Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

More on NSA data mining

NY Times:

The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials. (who are commiting a crime by talking about this material with reporters.)

The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said.

As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain back-door access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.

The government's collection and analysis of phone and Internet traffic has raised questions among some law enforcement and judicial officials familiar with the program. One issue of concern to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which has reviewed some separate warrant applications growing out of the N.S.A.'s surveillance program, is whether the court has legal authority over calls outside the United States that happen to pass through American-based telephonic "switches," according to officials familiar with the matter.

"There was a lot of discussion about the switches" in conversations with the court, a Justice Department official said, referring to the gateways through which much of the communications traffic flows. "You're talking about access to such a vast amount of communications, and the question was, How do you minimize something that's on a switch that's carrying such large volumes of traffic? The court was very, very concerned about that."

Since the disclosure last week of the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance program, President Bush and his senior aides have stressed that his executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants was limited to the monitoring of international phone and e-mail communications involving people with known links to al Qaeda.

What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.

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The NY Times is facilitating a criminal disclosure of information that tells the enemy some of our sources and uses of intelligence on enemy operations designed to attack this country. This is being done on the flimsy premise that the searches are unlawfaul, when the only court cases suggest that the operations are entirely legal. These former and current employees who are illegally providing this information to theTimes need to be caught and prosecuted. The current employees should all be given lie dector test and be required to sign waivers of confidentiality agreements with reporters. Those who will not sign them should be terminated immediately.

The existance of this program probably explains some of the earlier reluctance to discuss the Able Danger operation. In fact, this operation as describes sounds a lot like Able Danger.