Federal agents raid home of CIA’s former No. 3 boss

Federal agents Friday morning raided the home of Kyle “Dusty” Foggo, who stepped down this week from the No. 3 post at the CIA amid accusations of improper ties to a defense contractor named as a co-conspirator in the bribery case of former Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham.

I’m convinced there’s a war going on between the CIA and White House. This is just one more round. Oh sure, the allegations may well be true. But why now? Ditto for the NSA phone monitoring. The story has been around for months but just broke nationally after the CIA got attacked by the White House. I doubt this is coincidence.

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Democrats won’t try to impeach President

Seeking to choke off a Republican rallying cry, the House’s top Democrat has told colleagues that the party will not seek to impeach President Bush even if it gains control of the House in November’s elections, her office said last night.

The Republicans impeached Clinton on far less serious charges, yet Democrats continue to be too spineless to do anything. They are pathetic, so scared of being attacked that they do nothing. History will not be kind to them.

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More on why the NSA spying is Orwellian, intrusive - and won’t work - if indeed the actual reason for it is to catch terrorists and not create a database to be used against political enemies.

Crypto and security expert Bruce Schneier says

Unchecked police and military power is a security threat — just as important a threat as unchecked terrorism. There is no reason to sacrifice the former to obtain the latter, and there are very good reasons not to.

What the data is really for

This data as a means to track al Qaeda is too polluted to make any sense. No one I know who wants to discuss something truly confidential does so over the phone. Why think any terrorist would? Evil is not synonymous with stupid.

Unlike use for a terrorist search, where almost everyone picked up is useless to the purpose and a waste of finite resources, all data IS useful if it were collected to compile a political-network database … every hit will fall into one of three categories: friend, foe or apolitcal (or good fish, bad fish, throw-back-in-the-pond-and-check-later fish, in a continuing program, and this program may have really started in late 2000.)

FBI: NSA data lead to thousands of dead ends

That’s right. It doesn’t work. Instead it provides garbage data which wastes countless hours trying to verify.

John Robb weighs in

IF we knew who the terrorist is, they would be under surveillance and all the calls they made would be tracked. This program is being built because we DON’T know who the terrorist is. It is attempting to tease potential terrorists out of the data on patterns of behavior where no link to a known entity exists. In short: a very harmful boondoggle.

My money is on the cop, trained in counter-terrorism (like NYC and LA is going to), that works the beat.

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NSA spying on domestic phone calls is not only evil, anti-democratic, and Orwellian, it also won’t work. Outrage against this noxious governmental monitoring on citizens for no discernable reason has been huge and from both parties. Good.
From Global Guerillas

Noah, at DefenseTech, tapped Valdis Krebs for his analysis of the problems with the slowly leaked details on the NSAs domestic surveillance efforts. Valdis makes the absolutely correct observation that:

The right thing to do is to look for the best haystack, not the biggest haystack. We knew exactly which haystack to look at in the year 2000 [before the 9/11 attacks]. We just didn’t do it...

To me, it’s pretty clear that the people working on this program aren’t as smart as they think they are. Some top level thinking indicates that this will quickly become a rat hole for federal funds (due to wasted effort) and a major source of infringement of personal freedom. Here’s some detail:

* It will generate oodles of false positives.
* It will be expanded to include to monitor domestic groups other than al Qaeda.
* The database and associated information will be used for purposes other than tracking groups.

Not to mention the presumed billions of dollars it will cost. Who is the contractor for this monster database? Might be quite revealing to discover precisely who is getting wealthy off this. Or who in goverment quietly resigns and then gets a cushy job with those same contractors.

Bush of course said the spying wasn’t infringing on anyone’s rights. Goodness, no, why would a program to track every phone call made in the US be considered an invasion of privacy? Is Bush is so deluded he actually believes what he says? More probably, he’s lied so much and so often that he no longer knows, or cares about, the difference.

From AmericaBlog, “We don’t even remotely have the entire story about this new phone-records domestic spying scandal”, with a multitude of comments. They’re wondering, just how big is this database and precisely what is in it.

More from Kos, How 1984 works in 2006 - Wiretapping unveiled

The ACLU is suing NSA and a raft of class action lawsuits against the phone companies who turned over the records without a whimper are expected.

This could be a death knell for the Bush Administration. Indeed, his popularity has now dropped to 29%, and that poll was before this story broke.

And no, this didn’t start with Bush. It’s been going on for decades. The Bushies are just greedier, less careful, and far less competent. That’s why most everything they do eventually blows up in their faces. But the real problem is systemic. The rulers believe they are not beholden to the people. That’s what must change.

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