Obama's New FBI Chief Approved Bush's NSA Warrantless Wiretapping Scheme

[Octafish]

James Comey becomes just the latest symbol of the Obama legacy: normalizing what was very recently viewed as radical

by Glenn Greenwald
Published on Thursday, May 30, 2013 by The Guardian

One of the biggest scandals of the Bush administration (which is really saying something) began on December 16, 2005. That was when the New York Times' James Risen and Eric Lichtblau were finally allowed to reveal what they had learned more than a year earlier: namely, that President Bush, in 2002, had ordered the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the electronic communications of US citizens without first obtaining warrants from the FISA court as required by 30-year-old criminal law. For the next three years, they reported, the NSA "monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants." The two NYT reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for that story.

To say that progressives and liberals bellowed sustained outrage over that revelation is to understate the case. That NSA program was revealed less than two months after I first began writing about political issues, and I spent the next full year overwhelmingly focused on that story, and also wrote my first book on it. In progressive circles, the NSA warrantless eavesdropping program was the pure symbol of Bush/Cheney radicalism and lawlessness: they secretly decided that they were empowered to break the law, to commit what US statutes classified as felonies, based on extremist theories of executive power that held that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, was entitled under Article II of the Constitution to eavesdrop however he wanted in the name of national security, even if it meant doing exactly that which the law forbade.

The FISA law provided that anyone who eavesdrops without the required warrants - exactly what Bush officials did - is committing a felony "punishable by a fine of not more than $10,000 or imprisonment for not more than five years, or both" - for each offense. Moreover, all three federal judges who actually ruled on the merits of the Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program concluded that it violated the law.

So why, then, was there no accountability for this systematic illegal spying? That happened for two reasons. First, both the Bush DOJ and then the Obama DOJ successfully convinced obsequious federal courts that the eavesdropping program was so secretive that national security would be harmed if courts were to adjudicate its legality - in other words, top government officials should be placed above and beyond the rule of law because doing so is necessary to Keep Us Safe™. Second, the Bush DOJ's most senior lawyers - Attorney General John Ashcroft, Deputy Attorney General James Comey and OLC chief Jack Goldsmith - approved a legal memorandum in 2004 endorsing radical executive power theories and warped statutory interpretations, concluding that the Bush NSA warrantless eavesdropping program was legal, thus making it more difficult to prosecute the Bush officials who ordered it (even if the Obama DOJ were inclined to prosecute, which they were not).

CONTINUED w/links...

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/30-7

[MotherPetrie]

1. K&R

[Octafish]

6. It's not Democracy when citizens cannot freely and securely exchange ideas.

In 1976, Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) described what it would mean if the National Security Agency used its ability to eavesdrop on OUR communications:

“That capability at any time could be turned around on the American people and no American would have any privacy left, such is the capability to monitor everything: telephone conversations, telegrams, it doesn’t matter. There would be no place to hide. If this government ever became a tyranny, if a dictator ever took charge in this country, the technological capacity that the intelligence community has given the government could enable it to impose total tyranny, and there would be no way to fight back, because the most careful effort to combine together in resistance to the government, no matter how privately it was done, is within the reach of the government to know. Such is the capability of this technology.

"I don’t want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.”

Frank Church and the Abyss of Warrantless Wiretapping

[ProSense]

2. At least he didn't

approve torture.

What the new Jim Comey torture emails actually reveal

Just as they did with CIA reports on WMDs, Bush officials pressured DOJ lawyers to issue torture-authorizing memos.

By Glenn Greenwald

The New York Times was provided 3 extremely important internal Justice Department emails from April, 2005 (.pdf) – all written by then-Deputy Attorney General Jim Comey — which highlight how the Bush administration’s torture techniques became legally authorized by Bush lawyers. As Marcy Wheeler documents, the leak to the NYT was clearly from someone eager to defend Bush officials by suggesting that Comey’s emails prove that all DOJ lawyers — even those opposed to torture on policy grounds — agreed these techniques were legal, and the NYT reporters, Scott Shane and David Johnston, dutifully do the leakers’ bidding by misleadingly depicting the Comey emails as vindication for Bush/Cheney (Headline: ”U.S. Lawyers Agreed on the Legality of Brutal Tactic”; First Paragraph: ”When Justice Department lawyers engaged in a sharp internal debate in 2005 over brutal interrogation techniques, even some who believed that using tough tactics was a serious mistake agreed on a basic point: the methods themselves were legal”).

