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Monday, August 06, 2007


Closing In On The Leaker?

By Rob on August 6, 2007 at 09:42 am
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Good news from Newsweek:

Aug. 13, 2007 issue - The controversy over President Bush’s warrantless surveillance program took another surprise turn last week when a team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice’s Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets. The agents seized Tamm’s desktop computer, two of his children’s laptops and a cache of personal files. Tamm and his lawyer, Paul Kemp, declined any comment. So did the FBI. But two legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media. The raid appears to be the first significant development in the probe since The New York Times reported in December 2005 that Bush had authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international phone calls and e-mails of U.S. residents without court warrants.

Whatever your opinions of the NSA program the President authorized to track communications between terrorists, we should all at least agree that it is not the province of unelected government bureaucrats to decide what classified national security information gets out to the media and what doesn’t.  Nor is that the role of journalists.

We elect leaders to Congress and to the White House to make those sort of decisions, and we undermine their authority to do so when we allow leak of that sort of information to go unpunished.  What we promote when we don’t punish these leakers is a culture of government bureaucrats who think they are above the leaders we elect and make decisions to divulge this sort of information, usually with partisan agendas in mind.

Does this tick you off? Click here to email your elected representatives right here on Say Anything, or comment below.

Comments

Avatar for Robin Crensahw

“track communications between terrorists”

ARRRGGGHHH WHY DO YOU KEEP SAYING THIS?

This is now how telcom systems work, and it’s not what is reflected in the documents disclosed and published by the whistleblowers in the case. Oh yeah, I forgot one other source: Alberto Gonzalez (but I’ll get to that in a minute).

Can you look out your window at all of the cars driving by and pick out which ones will go on to drive out of state later today?
No.
In the same way, ‘terrorist only’ communications cannot be singled out. They have to capture everything.
How did I get this idea?
Because it’s what Alberto Gonzalez said!!
In recent Senate testimony, he explained that the controversy was over DATA MINING, becuase the wiretap program is so extensive that it captures everything without a warrant. They have to go in and search the data.
Stop saying this is only to capture terrorist phonecalls. Why? Because it puts our party on the defensive. It makes us sound like we’re trying to deny or justify. We shouldn’t have to. We need to say simply “Yes! We ARE wiretapping EVERYONE and SO WHAT.”

The Fourth Amendment only calls for warrants because searches are usually conducted to investigate and prosecute crimes. If no crime was committed, why should people worry if their phonecalls get logged? More than likely no one will actually listen to those calls, so who cares?

We need to stand up as a party and start owning what we’re doing to this country in our ceaseless efforts to keep it safe and start saying “so WHAT, Democrats? You gonna demand we follow the letter of the law on the Bill of Rights, a 200+ year old document (that ironically so many liberals want to change to fit their liking) or that we do what we need to to prevent a repeat of 9/11?”

Of course, it doesn’t help that so many lefties think we deserved 9/11 to begin with, but it’s easy to find out which ones are which: if they crow endlessly about “The Bill of Rights” or “The Fourth Amendment,” then they’re probably with the “well, we deserved it” camp.

Robin Crensahw on August 7, 2007 at 03:07 pm
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