Letters to the Editor
ondelette
Published Letters: 2259 Editor's Choice: 19
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Some more thoughts
[Read the article: More fallout from the Comey revelations]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Just a few comments on what Glenn has written today. While I admire the heck out of him for carrying this forward, I think there are some points about all this to remember:
1) I think we should go easier on Comey with the "why didn't you come forward before" stuff. Remember the timeline: NYT publishes about this in 2005, Newsweek carries the hospital story the same year. It later emerges, and the NYT is still taking it (rightly) in the neck for, that they had the story before the 2004 election and sat on it. Only two people could have given it to Newsweek, Comey or Goldsmith, and whoever did, also probably leaked to the NYT. So someone did come forward, in the Ellsberg sense, however anonymously, in 2004 before the election. It happened in March, that leaves you 6 months of "sooner" to complain about.
2) A related point is that when all this was going down, the NYT hadn't (obviously) leaked the program yet. These people were all committed Republican terror catchers. The threat of a mass exodus at Justice wasn't a threat of doing a Saturday Night Massacre to them, it was a threat of exposing a highly classified program whose purpose they all agreed on, they disagreed on method -- even the staunchest civil libertarian would not have disagreed with the goal, they'd have disagreed with the methods and their implications. So they were all, even Comey and Goldsmith, looking for a way to resolve it quietly: accomplish the goal without trampling rights. But this makes it all the more crucial that we find out what it was they were objecting to.
3) Don't be letting Hiatt off too easily. I know we should encourage any glimmers we see (there are some from Kurtz this morning too), but he does say, "Under the Constitution, the president has the final authority in the executive branch to say what the law is." I'm not a lawyer, but I was so stunned by the comment I went and read Article II, and then the rest of it, and, Glenn will have to help me out, I couldn't find that authority in there. Sounds like a "no law broken by the president here" comment to me. Hiatt will be perfectly satisfied, if disgusted, when Gonzales' head rolls and no one else's.
All that said, I agree that these people are only the modified limited versions of heroic. Similar kudos were heaped all over John McCain for refusing to endorse torture with enthusiasm at the Republican toy-soldiers-in-suits II the other night. The man has twice sponsored legislation restricting habeas corpus, and once sponsored legislation giving the president the right to decide what torture is.
And I'm still worried for the country and the human race when I see how slowly all these worms turn.
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@Fraud Guy
[Read the article: More fallout from the Comey revelations]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I think that sysprog nailed the reasons for the needed signature up page. Way to go, sysprog.
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More thoughts on dates
[Read the article: More fallout from the Comey revelations]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The new authorization was needed on March 12, it had been studied for several weeks, it had thus been sought in the Jan-Feb 2004 timeframe. Mark Klein had been asked to route new circuits to the optical splitter for the Narus STA in San Francisco in October 2003, and:
My job required me to connect new circuits to the "splitter" cabinet and get them up and running. While working on a particularly difficult one with a technician back East, I learned that other such "splitter" cabinets were being installed in other cities, including Seattle, San Jose, Los Angeles and San Diego.
[...]
Based on my understanding of the connections and equipment at issue, it appears the NSA is capable of conducting what amounts to vacuum-cleaner surveillance of all the data crossing the internet -- whether that be peoples' e-mail, web surfing or any other data.
Assuming they finished with all the splitter cabinets by some time in January, the phone companies would have been ready to go live with the data mining operation at about the time that the signature suddenly became very necessary.
(It's up to you whether you want to speculate that this data mining was as important to "the math" as the voter fraud investigations, being pressed at the same time).
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@Rick
[Read the article: More fallout from the Comey revelations]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Would it be correct to say that although YANATL, YAAL? If so, could you answer one for me?
Comey testified that Ashcroft wasn't oriented to time and place. In emergency medicine that makes him A&OX1 (Alert and Oriented times 1, i.e. he knows his name). He is definitely not competent to give consent to care, or to sign any medical legal document.
But isn't it coercion or something to try to get a signature out of someone while they aren't competent?
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@Frankly @Denning @Paul D
[Read the article: More fallout from the Comey revelations]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I'm still working on the theory I put up earlier that the timing is related to the new equipment for internet data mining coming online. Mark Klein was installing splitter cabinets (and he said others were too) starting October 2003, so this is consistent timing with the time it takes new technology to be installed, tested, and go live.
It would be of interest then that the description contains:
The split circuits included traffic from peering links connecting to other internet backbone providers, meaning that AT&T was also diverting traffic routed from its network to or from other domestic and international providers, according to Klein's statement.
(my emphasis)
It is known that "Son of TIA" starts development in Singapore in 2005, but there were deployments of data mining equipment and software to places like Iraq/Afghanistan earlier. The controversy over TIA and government data mining erupted about the same time (almost to the week) as the beginning of the Iraq war.
The systems with the Narus STA were installed earlier, but something changed that required new circuitry and maybe the new sign-off. Is it possible that data mining, either domestically or off-shore caused the review and rejection?