I defy anyone to read Comey’s 3 emails and walk away with that conclusion. Marcy has detailed many of the reasons the NYT article is so misleading, so I want to focus on what the Comey emails actually demonstrate about what these DOJ torture memos really are. The primary argument against prosecutions for Bush officials who ordered torture is that DOJ lawyers told the White House that these tactics were legal, and White House officials therefore had the right to rely on those legal opinions. The premise is that White House officials inquired in good faith with the DOJ about what they could and could not do under the law, and only ordered those tactics which the DOJ lawyers told them were legal. As these Comey emails prove, that simply is not what happened.

<...>

What’s most ironic about what the NYT did here is that on the very same day this article appears, there is a column from the NYT Public Editor, Clark Hoyt, excoriating the paper for having published a deeply misleading front page story by Elizabeth Bumiller, that claimed that 1 out of 7 Guantanamo detainees returned to “jihad” once they are released. That happened because Bumiller followed the most common method of modern establishment reporting: she mindlessly repeated what her government sources told her to say. As Hoyt put it:

But the article on which he based that statement was seriously flawed and greatly overplayed. It demonstrated again the dangers when editors run with exclusive leaked material in politically charged circumstances and fail to push back skeptically. The lapse is especially unfortunate at The Times, given its history in covering the run-up to the Iraq war.

That is exactly what Shane and Johnston did with these Comey emails. Just as Bumiller did, they included some contrary facts buried deep in the article about Comey’s objections, but the headline and the way the entire article was framed will create the impression — as intended — that there was unanimity among DOJ lawyers regarding the legality of the Bush interrogation program. Other journalists, too slothful to read the Comey emails themselves, will get the message and go forth and repeat it, and it will soon be conventional wisdom that “everyone” at the DOJ agreed these torture techniques were legal. Already this morning, here is George Stephanopolous’ Twitter reaction to the NYT story:



http://www.salon.com/2009/06/07/torture_memos/

This just goes to show how opinions can differ. I never trusted Comey.

The Greenwald piece about is interesting because it defends Comey and lashes out at the NYT.

[Octafish]

3. Worse: Comey approved the destruction of a human being's mind.

How U.S. Interrogators Destroyed the Mind of Jose Padilla

[nashville_brook]

24. absolutely horrifying. and we wonder why Bush warcrimes weren't pursued.

with this nomination, how can we not see complicity/approval of these tactics by the current administration?

[Octafish]

33. There certainly is a break down in Justice.

[font size="1"]Then-U.S. Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft[/font size]

Mr. Ashcroft never really explained why he chose to stop flying commercial on his customary weekend fishing sojourns back in July 2001.

Ashcroft Flying High

CBS News
February 11, 2009 9:23 PM

Fishing rod in hand, Attorney General John Ashcroft left on a weekend trip to Missouri Thursday afternoon aboard a chartered government jet, reports CBS News Correspondent Jim Stewart.

In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a "threat assessment" by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.

"There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines," an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.

A senior official at the CIA said he was unaware of specific threats against any Cabinet member, and Ashcroft himself, in a speech in California, seemed unsure of the nature of the threat.

"I don't do threat assessments myself and I rely on those whose responsibility it is in the law enforcement community, particularly the FBI. And I try to stay within the guidelines that they've suggested I should stay within for those purposes," Ashcroft said.

Asked if he knew anything about the threat or who might have made it, the attorney general replied, "Frankly, I don't. That's the answer."

CONTINUED...

http://www.cbsnews.com/2100-201_162-303601.html

As absurd as it sounds, Ashcroft and Comey aren't even the worst of Them.

[Luminous Animal]

9. Actually Comey signed off on "kinder, gentler", torture. From the same article

The part that you missed:

It’s worth noting that all of the officials involved in these events — including Comey — are right-wing ideologues appointed by George Bush. That’s why they were appointed. The fact that Comey was willing to go along with approval of these tactics when used individually — just as is true of his willingness to endorse a modified version of Bush’s NSA warrantless eavesdropping program in the face of FISA — hardly proves that there was a good-faith basis for the view that these individual tactics were legal.

http://www.salon.com/2009/06/07/torture_memos/

What Comey was unwilling to sign off on was the combined usage of torture on people. What he signed off on was subjecting people to an individual torture technique.

