When then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales went to John Ashcroft’s hospital room on the evening of March 10, 2004 to ask the ailing Attorney General to override Justice Department officials and reauthorize a secret domestic wiretapping program, he was acting inappropriately, Ashcroft’s deputy at the time, James Comey, testified before Congress earlier this week. But the question some lawyers, national security experts and Congressional investigators are now asking is: Was Gonzales in fact acting illegally?

In dramatic testimony Tuesday, Comey told the Senate Judiciary Committee that he raced to the intensive care unit of George Washington University Hospital that evening to intercept Gonzales and White House chief of staff Andrew Card and prevent them from convincing Ashcroft to reauthorize the program after Justice Department lawyers had concluded that it was illegal. Comey, who during Ashcroft’s stay in the hospital was acting Attorney General, has told Congressional investigators that when he arrived at the room and began explaining to Ashcroft why he was there, he was intentionally “very circumspect” so as not to disclose classified information in an unsecure setting and in front of Ashcroft’s wife, Janet, who was at his bedside and was apparently not authorized to know about the program.

Comey described what happened next: “The door opened and in walked Mr. Gonzales, carrying an envelope, and Mr. Card. They came over and stood by the bed. They greeted the Attorney General very briefly. And then Mr. Gonzales began to discuss why they were there - to seek his approval for a matter, and explained what the matter was - which I will not do.” Ashcroft bluntly rebuffed Gonzales, but Comey’s unwillingness publicly to say what Gonzales said in the hospital room has raised questions about whether Gonzales may have violated executive branch rules regarding the handling of highly classified information, and possibly the law preventing intentional disclosure of national secrets.

read more at TIME MAGAZINE

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

(Via Politics TV.) I had thought this story about the White House pressuring a sick man to approve their domestic spying program was bad enough when reading about it. That’s not to mention the “You mean even Ashcroft wouldn’t sign off on this?” angle. However, listening to NPR last night and hearing Comey’s voice, I started getting furious. Here’s the video.

Glenn Greenwald has two good pieces on this, “Gonzales’ yearlong effort to block Comey’s testimony” (5/15/07) and “Comey’s testimony raises new and vital questions about the NSA scandal” (5/16/07). Hilzoy has a good examination of some of the key testimony in “When Christ Told Us To Visit The Sick In Their Sickrooms, This Is Not What He Meant.”

I think at this point we can dispense with the ridiculous fiction that the Bush administration somehow didn’t know what it was doing or possesses any innocence whatsoever. They knew what they were doing was illegal, they knew going through the proper process would stymie them, so they used every trick they could and abused their power to try to get what they wanted. They’ve blocked investigations, prevented oversight and lied to Congress and the American people to try to get away with this. It’s a familiar pattern. Still, the conduct described in this testimony isn’t just illegal, it’s inhuman. The Bushies aren’t just bad public officials, they’re bad people. We still haven’t obtained the full details of the abuses leading to war (we have the broad strokes), but there’s ample evidence that the Bush administration are indeed worse than the Nixon crew and they’ve committed high crimes and misdemeanors. Democrats have an obligation not only to manage the country in this moral and managerial vacuum, they have a prosecutorial duty to continue to dig, and build an iron-clad case for impeachment. If nothing else, using the government to achieve something positive and just would make a nice change of pace, don’t you think?

Update: No surprise, Dan Froomkin’s column today, “High Drama - and High Crimes?” is also superb.

From the Guardian:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Two FBI whistle-blowers Monday supported protection for intelligence agency employees who expose government wrongdoing.

The comments by Colleen Rowley and Michael German came as 40 public-interest organizations urged Congress to include national security workers in the Whistleblower Protection Act.

The act outlawing retaliation against whistle-blowers does not apply to employees of most intelligence agencies.

“Freedom to warn is a key concept,” Rowley said at a panel discussion on Capitol Hill.

Rowley’s blistering memo to the FBI director helped focus attention on the law enforcement agency’s shortcomings in the run-up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

National security whistle-blowers often find themselves sidelined, without a security clearance and without a job, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a report.

Former FBI agent Michael German, a focus of one ACLU case study, reported serious problems in a counterterrorism investigation, a move he says prompted retaliation that led him to resign in protest.

