ARTS & FARCES internet

In the past two years, more than 200 transplant patients in the Twin Cities may have received tissue and organs that were not screened for infectious diseases. So says Chuck Haga’s report in the Minneapolis StarTribune. Thanks a lot Strib; bury the piece on Christmas Day in hopes that it will all blow over by the end of the year.

Apparently this wouldn’t even be a story except that Alistair Cooke’s body was illegally “carved up at a New York City-area funeral home and parts sold for use in transplants.”

In another stunning revelation this morning, James Bamford, writing for the New York Times, cites a 2004 General Accounting Office report asserting that the majority of US federal government departments have datamining projects underway:

“[A]ccording to a 2004 General Accounting Office report, the Bush administration and the Pentagon continued to rely heavily on data-mining techniques. ‘Our survey of 128 federal departments and agencies on their use of data mining,’ the report said, ‘shows that 52 agencies are using or are planning to use data mining. These departments and agencies reported 199 data-mining efforts, of which 68 are planned and 131 are operational.’ Of these uses, the report continued, ‘the Department of Defense reported the largest number of efforts.’”

This, of course, is all after the federal government abandoned its Total Information Awareness datamining project after knowledge of it was made public. That ill-fated project was run by John Poindexter, Reagan’s national security advisor who cooked up the plan to illegally sell weapons to Iran and divert the proceeds to support anti-governmental forces in Nicaragua.

As Bruce Schneier and others surmised, President Bush’s unwarranted wiretapping effort is much broader and deeper than the administration has acknowledged. According to Eric Lichtblau’s and James Risen’s latest New York Times missive, the National Security Agency (NSA) used a technology that sounds remarkably similar to Echelon to datamine vast quantities of raw email and telephone conversations:

“What has not been publicly acknowledged is that N.S.A. technicians, besides actually eavesdropping on specific conversations, have combed through large volumes of phone and Internet traffic in search of patterns that might point to terrorism suspects. Some officials describe the program as a large data-mining operation.”

What’s perhaps most disturbing in this administration’s war on the citizenry is that US telecommunications companies blithely granted NSA access to the nation’s data and voice infrastructure, possibly even control of the switches—hardware that routes all traffic on the networks. Additionally, the companies have—at the government’s request—increased “the amount of international traffic that is routed through American-based switches.” Traffic that passes through switches on US soil is most likely subject to the domestic surveillance laws—including the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)—that the Bush administration sought to evade.

Early next year Dan Gillmor will launch the nonprofit Center for Citizen Media as an affiliate of Berkeley’s graduate school of journalism (Gillmor will be an IF Stone teaching fellow) and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society (Gillmor will be a research fellow).

This couldn’t come at a better time, what with the ACLU doing the investigatory legwork that should be being done by the deep-pocketed corporate media.

Gillmor writes about the impetus for the launch:

“Why do this? We need a thriving media and journalism ecosystem. We need what big institutions do so well, but we also need the bottom-up—or, more accurately, edge-in—knowledge and ideas of what I’ve called the ‘former audience’ that has become a vital part of the system. I’m also anxious to see that it’s done honorably and in a way that helps foster a truly informed citizenry. I think I can help.”

President Bush claimed yesterday that he was not expanding unchecked power of the executive branch of US government with his secret domestic spying program: “to say ‘unchecked power’ basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject.” Bush defended the warrantless wiretapping of telephone conversations and email of US citizens as his “obligation to protect you.” Refusing to say how many people are under surveillance, what criteria must be met to begin surveillance, or if any terrorist plots had been subverted, Bush cited secret briefings with a few congressional leaders and internal administrative review as the only limits on a president’s power during war.

Citing his power under Article II of the US Constitution and the congressional resolution authorizing force after the 11 September 2001 attacks—specifically authorizing the president to use “all necessary and appropriate force”—Bush claimed his actions had absolute legal authorization.

Congress, for its part, mostly wasn’t buying it. Senate judiciary chair Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) announced hearings next month on the issue; Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) released a secret letter he sent to Vice President Cheney in July 2003 objecting to the administration’s domestic spying activities; and Senator Russell Feingold (D-Wisconsin) broached the idea of a special prosecutor adding that Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales would have to recuse himself. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-California) quoted John Dean, President Nixon’s White House counsel during the Watergate era, as saying that Bush had admitted to an impeachable offense. For his part, the only investigation Bush was having any part of was the presumed inquiry by the Justice Department into the leak about the NSA program: “It was a shameful act for someone to disclose this very important program in a time of war. The fact that we’re discussing this program is helping the enemy.”