[ProSense]

12. The paragraph

The part that you missed:

It’s worth noting that all of the officials involved in these events — including Comey — are right-wing ideologues appointed by George Bush. That’s why they were appointed. The fact that Comey was willing to go along with approval of these tactics when used individually — just as is true of his willingness to endorse a modified version of Bush’s NSA warrantless eavesdropping program in the face of FISA — hardly proves that there was a good-faith basis for the view that these individual tactics were legal.

http://www.salon.com/2009/06/07/torture_memos/

What Comey was unwilling to sign off on was the combined usage of torture on people. What he signed off on was subjecting people to an individual torture technique.

...you cited is about "Bush’s NSA warrantless eavesdropping program," not torture.

Here is what you missed from the link:

Any rational and minimally well-informed person who actually read the Comey emails would walk away with the exact opposite point — what is “stunning” was how extreme was the pressure from the White House to issue these memos and how compliant DOJ lawyers were to White House dictates. But that’s how our media works: anonymous government officials tell them what to say; they write it down uncritically; and it then becomes conventional wisdom regardless of how false it is.

[uponit7771]

19. ***Another fact based persepective from ProSense*** Thx much for the links

[NOVA_Dem]

37. Why won't you link to the article Glenn Greenwald wrote yesterday?

Greenwald said that Comey approved torture and approved the version of the NSA program that everyone here was correctly offended by and called unconstitutional.

Obama's new FBI chief approved Bush's NSA warrantless wiretapping scheme
James Comey becomes just the latest symbol of the Obama legacy: normalizing what was very recently viewed as radical
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2013/may/30/james-comey-fbi-bush-nsa

it was Comey who gave his legal approval to enable that NSA eavesdropping program to spy on Americans without warrants: the same program that produced so much outrage and scandal when revealed by the NYT. How can any progressive who spent the Bush years vehemently denouncing that domestic spying program as the symbol of Bush radicalism and lawlessness now cheer when the lawyer who approved it is about to be put in charge of the FBI?

and

he was the lawyer who legally approved that warrantless NSA program that the New York Times revealed that caused so much scandal. And he was part of the process that legalized the torture techniques used by the Bush administration. How can that possibly not disqualify him from running the FBI in the eyes of progressives who claimed to find all of that so atrocious and such an assault on all that is dear and good in the world?

[struggle4progress]

46. Greenwald is currently still in his "split Progressives from Dems by any means possible" mode,

so when Greenwald sees a chance to take digs at Obama, we shouldn't expect any consistency between what he said in 2009 and what he says today

[leveymg]

4. "The Program" Comey, Goldsmith objected to is the NSA "Thin Thread" program

I think "The Program" that Comey and Goldsmith objected to, and talked Ashcroft into modifying, was the NSA "Thin Thread" program described by Jane Mayer in her 2011 New Yorker profile of NSA Whistleblower, Bill Binney.

Going backwards, related programs included Trailblazer, an NSA program that focused on interception and analysis of data carried on web communications networks, cell phones, VOIP, and e-mail. After receiving widely-reported adverse publicity Trailblazer was shutdown but reportedly morphed into the NSA Turbulance Program. Thin Thread was a rival, and until more recently still secret, NSA program that went operational, resulting in massive domestic surveillance. This is described by Jane Mayer in a 2011 New Yorker article: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer?currentPage=all

"Code-named ThinThread, it had been developed by
technological wizards in a kind of Skunk Works on the N.S.A. campus. Formally, the project was supervised by the agency’s Signals Intelligence Automation Research Center, or SARC.

While most of the N.S.A. was reeling on September 11th, inside SARC the horror unfolded “almost like an ‘I-told-you-so’ moment,” according to J. Kirk Wiebe, an intelligence analyst who worked there. “We knew we weren’t keeping up.” SARC was led by a crypto-mathematician named Bill Binney, whom Wiebe describes as “one of the best analysts in history.”

Binney and a team of some twenty others believed that they had
pinpointed the N.S.A.’s biggest problem—data overload—and then solved it. But the agency’s management hadn’t agreed.

Binney, who is six feet three, is a bespectacled sixty-seven-year-old man with wisps of dark hair; he has the quiet,
tense air of a preoccupied intellectual. Now retired and suffering
gravely from diabetes, which has already claimed his left leg, he agreed recently to speak publicly for the first time about the Drake case. When we met, at a restaurant near N.S.A. headquarters, he leaned crutches against an extra chair. “This is too serious not to talk about,” he said.

Binney expressed terrible remorse over the way some of his
algorithms were used after 9/11. ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.” According to Binney, Drake took his side against the N.S.A.’s management and, as a result, became a political target within the agency.