German said his accusations ultimately were found to be true because of the persistence of Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, who thanked German and Rowley for providing “valuable information to me in my efforts to oversee the FBI.”

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Sir Percy Browne (Head of Security): One day, Mr. Fiennes, you will have the entire British population under permanent 24 hour surveillance - will you be happy?

Mr. Fiennes: Happy? No - Satisfied.

- A Very British Coup (TV adaptation)

The British Evening Standard reports:

The Big Brother nightmare of George Orwell’s 1984 has become a reality - in the shadow of the author’s former London home.

It may have taken a little longer than he predicted, but Orwell’s vision of a society where cameras and computers spy on every person’s movements is now here.

According to the latest studies, Britain has a staggering 4.2million CCTV cameras - one for every 14 people in the country - and 20 per cent of cameras globally. It has been calculated that each person is caught on camera an average of 300 times daily.

[...]

One fear is a nationwide standard for CCTV cameras which would make it possible for all information gathered by individual cameras to be shared - and accessed by anyone with the means to do so.

Read more »

The FBI contends that none of the mistakes were serious enough to reverse judges’ findings

What kind of logic is this? First of all, how do you know that? Second of all, that makes it ok to lie???? I don’t think so. Our government is Out Of Control.

FBI agents repeatedly provided inaccurate information to win secret court approval of surveillance warrants in terrorism and espionage cases, prompting officials to tighten controls on the way the bureau uses that powerful anti-terrorism tool, according to Justice Department and FBI officials.

The errors were pervasive enough that the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, wrote the Justice Department in December 2005 to complain. She raised the possibility of requiring counterterrorism agents to swear in her courtroom that the information they were providing was accurate, a procedure that could have slowed such investigations drastically.

A internal FBI review in early 2006 of some of the more than 2,000 surveillance warrants the bureau obtains each year confirmed that dozens of inaccuracies had been provided to the court. The errors ranged from innocuous lapses, such as the wrong description of family relationships, to more serious problems, such as citing information from informants who were no longer active, officials said.

The FBI contends that none of the mistakes were serious enough to reverse judges’ findings that there was probable cause to issue a surveillance warrant. But officials said the errors were significant enough to prompt reforms bureau-wide.

More at the Washington Post

Legal concerns are of no concern to anyone in this administration.

FBI counterterrorism officials continued to use flawed procedures to obtain thousands of U.S. telephone records during a two-year period when bureau lawyers and managers were expressing escalating concerns about the practice, according to senior FBI and Justice Department officials and documents.

FBI lawyers raised the concerns beginning in late October 2004 but did not closely scrutinize the practice until last year, FBI officials acknowledged. They also did not understand the scope of the problem until the Justice Department launched an investigation, FBI officials said.

Under pressure to provide a stronger legal footing, counterterrorism agents last year wrote new letters to phone companies demanding the information the bureau already possessed. At least one senior FBI headquarters official — whom the bureau declined to name — signed these “national security letters” without including the required proof that the letters were linked to FBI counterterrorism or espionage investigations, an FBI official said.

More at the WashingtonPost

(Cross-posted at Vagabond Scholar)

Caesar: Antonius!
Antony: Caesar.
Caesar: Let me have men about me that are fat;
Sleek-headed men and such as sleep o’ nights.
Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look;
He thinks too much: such men are dangerous.
Antony: Fear him not, Caesar, he’s not dangerous;
He is a noble Roman, and well given.
Caesar: Would he were fatter!
- Julius Caesar, 1.2, 190-198, William Shakespeare

Bush’s men are both fat and still hungry. As corrupt as these men and women get, they are never satiated. But they-ve been choking these past few weeks. Our boy-emperor need not fear plots with daggers - but subpoenas are another matter.

Libby has been found guilty. The FBI’s abuse of the Patriot Act and their lies about their activities have been revealed. Alberto Gonzales has been laid bare as the fraud and liar he is. George W. Bush and Dick Cheney are testing the limits of how low an approval rating can go. And Karl Rove, who is still accusing the Democrats of playing dirty politics, is watching more and more of his dirty tricks being exposed.

The more we learn about the Bush administration, the worse they look. And hallelujah, Congress is scrutinizing them, and the general public is seeing more of the truth.

