The Continuing Saga of Wiretapping

Tuesday, Micheal McConnell gave his some what annual address to Congress the BBC reported. Who is he? A little known member of the current administration, he is Director of National Intelligence, a position whose point it is to collect the information from America's sixteen different Intelligence agencies and collate it for the executive branch, reporting directly to the National Security Adviser. According to his White House bio, at one point he was head of the NSA, director of naval intelligence during the fall of the Soviet Union, and a private intelligence contractor.

Appearing in this case in support of a new bill to be passed, The Protect America Act, an act that would give the intelligence community more leeway when wiretapping "foreign" sources inside the U.S. Specifically, e-mails and phone calls being sent to or received from sources outside the country without a proper warrant. In order to protect this draconian new bill, McConnell dusted off an excuse that you might have thought died in the late 1990's with the fall of Communism, asserting that Russia and China were spying in America at levels close to Cold War levels. Admittedly, this is disturbing, but new legislation is not the answer. If it has indeed returned to Cold War levels, though it's much more likely that this is an artifact of his days in Naval Intelligence, there are already programs in place all over this country to deal with that. In fact, if there is anything this country is prepared to deal with, it is Cold War type counter-intelligence. There are, as previously stated, 16 different intelligence agencies whose sole purpose is this kind of work, not to mention the major ones like the CIA, FBI, and NSA.

This move towards the legalization of illegal wiretapping is disturbing on various levels, the most important being that it is illegal for a reason and oversight from both the judiciary and legislative branches of our government is necessary to make it anywhere near acceptable. For instance, in 1978, at the height of Cold War hysteria, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was passed and a shadow court was set up to review wiretapping cases involving American citizens or taking place on American soil. According to the act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) does not have to publish anything accept for a report at the end of the year stating how many cases were accepted and how many were denied. This court came into the news lately with the reveal that the Bush administration was wiretapping American citizens, illegally, without the approval of the FISC. This becomes even more ridiculous when it is realized that the FISC rarely denies a case put before them. Well, they didn't until, according to journalist Joshua Micah Marshall, about 2003 when the numbers on the denied-side of the report suddenly jumped from 2 in 2002 up to 79 in 2003. In a surprise move, the FISC published an opinion on May 17, 2002, that was open to all and given to the public, rebuffing Attorney General John Ashcroft claiming that he had allowed officials to "suppl[y] erroneous information to the court in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh". This becomes even more ironic considering that the FISC was put in place largely to check the excesses of another FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, who effectively ran the FBI like a tiny fiefdom and wiretapped whomever he damn well pleased. He also liked to dress in woman's clothes, so there's that to.

So, it becomes obvious, in this administration at least, that what is need is not less oversight, but more. When you start denying the power of the shadowy intelligence court that rarely denies the requests that you put before it, you've probably gone too far and are obviously abusing some of the powers given to you. Despite how important, in the words of McConnell, "Foreign intelligence information concerning the plans, activities and intentions of foreign powers and their agents is ... to protect the nation and preserve our security", more power in the hands of an already corrupt intelligence community that has proven it's ineptitude over and over again is not the answer. Work within the power you already have. Members of America's Intelligence community need to study a little bit of their own history and realize that America does not want or need to return to Hoover's reign of fear, that it is possible with the tools at hand to accomplish all the goals set before it. All it takes is a little practice with them.

It's Our Own Special Brand, mmm, Taste the Self Righteousness

The problem with libertarians is fairly obvious. The over riding economic/political goal of their philosophy being to take us back to the Articles of Confederation, a time in American History that didn't work then and sure as hell wouldn't work now. And, while I wholly and usually loudly disagree with that theory, there is something in there that I do find useful, and that I wish we would go back to. Isolationalism... a word that apparently in this great country of ours doesn't even show up in the spell check let alone in the political rhetoric of our leaders.

Let me begin my making this perfectly clear, isolationalism does not combat the growing sense of globalization and the interconnectedness of the global economy, and it shouldn't. There is nothing wrong with this force that is slowly remaking the world in it's image. It has led to standards of living that are slowly rising everywhere and is a force that could not be stopped even if we were to try. However, the isolationalism I espouse is more of a non-interventionist theory. In my, albeit humble, opinion, there is no reason for our troops to be on foreign soil, ever.

I'm going to make a bunch of universally unpopular statements now, and I'm okay with that. I'm going to discuss, American Imperialism. Let's begin at... well... the beginning I guess. In the late 1800's, America was beginning to feel it's power in the world as a developing country and despite the suggestions of both George Washington's final words as president, and the long standing practice of the Munroe Doctrine, both of which were designed to to keep Europe out of the America's, and vice virsa, to keep Americans out of Europe, the American people were led into a war with the declining Empire of Spain. This came about largely due to an increase in the power of the media in the form of Yellow Journalism and a hugely ineffectual president in the form of William McKinley. The war was "won" in short order and gave us two things. 1. Our first imperial possessions, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines and 2. Gave us our first great imperialist leader in the form of Theodore Roosevelt. The story goes on from there. Largely due to the policies of Roosevelt the First and then Wilson the Righteous, America was once again embroiled in a war for no real reason against a European power. This time, America would win the right to trade in China as it's great Imperial concession for helping to win the war. Then came Roosevelt II and the Third War for American Hegemony, better known as World War II. Following this war, it as fairly apparent that America "strode the world like a colossus", as under our imperial domain was easily half the world, and to use a Roman analogy, the Russians were our Goths, constantly nipping at our sides while never coming under our control.

But like all great empires, this has to eventually come to an end. In the case of the Romans, it was being bleed dry from a thousand tiny pricks of both resources and native sons in war after war after war. For Britain, it was the debt brought on by the fighting of two major consecutive major wars. For us? I foresee a mixture of the two, a middle ground. We are poor as a nation, there is no doubting that, and our resources are spread incredibly thin. When we can't dedicate our armed forces to a war without almost immediately calling up Reserves and National Guard, it becomes obvious that our forces in Germany, Japan, and even South Korea, could possibly be better used. When our debt is so high that it becomes impossible to outfit them properly before sending them into another imperialistic war. These are prime signs of decline. Also, generally in the early stages of decline, people who dream of the old days of glory, the way it used to be, find their way into power, something we would today call conservatism.

There appears to be only one way to avoid the decline. One way to avoid the collapse that eventually took Rome under, eventually took London to the point where it largely ineffectual. Remove ourselves from world affairs. Return our presence from the continents and try to put our own house in order before stepping foot out of it again. Sanctions, the work of the UN, these things are fine, but the wars that we have been involved in since the late 1800's are not. We need to worry about our own collapsing economy now. We need to be trying to fix our own broken standards of democracy.