Surveillance

William Arkin has written a piece about the domestic spying program. In it, he calls the Democrats cry-babies, focusing on minutiae instead of helping to protect the country by upgrading FISA to be consistent with new technology. His conclusion:

The next president will quickly learn that NSA's post-9/11 surveillance program never involved the promiscuous collection of information on innocent Americans. Still, the problem of how to limit what is collected, and how to prevent abuse of these new powers, should be high on any new president's agenda. What we are witnessing is a revolution in the ability of the government to collect digital signals from afar and combine that information with other data to pry into anyone's private life: That ability could be the root of future abuses.

If only that were true. This statement, in light of all the revelations about the Bush administration, seems a bit naive to me.

Arkin misses the point. Perhaps the Bushies have used good sense. Suppose they haven't used the spying improperly. The fact remains that without oversight no one will ever really know. And given human nature, especially humans called "President" I'm not willing to thoroughly trust anyone with that power. And to simply have oversight provided by a Presidential appointee is nonsense. In short, I think Arkin makes a very HUGE assumption that executive officials are and will always work in good faith (if not George Bush, how about Richard Nixon anyone?).

I think Bush has used spying inappropriately. And I don't mean simply violating FISA law. It would be completely consistent with his, and Karl Rove's, behavior to have used intelligence apparatus for political purposes. I suspect the reveleations that Arkin refers to will surprise him. But even if they don't, I simply do not trust Presidents of any party or stripe to have that kind of power without significant oversight.

Update: Right on time. LOL. Right after posting this, I ran across this story:

SAN FRANCISCO — In open court and legal filings it's referred to simply as "the Document."

Federal officials claim its contents are so sensitive to national security that it is stored in a bombproof safe in Washington and viewed only by prosecutors with top secret security clearances and a few select federal judges.

The Document, described by those who have seen it as a National Security Administration log of calls intercepted between an Islamic charity and its American lawyers, is at the heart of what legal experts say may be the strongest case against the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program. The federal appeals court in San Francisco plans to hear arguments in the case Aug. 15.

The charity's lawyer scoffs at the often surreal lengths the government has taken to keep the Document under wraps.

"Believe me," Oakland attorney Jon Eisenberg said, "if this appeared on the front pages of newspapers, national security would not be jeopardized."

Lawyers and an "Islamic Charity" ferchristsakes. Based on what? I'll tell you. Based on a racist perspective that if they're Islamic they "might" be a terrorist. Same thing applies to anyone who is "anti-war" or "anti-Bush" I guess.