Nixon was not under indictment.

Weinberger was indicted but had not yet gone to trial when he was pardoned.

True, but I'm going to plead "distinction without difference" here and say Ford pre-empted even the possibility Nixon would be indicted which would have been a great way to refer to Nixon in future, "as indicted Republican president Richard Nixon said..."

It also pre-empted any level of formal criminal investigation into Nixon's crimes, which could have helped America avert such characters as Cheney, Rove and Fred Fielding (thought not likely since Bush was comfortable hiring several Iran contra convicts like Eliott Abrhams, so the stain of committing felonies against your nation is no bar to public service in a Republican administration it seems).

The real question is, how will we deal with the newly minted set of bad pennies who have come up with Bush? They will blossom into full on authoritarian psychopaths come the next Republican administration. There was a long time between Nixon and Bush II, there are plenty of people working for Bush who are young enough to be in their prime for 2020 or 2024.

Bush's final round of pardons in January will dwarf anything attempted by any other president in history. I'm thinking there will be blanket pardons for unnamed people who might ever come up in any investigation relating to some list of matters.

Bush will issue the first ever "class action pardon."

Bush needs the telcoms to get immunity now, because not only will his lawbreaking be disclosed, but as the suits drag on into 2009 and beyond he could be compelled to testify as he'll no longer be a sitting President.

On a somewhat tangential note. I was a subscriber to a huge wireless provider, perhaps 6 months into a two-year contract, when the news hit about how said huge wireless provider and others had dumped all their call records to the NSA without any warrants or other legal process. They just did it because the NSA asked them to. I called my wireless provider and canceled my contract. I explained that they violated the terms of the contract by providing my phone records without my permission or any legally binding request from the government. They canceled my contract without penalty. I subscribed to T-Mobile that same day as they were one of the few companies that refused to comply with the governments "request".

The other day, on another thread about FISA, I worked on and came up with the proposition that it was now crucially important to decide whether the 4th amendment right to protection from unwarranted search and seizure meant that the data should not be collected, or whether it meant it should not be read. In specific, I queried whether the file on Martin Luther King, Jr. was wrong because it was compiled, or because the government acted on it.

I received a couple of replies, one bothered me, suggesting that this was an age old problem that had been debated long ago and determined to be a logical fallacy. I'm not a logician, but as a practicing mathematician, and therefore someone who uses at least rudimentary logic and proof on a daily basis, I can assure that there is no logical fallacy in the query.

The problem becomes explicit in the FISA debate, twice. The first is the problem of minimization, targeting, continuation, and rollback (Ugh, the broken record is going on again!). These procedures and rules focus on data that, essentially, "should not have been acquired". Minimization focuses on accidentally acquired data, and mandates that no use shall be made of the data and no one shall see it (in the proposed legislation). It specifically does not mandate that it should be destroyed. Targeting mandates that adequate specification of who is being surveilled be provided. It mandates that the court needs to review the procedures and determine that the targeting is sufficiently narrow. Continuation is a proposed procedure that if surveillance has been begun before a court issued warrant, and the court finds the procedures or targets not sufficient for ordering a warrant, the government may continue the surveillance while it makes modifications, and appeals -- in other words the denied procedure continues during the appeals. The White House web site, when comparing the SSIC and SJC versions of the amendments, placed very high importance on continuation. Rollback is not in the current law, and is not in the House RESTORE bill, either. It was in the SJC version. It stipulates that any automated use of illegally obtained information - data that must be minimized or data that failed to get an a posteriori warrant, must be rolled back - a database term for undoing the operations back to the beginning of the procedure. If datamining was done, this procedure makes sure the datamining software does not learn the information and keep the knowledge.

Only the rollback procedure indicates that the acquisition of the data, compiling the file on Martin Luther King Jr., is the unreasonable search and seizure, the other provisions all indicate that it is acting on his file that breaks the 4th amendment prohibition. The use of Dr. King's file as an example was deliberate: He, and later his reputation, remained a target of suspicion the entire period that the folder existed. Furthermore, one point of these types of prohibitions is to eliminate the culture of fear, the fear of being watched. Note that it is the fear of being watched that will cause you to change your vocabulary and self-regulate your freedoms of expression. The file does not have to be read to feel that, if it did, all blackmailers would be out of business.

I spent a week puzzling with this. It isn't a simple problem in AI/datamining anymore. And our behavior isn't consistent on it with respect to data collection. Our behavior is also seldom informed on that subject, either. It's extremely difficult when it comes to fragments of images, phrases, text in and out of context, contextual search, sharing of information, background checks, internet security, and on and on....

What I came up with is that there is a missing piece to our government. Because the new government secrecy and intelligence functions were implemented by executive order in 1947 and at other times, and because there has only been oversight, the occasional limitation either in the form of a FISA law or a judicial order barring some form of surveillance, there is no real check and balance system when it comes to classifying data. There are only guidelines (which may or may not be followed), and the entire classification/declassification process is within the executive branch. There can not be a solution to this problem, as we move into the age of data mining and internet traffic, unless there is a means for declassifying data or challenging its classification, for the legislative and judicial branches.

How does this spark off Glenn's current blog? The twin arguments have been put forth that on the one hand there is no impediment to national security by submitting to court scrutiny, that courts can and do look at classified data on a regular basis, and on the other hand, we need these court cases so that we can find out what the government did.

Well....yeah, but either the court can keep a secret and we don't find out what the government did, or the court doesn't keep secrets and we do, but a national security argument gains validity. The SSIC believes they went through the government's programs, requests to the telecoms, and OLC legal justifications, and they are keeping it a secret and telling the public what it needs to know. Here's the document:

http://intelligence.senate.gov/071025/report.pdf.

I was unable, going through all my stuff on datamining, to come up with a solution in terms of which data to collect, or even in terms of when it was acquisition and when it was transformation that produced the intrusion. So it seems to me that the only thing that can really be done is to empower the Congress and the courts with the ability to classify and declassify information, and subject classification, when there is an issue, to review without any exception for emergency or the exigency of any particular situation.

End of soliloquy.