Binney described Thin Thread to Mayer, who describes The Program this way:

ThinThread would correlate data from financial transactions, travel records, Web searches, G.P.S. equipment, and any other “attributes” that an analyst might find useful in pinpointing “the
bad guys.” By 2000, Binney, using fibre optics, had set up a computer network that could chart relationships among people in real time. It also turned the N.S.A.’s data-collection paradigm upside down. Instead of vacuuming up information around the world and then sending it all back to headquarters for analysis, ThinThread processed information as it was collected—discarding useless information on the spot and avoiding the overload problem that plagued centralized systems. Binney says,
“The beauty of it is that it was open-ended, so it could keep
expanding.”

Pilot tests of ThinThread proved almost too successful, according to a former intelligence expert who analyzed it. “It was nearly perfect,” the official says. “But it processed such a large amount of data that it picked up more Americans than the other systems.” Though ThinThread was intended to intercept foreign communications, it continued documenting signals when a trail crossed into the U.S.

< . . .>

Binney, for his part, believes that the agency now stores copies of
all e-mails transmitted in America, in case the government wants to
retrieve the details later. In the past few years, the N.S.A. has built
enormous electronic-storage facilities in Texas and Utah. Binney says that an N.S.A. e-mail database can be searched with “dictionary selection,” in the manner of Google. After 9/11, he says, “General Hayden reassured everyone that the N.S.A. didn’t put out dragnets, and that was true. It had no need—it was getting every fish in the sea.” [end excerpt]

The thing that's different about the The Program as it was modified by Comey, Goldsmith, Ashcroft is a feature retrieved from Binney's original Thin Thread design that employs algorithms to determine that due cause exists to obtain a FISA warrant before US Person identities are revealed to the analyst. That may be a small difference, but it is a difference.

[Autumn]

11. replied to wrong post

Last edited Fri May 31, 2013, 12:26 PM - Edit history (1)

[Octafish]

13. National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance

Democracy Now interviewed Binney last year:

EXCERPT...

WILLIAM BINNEY: Well, and, you see, the World Wide Web routes things all over, so you never really know where U.S. citizens’ communications are going to be routed. So, you—if you were collecting somewhere else on another continent, you could still get U.S. citizens. That’s—see, that was a universal problem. So we devised how to do that and protect U.S. citizens. So—and this was all before 9/11. And we devised how to do that, made that effective and operating. So we were actually prepared to deploy about eight months before 9/11 and actually have a system that would run and manage the—what I call 20 terabytes a minute of activity.

So—but after 9/11, all the wraps came off for NSA, and they decided to—between the White House and NSA and CIA, they decided to eliminate the protections on U.S. citizens and collect on domestically. So they started collecting from a commercial—the one commercial company that I know of that participated provided over 300—probably, on the average, about 320 million records of communication of a U.S. citizen to a U.S. citizen inside this country.

AMY GOODMAN: What company?

WILLIAM BINNEY: AT&T. It was long-distance communications. So they were providing billing data. At that point, I knew I could not stay, because it was a direct violation of the constitutional rights of everybody in the country. Plus it violated the pen register law and Stored Communications Act, the Electronic Privacy Act, the intelligence acts of 1947 and 1978. I mean, it was just this whole series of—plus all the laws covering federal communications governing telecoms. I mean, all those laws were being violated, including the Constitution. And that was a decision made that wasn’t going to be reversed, so I could not stay there. I had to leave.

CONTINUED w/video, transcript, etc...

http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_whistleblower_william

Thanks for the heads-up, leveymg! A thin thread ties us all...

[Kurovski]

5. K&R. (nt)

[Octafish]

32. When only certain people can be privy to the secrets of a nation...

...then those secrets are known only by insiders in Washington -- and their bosses or future bosses on Wall Street.

Shadow CIA' buys state secrets for cash via Swiss bank accounts, claims WikiLeaks as it releases 'stolen' files

Five million emails obtained from U.S.-based global security analysis firm Stratfor 'will reveal murky truth about intelligence gathering'

Julian Assange claims firm is monitoring activists for corporate giants and taking information from U.S. government department insider

By DAILY MAIL REPORTER

Last updated at 8:43 PM on 27th February 2012

Whistleblowing website WikiLeaks today started to publish more than five million confidential emails from the global intelligence company Stratfor.

The emails, dated from July 2004 to late December 2011, are said to reveal the 'inner workings' of US-based firm known as the 'Shadow CIA'.