A year ago, this U.S. attorney scandal, a mere fraction of the wrongdoing perpetrated by this administration, would have been furious fodder for liberal blogs, but little probably would have been done. This time, the liberal blogs were right as usual - and the mainstream media actually listened. Is this a dream? Not that all the coverage is fantastic, but isn-t this widespread furor over obvious misdeeds, incompetence and villainy exactly what’s supposed to happen? Not that everything is going well, but isn-t this cause for hope?

Did the divine inspiration and brilliant instincts of George W. Bush warn him of this? Has Dick Cheney’s unerring judgment fled to an undisclosed location? Did Karl Rove see this in the entrails of a crony, or have his powers of prognostication left him?

In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, Marc Antony says:

The evil that men do lives after them;
The good is oft interrèd with their bones.

The truth always comes out eventually. But there’s now real hope that some of the evil can be dug out while the culprits are still alive, or even while they-re still in office. Every lie exposed and misdeed challenged is a small victory. And the permanent discrediting of these knaves and scoundrels is a matter of national security. There is providence in the fall of an attorney general. (Or something like that.)

Happy Ides of March!

Over a three-year period ending in 2005, the FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda’s — 52,000 — and stored it in an intelligence database accessible to about 12,000 federal, state and local law enforcement authorities and to certain foreign governments.

The FBI did so without systematically retaining evidence that its data collection was legal, without ensuring that all the data it obtained matched its needs or requests, without correctly tallying and reporting its efforts to Congress, and without ferreting out all of its abuses and reporting them to an intelligence oversight board.

These are the conclusions of the Justice Department’s uncontested examination of one of the most sensitive and widely used intelligence-gathering tools of the post-Sept. 11 era — the
(NSL). A report released yesterday by the department’s Office of the Inspector General offers the first official glimpse into the use of that impressive tool, and the results, according to the report, are not pretty.

“We believe,” the inspector general’s office said in a summary of whether and how often the tool might have jeopardized the privacy of U.S. residents, “that a significant number of NSL-related violations are not being identified or reported by the FBI.”

The 199-page report, which Congress ordered the inspector general’s office to produce over the Justice Department’s objections, does not accuse the FBI of deliberate lawbreaking. But it depicts the bureau’s 56 field offices and headquarters as paying little heed to the rules, and misunderstanding them, as they used the USA Patriot Act and three other laws to request the telephone records, e-mail addresses, and employment and credit histories of people deemed relevant to terrorism or espionage investigations.

Continue reading at the Washington Post

Whodda thunk……

WASHINGTON - The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, underreporting for three years how often it forced businesses to turn over customer data, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday.

FBI agents sometimes demanded the data without proper authorization, according to a 126-page audit by Justice Department Inspector General Glenn A. Fine. At other times, the audit found, the FBI improperly obtained telephone records in non-emergency circumstances.

The audit blames agent error and shoddy record-keeping for the bulk of the problems and did not find any indication of criminal misconduct.

Still, “we believe the improper or illegal uses we found involve serious misuses of national security letter authorities,” the audit concludes.

Read more at YahooNews

H/T Bat for link!!!

Bozo the Clown could run a government better than these idiots. The waste and incompetence is overwhelming in this administration. Not to mention dangerous.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The FBI had more than 300 weapons and laptops lost or stolen in just under four years, and some of the computers contained sensitive or classified information, the U.S. Justice Department inspector general said on Monday in a highly critical report.

Fewer had gone missing than before a 2002 report in which Inspector General Glenn Fine’s office reported 354 FBI weapons and 317 laptops lost or stolen over the previous 28 months, but he said the bureau had done too little to address the problem.

“Our review determined that the FBI has made some progress in improving its controls over weapons and laptops,” Fine said. “However, significant deficiencies remain, particularly with regard to the FBI’s response to lost or stolen laptops that may contain sensitive information.”

It was impossible for the FBI to determine the extent of the damage the losses might have had on its operations or national security, the report said.

The 160 missing weapons and 160 laptops disappeared during the 44 months that ended on September 30, 2005. At least 10 laptops contained sensitive or classified information, including one with personal identifying information on FBI personnel.

The FBI could not determine whether an additional 50 missing laptops contained sensitive or classified information. Seven of those were assigned to the counter-intelligence or counter-terrorism divisions, which handle sensitive national security information.

