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Thursday, May 11, 2006

The Fake Outrage Machine Cries for Oil

USA Today scurries, ragged and worse for the wear, to inform you of the latest outrage:

The National Security Agency has been secretly collecting the phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, using data provided by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth, people with direct knowledge of the arrangement told USA TODAY.

Fair minded people everywhere are yawning. Raw call data—lengths, number in, number out, time and date—were never unavailable to the Feds. It just never made sense to aggregate them before the internal terror threat became clear. It was a targeted tool before. Now there is dot connecting to be done.

And this article is a mess. It commingles the National Security Agency’s legal international enemy surveillance program with this “new” program, which seems to consist of intelligence agencies—not criminal investigative agencies, but agencies assisting in the prosecution of the Global War on Terror—gathering on central computers what they already had access to: The cold and (hopefully) storyless details of which phone numbers are called at which times of the day. And that data is detached from your name and address, since adding in those would, at least if used domestically, constitute a tap and would require the same judicial oversight as does a domestic tap for a criminal investigation. The USA Today article, simply put, describes an NSA project that takes in billions and billions of numbers, not one name and not one second of audio, and tries to identify suspicious patterns using automated computer programs. Hallelujah for it.

So why is this news? Hayden.

Air Force Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated Monday by President Bush to become the director of the CIA, headed the NSA from March 1999 to April 2005. In that post, Hayden would have overseen the agency’s domestic call-tracking program. Hayden declined to comment about the program.

Posted on May 11, 2006 07:07 AM. Permalink