Among the allegations to emerge is that Stratfor's claim to be a media organisation providing a subscription intelligence newsletter is a front for 'running paid informants networks' and 'laundering those payments through the Bahamas, through Switzerland, through private credit cards'.

SNIP...

The group said the emails expose a 'revolving door' in private intelligence companies in the U.S., claiming government and diplomatic sources give Stratfor advance knowledge of global politics and events in exchange for money.

CONTINUED ...

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2107041/WikiLeaks-releases-stolen-files-Shadow-CIA-buys-state-secrets-cash-Swiss-bank.html

And to think people actually wonder why it is the rich keep getting richer and the rest poorer.

[H2O Man]

7. Recommended.

Thanks for this!

[Mnemosyne]

8. K&R nt

[blkmusclmachine]

10. "Change" You Can't BeLIEve In!

Win The Future!

[MotherPetrie]

17. Hail to the new criminal boss...same as the old criminal boss. I've always

Thought the reason Obamadmin ignored BushCo crimes was to set a self-protecting precedent, but seeding his own administration with Bushies like this one and torture-promoting John Brennan (and his couldn't-keep-it-in-his-pants predecessor) makes it abundantly clear that Obama truly had no issues with BushCo's spying on citizens and illegal torture torture and wars. If he did he wouldn't reward their practitioners.

[Safetykitten]

14. But, but ...he was one of the good guys...he stood up against...oh nevermind.

[Puzzledtraveller]

15. It seemed some here came to the defense of this pick really fast too

now that the details are clear, where are they?

[L0oniX]

18. Church. n/t

[pocoloco]

22. Back up Obama's ass....

but don't worry , they will be back.

[nashville_brook]

23. bwahahahaha...

yep.

[rhett o rick]

28. If they do come back, I wont know. I have the bunch on ignore. I was getting sick of their

blind adoration.

[ProSense]

30. Is that

"Back up Obama's ass...."

...where you think Howard Dean went?

http://www.democraticunderground.com/10022927987

[L0oniX]

16. OK ...let's all be good patriots and accept the implants.

I may have been born here but this is NOT my country.

[Eyerish]

20. K&R nt

[Autumn]

21. Recommended

nothing more to say

[Pragdem]

25. Except all the news sources that matter contradicts these blatant lies. nt

[rhett o rick]

26. Dont leave us hanging. Tell us more. nm

[Rex]

29. Such as?

Please leave us a link or two from the news sources that matter. I am sure you will be right back in here to prove your claim!

[Corruption Inc]

27. Rec'd

So many laws, so few followers.

[MinM]

31. Comey is the one who appointed Fitzgerald to do the Plame leak investigation

Of course his buddy Fitz could not find enough evidence to indict Cheney or Rove.

This appointment also paves the way for Mike Rogers (R-MI) to take over Carl Levin's seat. Lose -lose.

http://www.rigorousintuition.ca/board2/viewtopic.php?f=17&t=32946

[byeya]

34. Fitzgerald, after being praised so highly, was a weak fish, wasn't he?

[awoke_in_2003]

45. As weak as Harry Reid. nt

[Skittles]

44. yes I remember everyone being held accountable

oh wait

[Corruption Inc]

35. A felon and a torturer to head the FBI? It's unbelievably horrific

and yet people just line up and start making excuses for it.

Just how corrupt has the U.S. become is the real question, it seems boundless.

[indepat]

36. Jesus, with nominations like this, it seems we have a kinder, gentler, albeit more

competent, 4th GWB administration in place.

[NOVA_Dem]

38. well...

Bush didn't make 80-90% of his tax cuts permanent and he never had a "kill" list and he didn't claim the right to execute US citizens without due process and I don't believe Bush ransacked reporters emails to find whistle-blowers.

[indepat]

40. Well, so much for the kinder and gentler bit

[PufPuf23]

39. What is it with Obama and the GWB retreads?

There are literally thousands of qualified liberal Democratic Party members without "baggage" or even independents or GOP members of skill, experience, and moral stature.

Disgusted with the appointments and disgusted with anyone at DU that apologizes for GWB retreads.

There is no acceptable justification that appointment of GWB retreads, especially those complicit in questionable actions, being part of a Democratic elected Executive Branch.

[indepat]

41. Look at it as proliferation of the right-wing's agenda minus some of the really crazy

stuff.

[Coyotl]

42. James Comey testifies before Senate Judiciary

[forestpath]

43. Comey and Obama are 2 peas in a pro-warantless wiretapping pod.