The Crucial Differences Between Bush and Obama's NSA Phone Surveillance Programs
By Michelle Malkin
MichelleMalkin.com
It is certainly
schadenfreudelicious to see Al Gore
and assorted Democratic tools going bonkers over
news of President Obama’s
radically expanded phone call data collection
program — which he, ahem, inherited
from the Bush administration and has apparently now
widened far beyond anything Bush ever
enacted or proposed.
But unlike Gore and company, I am not going to
engage in a full, NSA-bashing freakout. Some of us
have not regressed completely to a 9/10 mentality.
I will instead provide you with a sober reflection
on why I supported the Bush NSA’s work and why
Obama’s NSA program raises far more troubling
questions about domestic spying than his
predecessor.
As longtime readers know, I
supported the NSA’s post-9/11 efforts
to collect and connect the jihad dots during the
Bush years. When left-wing civil liberties
absolutists were ready to
hang Bush intel officials, I exposed
the
damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don’t hypocrisy
of Bush-bashers who condemned the administration for
not doing enough to prevent the 9/11 jihadi attacks
and then condemned it for doing too much. Bush
defended himself ably at a press conference in
December 2005 — refresh your memories
here.
The Bush NSA’s special collections program grew in
early 2002 after the CIA started capturing top Qaeda
operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah. The CIA
seized the terrorists’ computers, cellphones and
personal phone directories. NSA surveillance was
intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as
quickly as possible. As a result of Bush NSA
work,the terrorist plot involving convicted al Qaeda
operative Iyman Faris was uncovered — possibly
saving untold lives, not to mention New York bridges
and possibly Washington, D.C. trains. I noted the
Bush DOJ account of the plot at the time:
Faris has admitted traveling to a training camp in
Afghanistan in late 2000, where he was introduced to
Usama bin Laden. Faris admitted that during a
meeting in late 2000, one of bin Laden’s men asked
him about “ultralight” airplanes, and said al Qaeda
was looking to procure an “escape airplane.” Faris
admitted that about two months later, he performed
an Internet search at a café in Karachi, Pakistan
and obtained information about ultralights, which he
turned over to a friend for use by al Qaeda.
Faris also admitted that during a visit to Karachi
in early 2002, he was introduced to a senior
operational leader in al Qaeda. A few weeks later,
the operational leader asked what he could do for al
Qaeda. Faris said he discussed his work as a truck
driver in the United States, his trucking routes and
deliveries for airport cargo planes, in which the al
Qaeda leader said he was interested because cargo
planes would hold “more weight and more fuel.”
According to Faris’ admission, the operational
leader then told Faris that al Qaeda was planning
two simultaneous attacks in New York City and
Washington, D.C. The al Qaeda leader spoke with
Faris about destroying a bridge in New York City by
severing its suspension cables, and tasked Faris
with obtaining the equipment needed for that
operation. The leader also explained that al Qaeda
was planning to derail trains, and asked Faris to
procure the tools for that plot as well.
Faris admitted that upon returning to the United
States from Pakistan in April 2002, he researched
“gas cutters” – the equipment for severing bridge
suspension cables – and the New York City bridge on
the Internet. Between April 2002 and March 2003, he
sent several coded messages through another
individual to his longtime friend in Pakistan,
indicating he had been unsuccessful in his attempts
to obtain the necessary equipment. Faris admitted to
traveling to New York City in late 2002 to examine
the bridge, and said he concluded that the plot to
destroy the bridge by severing cables was unlikely
to succeed because of the bridge’s security and
structure. In early 2003, he sent a message that
“the weather is too hot” – a coded message
indicating that the bridge plot was unlikely to
succeed.
The Bush administration argued then that the NSA
program that helped uncover the Faris plot was
necessary because officials needed to act quickly on
large caches of information, such as the data found
after the Zubaydah capture in March 2002. Normally,
the government obtains court orders to monitor such
information from the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court. But the window of opportunity to
exploit the names, numbers, and addresses of those
associated with the top terrorist leaders was
obviously small.
As I asked at the time: If the Bush administration
chose to pursue FISA warrants, failed to obtain
them, let the information go to waste, and allowed
another attack to occur as a result, is there any
question the finger-waggers at the NYTimes would be
the first to attack the President for failing to do
everything necessary to prevent it?
I also noted then that despite the Get Bush media’s
best efforts to
undermine effective counterterrorism measures,
the
American public stood with Bush.
They
trusted him on national security
matters.
A majority of Americans initially support a
controversial National Security Agency program to
collect information on telephone calls made in the
United States in an effort to identify and
investigate potential terrorist threats, according
to a Washington Post-ABC News poll.
The new survey found that 63 percent of Americans
said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable
way to investigate terrorism, including 44 percent
who strongly endorsed the effort. Another 35 percent
said the program was unacceptable, which included 24
percent who strongly objected to it.
A slightly larger majority–66 percent–said they
would not be bothered if NSA collected records of
personal calls they had made, the poll found.
