may provide confidential customer information to these companies so that they can offer you the same or similar services. In all of these situations, we provide information to these other companies only as needed to accomplish our business objectives and the companies are bound by requirements to keep Qwest customers' information confidential.
But of course . . .
There are exceptions to the general rule. For example, we might provide information to regulatory or administrative agencies so that they can accomplish their regulatory tasks (for example, responding to a customer complaint) or to maximize the efficiencies of our own processes (such as getting mailing addresses correct, for example). Other disclosures will be driven by legal requirements imposed on Qwest. Qwest complies with "legal process," such as a subpoena or court order or other similar demand, associated with either criminal or civil proceedings.
So what exactly is this scandal that so appalls Senator Patrick Leahy? What is it that Mathew Cooper thinks will finally turn Americans against the National Security Agency? It concerns information that Qwest already shares with its affiliates, subsidiaries, and business partners, as well as with God knows how many "regulatory or administrative agencies." The scandal is that this information has also been shared with agencies that are trying to prevent the next terrorist attack. Maybe, just maybe, the real scandal is that we weren't doing this kind of surveillance all along.
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