Michael Hirsh asks for some clear thinking about the NSA. He starts off well.
Sen. Joseph Biden was uncharacteristically succinct. “How will we know when this war is over?” Biden asked Attorney General Alberto Gonzales on Monday at a Senate hearing on the National Security Agency’s domestic surveillance program. Biden never really got a good answer, but his question still resonates. The Bush administration calls the war on terror “the long war.” But if we are to take the president and his aides at their word, it is more like a permanent war, one that by definition can never end. Having identified the enemy as Al Qaeda and its “affiliates”—at a time when angry young Muslims are boiling up all over, to be recruited by terror cells yet unborn—the administration surely knows it will be a long, long time until all the Islamist bad guys are eliminated. And that means the extraordinary powers that George W. Bush has arrogated to himself “during wartime”—including the surveillance of Americans—could become permanent as well.
It all sounds frighteningly Orwellian. But the truth is that, for all the hue and cry over American civil liberties, we are a long way from Big Brother today. In fact, we could probably use a little more Big Brother about now. After four and a half years, our intelligence and national-security apparatus still hasn’t learned how to track terrorists, and the Bush administration has put forward little more than cosmetic reforms.
Yes, Hirsh is correct, that we are a long way from Big Brother. But Biden is also correct, in that the Bush administration has cast a wide net in declaring their supposed powers. Hirsh is also correct in talking about FISA.
As our esteemed senators fret over whether the NSA has violated their outdated 1978 law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, they are not paying enough attention to the competence issue.
Yes, it could stand to be updated, but the Bush Administration does not trust Congress to do it, so they are doing what ever they want to do, blithely ignoring the law as the do so.
Hirsh talks about modernizing the NSA.
In recent years the agency tried to do so, but failed. To little notice, a giant $1 billion-plus program called Trailblazer that was to have brought the NSA up to date in data mining and pattern analysis—transforming the NSA’s blizzard of signals intelligence into an easily searchable database—has turned into such a boondoggle that, one intelligence official says, “nothing can be salvaged out of it.” “It’s a complete and abject failure,” says Robert D. Steele, a CIA veteran who is familiar with the program.
In the rest of the article, Hirsh explores some of these themes, but what he never really talks about is that this issue is yet another issue in which the Bush Administration, displaying a complete lack of trust in the people, attempts to rule by fiat, rather than govern by concensus. This is the hallmark of the current Administration.
There are many issues that should be addressed in an open forum.
These are open forum questions, and the Bush Administration is acting in half duplex mode.