The FBI also submitted late and inaccurate reports to the Department of Justice about missing weapons and laptops, the report said.

Read more at Reuters

No shock here…..

The FBI appears to have adopted an invasive Internet surveillance technique that collects far more data on innocent Americans than previously has been disclosed.

Instead of recording only what a particular suspect is doing, agents conducting investigations appear to be assembling the activities of thousands of Internet users at a time into massive databases, according to current and former officials. That database can subsequently be queried for names, e-mail addresses or keywords.

Such a technique is broader and potentially more intrusive than the FBI’s Carnivore surveillance system, later renamed DCS1000. It raises concerns similar to those stirred by widespread Internet monitoring that the National Security Agency is said to have done, according to documents that have surfaced in one federal lawsuit, and may stretch the bounds of what’s legally permissible.

Call it the vacuum-cleaner approach. It’s employed when police have obtained a court order and an Internet service provider can’t “isolate the particular person or IP address” because of technical constraints, says Paul Ohm, a former trial attorney at the Justice Department’s Computer Crime and Intellectual Property Section. (An Internet Protocol address is a series of digits that can identify an individual computer.)

Read more here

The FBI appears to have begun using a novel form of electronic surveillance in criminal investigations: remotely activating a mobile phone’s microphone and using it to eavesdrop on nearby conversations.

The technique is called a “roving bug,” and was approved by top U.S. Department of Justice officials for use against members of a New York organized crime family who were wary of conventional surveillance techniques such as tailing a suspect or wiretapping him.

The FBI is apparently using a novel surveillance technique on alleged Mafioso: activating his cell phone’s microphone and then just listening.

Bottom line:
While it appears this is the first use of the “roving bug” technique, it has been discussed in security circles for years.
Nextel cell phones owned by two alleged mobsters, John Ardito and his attorney Peter Peluso, were used by the FBI to listen in on nearby conversations. The FBI views Ardito as one of the most powerful men in the Genovese family, a major part of the national Mafia.

The surveillance technique came to light in an opinion published this week by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan. He ruled that the “roving bug” was legal because federal wiretapping law is broad enough to permit eavesdropping even of conversations that take place near a suspect’s cell phone.

More here

By Dan Eggen
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 29, 2006; 3:08 PM

The U.S. government has agreed to pay $2 million to an Oregon lawyer who was wrongfully arrested as a terrorism suspect because of a bungled fingerprint match and has issued an apology for the “suffering” inflicted on the attorney and his family.

Under the terms of the settlement announced today, Brandon Mayfield of Portland, Ore., will also be able to continue to pursue a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the USA Patriot Act antiterrorism law, which played a role in Mayfield’s case.

The monetary payment amounts to an embarrassing admission of wrongdoing by the FBI, which arrested and detained Mayfield as a material witness in May 2004 after FBI examiners wrongly linked him to a portion of a fingerprint found on a bag of detonators during the investigation of the Madrid commuter train bombings.

Read more at the Washington Post

Thanks Bat!

WASHINGTON - The Justice Department increasingly has refused to prosecute FBI cases targeting suspected terrorists over the past five years, according to private researchers who reviewed department records.

The government says the findings are inaccurate and “intellectually dishonest.”

The report being released Monday by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse at Syracuse University raises questions about the quality of the FBI’s investigations.

Prosecutors declined to bring charges in 131 of 150, or 87 percent, of international terrorist case referrals from the FBI between October 2005 and June 2006, according to the report. The study was based on the most recent data available from the Justice Department’s executive office for U.S. attorneys.

Continue reading at MSNBC

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Tuesday called on Internet service providers to record their customers’ online activities, a move that anticipates a fierce debate over privacy and law enforcement in Washington next year.

“Terrorists coordinate their plans cloaked in the anonymity of the Internet, as do violent sexual predators prowling chat rooms,” Mueller said in a speech at the International Association of Chiefs of Police conference in Boston.

“All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims,” Mueller said. “We must find a balance between the legitimate need for privacy and law enforcement’s clear need for access.”

The speech to the law enforcement group, which approved a resolution on the topic earlier in the day, echoes other calls from Bush administration officials to force private firms to record information about customers. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for instance, told Congress last month that “this is a national problem that requires federal legislation.”

continue reading