One Reason to Listen to Me
If you, the reader, are not asking yourself, “why should I listen to this guy?”, I’m flattered. If, however, you’ve asked that question regarding me, I’m not offended. It’s a fair question. The answer? Because I tend to be right when the pundits are wrong. For example, earlier this week I wrote:
Q: All right, then. Why don’t you tell me why in the world the Bush administration would engage in this if it’s probably illegal and they could just get warrants anyway?A: Because they’re not telling us the extent of the program– and they couldn’t get warrants for what they’re doing. They’re intercepting a large fraction of phone calls and screening them with computers that are searching for particular phrases or patterns. If a match comes up, the tip is passed along to others who can follow up on it. This method could, in theory, catch a terrorist who is under the radar. The vast majority of what comes up will be the conversations of innocent citizens, though…
That’s my guess, at least.
Surprise, surprise… Today’s Washington Post is carrying this revelation:
Fewer than 10 U.S. citizens or residents a year, according to an authoritative account, have aroused enough suspicion during warrantless eavesdropping to justify interception of their domestic calls, as well…The Bush administration refuses to say — in public or in closed session of Congress — how many Americans in the past four years have had their conversations recorded or their e-mails read by intelligence analysts without court authority. Two knowledgeable sources placed that number in the thousands; one of them, more specific, said about 5,000.
The program has touched many more Americans than that. Surveillance takes place in several stages, officials said, the earliest by machine. Computer-controlled systems collect and sift basic information about hundreds of thousands of faxes, e-mails and telephone calls into and out of the United States before selecting the ones for scrutiny by human eyes and ears.
Successive stages of filtering grow more intrusive as artificial intelligence systems rank voice and data traffic in order of likeliest interest to human analysts. But intelligence officers, who test the computer judgments by listening initially to brief fragments of conversation, “wash out” most of the leads within days or weeks.
The Post article is worth reading, it offers a more textured view of the situation than anything else published thus far.