ARTS & FARCES internet

In the continuing saga that is the New York Times parceling of information about President Bush’s warrantless wiretap program, Eric Lichtblau and James Risen report that top Justice Department officials may have refused to certify the domestic surveillance program in 2004. The report claims that Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, and then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales visited then-attorney general John Ashcroft in the intensive care unit of George Washington University Hospital to obtain the attorney general’s certification of the probably illegal surveillance program.

Ashcroft was hospitalized for gallblader surgery and his top deputy, James B. Comey “had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it,” according to the Times article. Some accounts indicate that Ashcroft was also reluctant to certify the domestic surveillance program “in light of concerns among some senior government officials about whether the proper oversight was in place at the security agency and whether the president had the legal and constitutional authority to conduct such an operation.”

“It is unclear whether the White House ultimately persuaded Mr. Ashcroft to give his approval to the program after the meeting or moved ahead without it.”

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.”