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Obama’s NSA phone surveillance called “shockingly broad”

June 6, 2013 by Jeff (ILoveCapitalism)

Michelle Malkin has a must-read post on NSA phone surveillance of Americans (a subject that I touched upon in an earlier footnote).

She starts by reminding about the NSA phone surveillance of the Bush administration:

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…

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…

So the Bush administration had the NSA track Americans’ overseas phone calls, insofar as captured terrorist phone numbers might show up. But the Obama administration? Not so much…err, so little:

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.

[Malkin now links/quotes an article at Politico:] Trevor Timm, a digital rights analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called the order “shockingly broad.” …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.”

I’m willing to preserve our counter-terrorism efforts. And I don’t know much about the legal ins/outs of all this. But, all domestic calls by Verizon customers? Sheesh! This surely goes beyond the Bush NSA surveillance that the public debated in 2005-6.

So, it’s worth discussing the rightness (or wrongness) of the broadened surveillance. The more so if (note IF) the War on Terror is over, as some international observers thought Obama to be implying in his speech last week.

By way of counterpoint, Senator Feinstein implies that the broadened phone surveillance did start under Bush, in 2007. But that still wouldn’t make it right. Or make it anything that the public has approved, because we haven’t learned about the broadened efforts (or been able to debate them) until now.

As always, please feel free to post whatever more you know about this issue, in the comments.

Filed Under: Obama Watch, War On Terror Tagged With: dianne feinstein, Michelle Malkin, nsa, nsa spying on verizon phone records, Obama, war on terror

Wonder if Washington Post Will Run Piece on this hate mail?

October 14, 2009 by B. Daniel Blatt

On Sunday in a Page A1 piece (above the fold) in the Washington Post, Ann Gerhart reported that after Michell Malkin blogged about Charisse Carney-Nunes uploading* “the video of schoolchildren reciting a Barack Obama song/rap at Bernice Young elementary school in June“,

voice mails on her [Carney-Nunes’] home phone and cellphone were clogged with the furious voices of strangers. The e-mails kept pouring in, by the hundreds, crammed with words spam filters try to catch: She was a “nappy-headed” traitor; she would lose her job and go to jail; she was Leni Riefenstahl, the filmmaker who glorified Hitler.

Well, now after MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann accused Malkin of possessing “fascistic hatred,” and comparing her to a “mashed-up bag of meat with lipstick on it,” that blogress has once again** received a raft of hate-mail.  She was called “pig with no morals or any redeeming values” and a “sick BITCH.”  And subject to sexual innuendo.

I’m sure Ms. Gerhart is busy at work on piece for next Sunday’s Post on the vitriolic nature of many left-wing attacks on prominent conservative women.

* [Read more…]

Filed Under: Hysteria on the Left, Liberal Hypocrisy, Media Bias, PDS (Palin Derangement Syndrome) Tagged With: Michelle Malkin

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