Could there be legitimate reasons for trumping FISA? I mean if you have folks who are U.S. citizens and either have been or are a serious threat to the safety of the U.S. AND If these U.S. citizens that have been determined to be a serious threat were to be alerted about being wiretapped by the Bush administration by following legal procedures (FISA). Can anyone imagine a serious enough threat to the U.S. that FISA procedures could not be followed (say if these U.S. citizens had the whole system all ready wired?) and had the ability to listen in to all legal procedures taking place

I’m just saying.

yours is the most convincing – because it explains “why bother expending resources on vague and general outcomes?” – explanation of the cheney-rumsfeld-bush authorized data mining that i have yet seen – anywhere.

thanks.

You are cracking me up today. I was in a fit of laughter over at the Simpson post because of you!

By the way, I meant to write to EW in that comment @ 64 that if we find out who came up with the US PATRIOT Act acronym, we would be able to answer her question.

Forget the
Intelligence
Review of
Executive
Unilateral
Spying — act.

you who think “it can’t happen here” would be well advised to study the history of false flag terrorism.

to ignore the obvious connections between the anthrax attacks, 9/11, and the imperialist agenda items of the former administration is nothing short of naive.

confront the facts. acknowledge the contradictions. do some research. people have been telling you for years that the official narrative of 9/11 is impossible… wake up america.

My limited experience with datamining in industry is that the above is only the expressed point of datamining. The real point is different.

Datamining is hunting for specific types of information in data structures that weren’t designed to store them or make them available. It is a needle-in-a-haystack exercise, where results never justify the effort/cost, except by accident.

So in real life datamining is more often used to obscure the origins of information and thus make it easier to bend it to a purpose. If you have a dubious claim–you want to say that your adoption of Six Sigma improved the reliability of X by Y%, thus justifying a big bonus for you, or you want to hide how you came upon credit-card records documenting a governor’s compulsive floozy rentals–you can say that the claim that you wanted to make all along orginated independently, almost inevitably, in “all that stuff we datamined.” It is given the appearance of a casual fact, when it is really a preordained conclusion.

In this instance, I suspect that data-mining is the camouflage for targeted wiretapping without warrant or cause. You can’t wiretap a Democratic governor or a nosey blogger just because you want to. Doing so leaves grubby fingerprints behind, no matter how carefully you do it. Worse, if you get lucky, you can’t use the material readily. But if you have already established the propriety of listening to EVERYONE and “just” datamining the results for “suspicious” patterns, you can hide illegal surveillance of individuals in plain sight. You can even use any good material by claiming to have just stumbled on it in the course of your other work.

This is why what happened to the former governor of New York strikes my imagination, even after the convincing explanation of prosecutorial tactics that was presented on Oxdown yesterday. What happened to him is exactly what I would do to an enemy, given the cover offered by datamining and the ethics of a blackmailer.

Mary speaks of loose, vague, touchy-feely legal language above. Datamining is the technical equivalent. It is there to hide truth, give deniability, and blur the line between legal and illegal actions.

Notice the hurried, inconsistent, constantly changing feel of these opinions–I’m a literary critic and writer, not a lawyer, and the stuff has all the marks of stuff written late at night in an attempt to get back on schedule.

Also, notice the crudeness of the supposed linkages between 9/11 and Iraq that the Bushistas trotted out. Even they could have done better, given time. Like most people, I suspect that Iraq’s supposed WMD was the planned casus belli for the War on Terror and the subsequent Beelzebublican coup. But I imagine that plotters planned to build up to things with a media campaign like that for Gulf War I (remember the imaginary Kuwaiti preemies dying on cold floors?). 9/11 happened before they were ready and they were forced to use it or lose the opportunity altogether. The fact that the attack came from a quarter that they didn’t expect and found deeply embarrassing–their Saudi friends and old CIA playmates–was something that they just couldn’t finesse when working out the PR for the coup. But having two provocations from totally different directions was too much to claim. So 9/11 and Iraq were roughly conflated.

I likewise have to believe that the aims of the OLC memos would have been pursued more publicly, more plausibly, and with more Madison-Ave/K-Street finesse had there been time.

Who knows? 9/11 may have saved our democracy.