Paul Mulshine: When the feds eavesdrop

12/29/2005

LET HEARINGS BEGIN A number of conservatives suspect the government is “data mining” vast numbers of phone calls and e-mails for interesting information, very little of it related to terrorism.

Paul Mulshine, Newhouse News Service
Posted in Star Tribune
Last update: December 28, 2005 – 5:19 PM

This is an amusing time for observers of democracy in America.

President Bush, in reaction to revelations about domestic surveillance, expresses outrage at those who would leak classified information to the news media. “My personal opinion is it was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in time of war,” Bush said.

Syndicated columnist Robert Novak, meanwhile, says Bush himself almost certainly knows the name of the person who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame to a number of journalists, among them Novak himself. “I’m confident the president knows who the source is,” Novak said. “I’d be amazed if he doesn’t.”

But Bush isn’t saying—even though, as shameful acts go, the Plame leak was far more shameful than the surveillance leak. It was done solely for political purposes. In that regard, it was exactly like a prior CIA leak, during the Clinton years—then-Rep. Robert Torricelli’s leak of the name of a CIA operative in Guatemala.

When I was writing columns about the antics of Torricelli, D-N.J., I heard from various true believers on the right. All assured me that anyone who would leak the name of a CIA source should be either jailed for life or taken out and shot.

Those same true believers have so far managed to restrain their anger at the Plame leak. But if leaking the name of a CIA operative is bad for Democrats, then it is bad for Republicans.

As for this leak about the surveillance program, it is of a different type altogether. The leaker, or leakers, seems to have been motivated not by a desire to score political points, but a desire to make the American public aware of a program of dubious constitutionality. The executive branch seems to be claiming almost unlimited power to tap into phone calls, e-mails and other electronic communications. Even if you trust the current Republican administration to use this power wisely, what constraints are there on a future Democratic administration?

“You can’t do these things on a basis of trust. There have to be some sort of checks and balances.”

That opinion comes not from a liberal but from David Keene of the American Conservative Union. Keene, who worked in the White House under Vice President Spiro Agnew, knows a thing or two about executive overreaching. He is among a number of prominent conservatives who worry about the unchecked growth of presidential power in the Bush administration.

“Lurking behind this is something nobody knows about,” Keene said when I phoned him last week.

That something appears to be a type of surveillance that goes beyond the simple wiretapping of suspected Al-Qaida operatives and their contacts within the United States. As Keene and others have pointed out, that wiretapping is already permitted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, commonly known as FISA. Such a wiretap can be performed at any time without a warrant. The government has 72 hours after the fact to seek approval from the special FISA court.

Bush himself said last year, in a quote that made the rounds of the Internet last week, “Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires—a wiretap requires a court order.”

Except when it doesn’t. So what’s going on here?

Keene is among a number of conservatives you could call either “hard-core” or “paranoid” about this sort of thing. So am I. The suspicion among us right-wing nuts is that the government is involved in what is known as “data mining.” That would involve not just a finite number of wiretaps, all perfectly fine under FISA, but a wide net collecting vast numbers of phone calls and e-mails, all of which could be sifted through computers to sort out various data.

Such a program would produce all sorts of interesting information, very little of it related to terrorism. The executive branch might, for example, learn that a member of the legislative branch has a sweetheart in the suburbs of D.C. That information might then be used to secure the cooperation of this congressman on matters crucial to the administration.

Can’t happen? FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover pulled similar stunts during the Democratic administration of Lyndon Johnson.

Then there was the Republican administration of Richard Nixon.

As for this administration, can the same people who leaked the name of a CIA agent for political gain be trusted not to use other secrets for political gain?

That’s certainly possible. In fact, I believe that there is a perfectly satisfactory explanation for this entire endeavor. But I’m looking forward to those Senate hearings just the same.