The Exercise of Vital Powers

John Tierney on the astronaut thing:

The only way to get the public to pay for a manned mission to Mars, I’ve argued is to turn it into a long-running reality TV show, with a cast of astronauts carefully chosen to maximize romance and ratings.
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I attended the first Georgia Americans For Prosperity town-hall meeting last Tuesday. Congressman Lynn Westmoreland and Herman Cain were the guests of honor. AFP looks to be a good group promoting fiscal responsibility and tax relief in Georgia and nationwide. I look forward to their progress.

At the AFP event, Westmoreland was asked about the Foley Fiasco. It was pretty clear by his explanation that the folks in Washington and in the Media either have no idea the difference between email and IM or they are deliberately trying to confuse the “overtly friendly” emails Hastert’s office was told about with the explicit and disgusting IMs that forced Foley to resign.

Saturday was the Gwinnett GOP’s monthly breakfast. Congressman John Linder was added as a surprise guest to the program. Seems like orders went out to the caucus to motivate the troops, and Linder did as good of a job as can be done defending the GOP’s last six years in office. He too brought up Foleygate and by his comments, it didn’t seem to catch on. They still aren’t getting out the message that Hastert’s office knew about strange emails and not explicit IMs. Also trying to bring up the Stubbs scandal 23 years ago isn’t going to convince anyone that the GOP should be left in office.

Kathy Cox was the other speaker and she had some interesting statistics on Georgia’s SAT scores. Sure we are towards the bottom in ranking and aggregate score. But when you break out the numbers, Georgia has some of the best scores for African Americans among the states where over 50% of the students took the SAT. I need to go find the statistics before I can do the numbers justice.

Finally, tonight was the Georgia Public Policy Foundation’s 15th anniversary. Senator John McCain was the featured speaker. McCain’s speech was canned and he delivered it like a high school kid in his first public speaking class. It was very disappointing. However there were certain parts of the speech were you could tell he was more fired up. The best example of that was when he started talking about Property Rights, Kelo, and the growth of Government. He also made a fairly frank assessment of the GOP’s track record on decreasing the size of government and came close to admitting what I’ve been saying about the National GOP for awhile: They believe that government is good when they are the one who get to run the government.

McCain’s assessment of the North Korea situation seems pretty rational. Two party talks won’t work and will just increase Kim’s stature in the world. We need to pick up the phone and tell China that it is time for them to become a responsible super-power and work with us on resolving the NK situation. If NK isn’t brought under control, Japan, South Korea and even Taiwan will all begin their own nuclear programs in self defense. An asia-pacific nuclear arms race will benefit no one, and will hurt the Chinese the most.

Finally he was asked “What are the first three bills President McCain will send to the Congress?”. His response: Earmark reform, Social Security Reform, Medicare Reform.

I’m starting to warm to the idea of McCain as president. I’m still furious at him for McCain-Feingold. I do think he is more in the right place on torture than the Administration, although I admit I never followed that issue closely. We’ll have to see.

President Bush was in Atlanta on Thursday speaking to the Georgia Public Policy Foundation. This was the 3rd of 4th in a series of speeches trumpeting the Administration’s accomplishments in the War on Terror. The day before the President revealed that some Al Qaeda operatives had been held in secret detention facilities overseas. His speech on Thursday didn’t contain much in the way of revelations, but there was some interesting content.
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I suppose Portgate is the best name for this latest scandal silliness.

Best write up yet is here

I believe there is more to this story than is being reported

Former Senate intelligence committee chair Bob Graham (D-Fla.) was quoted in the Washington Post as saying, “I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy,” … with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches(emphasis mine).

What change in technology? Law Enforcement has had the ability to wiretap on demand due to the CALEA law since 1994.

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller’s statement on publishing the article raises more questions:

“A year ago, when this information first became known to Times reporters, the Administration argued strongly that writing about this eavesdropping program would give terrorists clues about the vulnerability of their communications and would deprive the government of an effective tool for the protection of the country’s security…..

“Second, in the course of subsequent reporting we satisfied ourselves that we could write about this program — withholding a number of technical details – in a way that would not expose any intelligence-gathering methods or capabilities that are not already on the public record. (emphasis mine)

The NSA’s surveillance program ECHELON has been public knowledge since 1999. What clues would the publishing of this story have given the terrorists? More importantly, what clues could the story have given the terrorists what were compelling enough to cause the Times to sit on the story for over a year? Are these the technical details that were not reported?

General Hayden, Director of the NSA:

FISA involves the process — FISA involves marshaling arguments; FISA involves looping paperwork around, even in the case of emergency authorizations from the Attorney General. And beyond that, it’s a little — it’s difficult for me to get into further discussions as to why this is more optimized under this process without, frankly, revealing too much about what it is we do and why and how we do it…

And here the key is not so much persistence as it is agility. It’s a quicker trigger. It’s a subtly softer trigger. And the intrusion into privacy — the intrusion into privacy is significantly less. It’s only international calls. The period of time in which we do this is, in most cases, far less than that which would be gained by getting a court order.