Underlying those views is the belief that the need
to investigate terrorism outweighs privacy concerns.
According to the poll, 65 percent of those
interviewed said it was more important to
investigate potential terrorist threats “even if it
intrudes on privacy.” Three in 10–31 percent–said it
was more important for the federal government not to
intrude on personal privacy, even if that limits its
ability to investigate possible terrorist threats.
Half–51 percent–approved of the way President Bush
was handling privacy matters.
I must also remind you of some
wise words from fellow conservatives
who defended the Bush monitoring program back in
2006:
Mark Levin:
Is not life the most important of civil liberties?
These intelligence programs are trashed without any
curiosity as to whether they’ve prevented any
attacks and saved any lives. The hostile responses
are largely knee-jerk and lack any kind of context.
The arguments are abstract and descend into
fear-mongering. While I’m all for philosophical
debates, how about a little more reality when it
comes to fighting and winning this war—a real war
against a horrific enemy.
John McIntyre at Real Clear Politics:
Many of the people decrying these violations of
civil liberties are the same ones who ripped the
government for its inability to “connect-the-dots”
prior to 9/11.
But the paranoia on the left, and in particular, the
hatred for the Bush administration has become so
intense there is an automatic assumption that the
NSA has to be engaging in nefarious activity, spying
on you and your neighbor. The idea that the agency
is thinking creatively and proactively about how
they can legally monitor the bad guys instead of
just going about business as usual is, apparently,
out of the question for some. The sad truth is it is
probably going to take another devastating attack to
convince many in this country that we are actually
at war against Islamic jihadists.
The differences between then and now are glaring.
The new Obama order covers not only phone calls
overseas with the specific goal of counterterrorism
surveillance, but
all
domestic calls by Verizon customers
over at least a three-month period.
Trevor Timm, a digital rights analyst at the
Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the order
“shockingly broad.”
“Not only are they intercepting call data into and
out of the country, but they are intercepting all
call data in the United States, which goes far
beyond what the FISA Amendments Act allows,” Timm
said.
“This is an abuse of the Patriot Act on a massive
scale,” said Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the
Center for Democracy and Technology. “Since the law
requires that the telephone records sought be
relevant to an investigation, it appears that the
FBI and the NSA may have launched the broadest
investigation in history because everyone’s
telephone calls seem to be relevant to it.”
…The “top secret” order issued in April by a judge
on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court at
the request of the FBI instructs the
telecommunications giant Verizon to provide the NSA
with daily reports of “all call detail records or
‘telephony metadata’ created by Verizon for
communications (i) between the United States and
abroad; or (ii) wholly within the United States,
including local telephone calls.”
As usual, Obama was against it before he was for it:
It had not previously been confirmed that the Obama
administration was conducting similar broad
surveillance of calling patterns. However, in 2008
Congress amended the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act to give explicit legal authority to
aspects of the program President George W. Bush
initiated without requiring a future blessing from
lawmakers.
Then-presidential candidate Barack Obama opposed the
legislation during his primary battle with Hillary
Clinton. However, he reversed course shortly after
clinching the nomination and voted for a modified
version of the bill.
Here is another key difference between the Bush and
Obama administration programs.
Bush was fully engaged and committed to the war on
terror when the NSA programs were first exposed in
2005, four short years after the bloody 9/11
attacks.
Obama, by contrast, immediately rejected the war on
terror for “workplace violence”/”overseas
contingency operations” euphemisms and officially
declared last week that America’s
war on terror is over.
Which makes you wonder:
What exactly prompted the Obama FBI to seek the
sweeping FISA order on April 25? And
why does it extend through July 19?
If it was related to the April 15 Boston terror
bombing, how could Obama then stand up at National
Defense University on May 23 and so publicly
throw in the towel on combating
Islamic jihad?
And if the catalyst for the FISA court order
wasn’t
the Boston bombing, then why so sweeping and so
secretive? If not for the Guardian-published leak,
which I must note I find as troubling now as I did
during the Bush years, the document
would not have been declassified until
April 12, 2038.
Another fundamental difference between then and now:
While Bush-bashers raised the specter of political
spying abuses when the post-9/11 NSA program was
exposed, there was never a shred of evidence that
such abuses ever took place.
But now, the revelations about Obama’s expansive
collection of domestic phone call data come amidst
the still-exploding IRS witch hunt scandal, the
DOJ/AP snooping scandal, and the invasive DOJ/James
Rosen spying scandal — not to mention the gangrenous
distrust of government fostered by the stonewalling,
lies, and obstruction at the heart of the Benghazi
and Fast and Furious national security debacles.
Is it possible that the Obama NSA program has a
legitimate counterterrorism/national security
objective?
Yes, remotely.
Is it crucially important to consider 1) the
creeping, creepy surveillance-state context in which
this current administration operates and 2) the
naked contempt this current administration has shown
for the privacy rights of its political enemies?
Hell yes, absolutely.