Now, 50 U.S.C. 805 (f), aka FISA, permits the Attorney General to commence emergency surveillance if there is not time to get a FISA judge to issue a warrant. If the NSA were conducting normal FISA surveillance then the FISA law should suffice. But it doesn’t, so the question is why?

One final tidbit that indicates this is more about technology than law. In his handwritten letter to the Vice President after being briefed on the program, Sen. Rockefeller said that “I am neither a technician nor an attorney”. If the NSA were conducting normal run of the mill surveillance, why would he have said he was not a technician?

Here is my theory.

The NSA is using technology and techniques similar to what Google uses in Gmail. With Gmail, Google uses content extraction to scan an email and obtain the “concepts” of the email. Google then displays ads on the page related to those concepts. All of this is done with Google’s usual speed and efficiency.

What if the reason that FISA doesn’t work for “this program”, as Gen. Hayden puts it, is because they are scanning anything that is remotely related to terrorism. Getting FISA warrants for every conversation containing the phrases “Bin Laden”, or “blow up a building” would be impossible. The paperwork generated would be immense. That is why Hayden said it is “more optimized under this process”. The “subtlety softer trigger” may simply be a combination of the phrase “hijack a plane” made on an international call. And since the surveillance is based on the conversation – not on who the end points are, the period of monitoring is much shorter than a normal FISA order would cover.

The next question becomes, is this possible?
My answer is probably, and again I turn to the folks at Google. Consider how much information is on the Internet. Consider how quickly Google returns the results for your query. It is known that Google runs a massively parallelized server farm using the cheapest hardware they can find. Rumors are that Google maintains anywhere from 10,000 to 100,000 servers.

Of course scanning voice is much more difficult than scanning text. I’m not aware of any programs that are processing massive amounts of binary multimedia data in near real time. But the NSA does have the best math geeks in the world, and searching audio streams for key words would be a math problem.

The perplexing part is how the Bush Administration is responding to this revelation. They went on full defensive mode once the story broke. That isn’t the typical MO for the Bush Administration, but they knew a year ago the Times had the story.

Second their legal defense seems incredibly weak as outlined by Professors Kerr and Solove.
Given that they had a year to prepare, couldn’t they have developed something better¹? The AUMF and Article II arguments seem almost designed to put the Administration at odds with Congress.

Is Bush using this disclosure for political advantage? John McIntyre seems to think so. However Bush is playing a dangerous game. Americans like their privacy and with the scenes of 9/11 retreating from people’s minds the Democrats could be able to play this to their advantage.

If Bush can’t quickly kill the interest in this story, then he is going to have to reveal more details to satisfy his critics. However, revealing the details of a massive key word analysis of phone conversations being conducted by the NSA would damage our ability to conduct the war on terror. Once the terrorists know what the NSA is up to they will change their behavior patterns.

The best way for the Administration to handle this is to quiet Congress down about it.

Miers pulled her nomination! woohoo!

By a 2:1 margin, voters in Brazil reject a ban on firearm sales.

First up:

In one of television’s inadvertently funny moments, the NBC News correspondent was paddling in a canoe during a live report about flooding in Wayne, N.J. While she talked, two men walked between her and the camera _ making it apparent that the water where she was floating was barely ankle-deep….

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Next we have photographers in Iraq getting staged shots of “insurgents”.
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Katrina Myths

Finally, TCS has a piece on how Katrina exagerations cost lives.

The Times Picayune is reporting the real reason why Nagin wants to re-populate New Orleans.

With about 75,000 Hurricane Katrina evacuees remaining in Red Cross shelters in several states, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People is trying to organize them, especially black New Orleans residents, to help them return home before next year’s political elections.

The Feds are saying they don’t think its safe. There is another Tropical Storm headed into the gulf. Army Corp of Engineers is not sure the levees could withstand another storm of any size. Yet the mayor is desperately trying to get people back into the city ASAP before the decide to settle down where they are.

Smart Move Nagin. Not.

That is the only message I can take from the fact that the chief of disaster recovery for Louisiana’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness was in New York this week speaking at a symposium.

Speaking at a symposium in New York, Arthur Jones, chief of disaster recovery for Louisiana’s Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness, said he was caught off guard by the violence in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina….
Jones said the flow of aid to the city was delayed because officials were not able to guarantee the safety of American Red Cross workers and other volunteers.

Thats strange Mr. Jones, I thought you told the Red Cross to stay out of the city:

The state Homeland Security Department had requested–and continues to request–that the American Red Cross not come back into New Orleans following the hurricane. Our presence would keep people from evacuating and encourage others to come into the city.

In other news, Blanco is complaining that FEMA isn’t collecting the bodies fast enough, yet:
Federal Emergency Management Agency spokesman David Passey said the state asked to take over body recovery last week. “The collection of bodies is not normally a FEMA responsibility,” he said.

So once more the state of Louisiana screws up and lies about it. But its still all George Bush’s fault.