Blogswarm - Online Political News Magazine

A senior federal law enforcement official tells ABC News the government is tracking the phone numbers we call in an effort to root out confidential sources.

"It's time for you to get some new cell phones, quick," the source told us in an in-person conversation.

ABC News does not know how the government determined who we are calling, or whether our phone records were provided to the government as part of the recently-disclosed NSA collection of domestic phone calls.

Other sources have told us that phone calls and contacts by reporters for ABC News, along with the New York Times and the Washington Post, are being examined as part of a widespread CIA leak investigation.

Until the criminals are locked up, members of the press might need to go down to 7-11 and start using throw-away cell phones. Pretty sad when the press have to use the same tactics terrorists do just to ensure their 1st Amendment freedom is not illegally violated by a criminal administration.

But even if we can't change each other's minds, there is still a choice about what we do next. The first option is for the Senator to reflect on the will of the the people of Connecticut, and despite his personal views on the subject, act in accordance with his constituents. Senator Lieberman could vote how the people want him to vote and seek the path that returns our soldiers home safely. He doesn't have to change his mind, just his vote. He can put his constituents first, his personal opinions second.

Unfortunately, Senator Lieberman wants to do it His way. He doesn't want to change his mind and he doesn't want to change his vote. He wants us to let him vote however he wants. He wants to value his own opinion over the opinions of the millions of citizens he represents. So while the citizens of Connecticut want to end a war, Senator Lieberman wants to prolong it. And while we want our troops to come home safely, he's satisfied with leaving them in a shooting gallery a few more years.

Mr. Lieberman specifically expressed his philosopy of voting in his In Praise of Public Life:

When it comes to votes in the Senate, I first consider the merits of the issue. If I have strong opinion about the issue, I am going to vote that way, regardless of the preferences of any interest group or even of the general public....If I conclude that a majority of my constituents have a strong opinion on an issue, and I do not, then I will vote my constituents' opinion regardless of what the special interests want. That is true of most members of Congress and, of course, is the way our democracy is supposed to work.
[My emphasis added]

In the case of Iraq, Lieberman is invoking his "strong opinion" clause, and refusing to listen to the public.

The conclusion is clear: if we cannot change the Senator's mind, or his vote, we have to change the Senator.

But N.S.A. lawyers, trained in the agency's strict rules against domestic spying and reluctant to approve any eavesdropping without warrants, insisted that it should be limited to communications into and out of the country, said the officials, who were granted anonymity to discuss the debate inside the Bush administration late in 2001.

The N.S.A.'s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary N.S.A. officers to accept it and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear.

Hayden shouldn't be confirmed and Cheney should be impeached. Billmon says:

But I get a little crazy in the head when I hear people (usually on the authoritarian right) citing the latest poll numbers as a political justification for their own position.

The whole point of having civil liberties is that they are not supposed to be subject to a majority veto. Hobbes may not have believed in natural rights, but our founders did. And their opponents, the anti-Federalists, were even more zealous about restraining the powers of the federal superstate, which is why they forced the Federalists to write the Bill of Rights directly into the Constitution.

It defeats the purpose of having a 4th Amendment if its validiity is entirely dependent on breaking 50% in the latest poll. It would be nice to have "the people" on our side in this debate, and obviously a lot of them are, even if Doherty's plurality still prefers Leviathan's crushing embrace. But some things are wrong just because they're wrong -- not because a temporary majority (or even a permanent one) thinks they're wrong.

But constitutional rights are different. A true natural lawist would argue that they are beyond the power of governments or the voters to grant or deny. Like the man said, they're "self evident," not to mention "inalienable."

In the end, the framers were more pragmatic: If the majority wants to abolish the 4th Amendment -- or the entire Bill or Rights, for that matter -- all it has to do is get two thirds of each house of Congress to pass a new amendment, get the president to sign it and three fourths of the states to ratify it. Or, it can get two thirds of the states to call a constitutional convention, and try its luck there. Win that battle, and the NSA can tap everbody's phones until the cows come home. But until then, the 4th Amendment stands, and it is most definitely not subject to majority rule.

Of course, this president and this Congress and this Supreme Court have already proven that constitutional rights -- natural or not -- mean very little in the face of money, power and expediency. And as long as the polls continue to show that a majority, or even an influential minority, of the voters is willing to put up with that state of affairs, the powers that be will go right on riding roughshod over the Constitution. As Shrub likes to say, he already had his accountability moment -- at a different set of polls.

So polls (both kinds) obviously matter. And those who favor the unlimited surveillance state can certainly try to cite public opinion as proof that the Cheney regime has the power to break the law. But they can never cite the polls -- accurate or not -- to prove that they have the right to break the law, and we should never forget that.

By several accounts, including those of the two officials, General Hayden, a 61-year-old Air Force officer who left the agency last year to become principal deputy director of national intelligence, was the man in the middle as President Bush demanded that intelligence agencies act urgently to stop future attacks.

On one side was a strong-willed vice president and his longtime legal adviser, David S. Addington, who believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country. Later, Mr. Cheney would personally arrange tightly controlled briefings on the program for select members of Congress.

On the other side were some lawyers and officials at the largest American intelligence agency, which was battered by eavesdropping scandals in the 1970's and has since wielded its powerful technology with extreme care to avoid accusations of spying on Americans.

As in other areas of intelligence collection, including interrogation methods for terrorism suspects, Mr. Cheney and Mr. Addington took an aggressive view of what was permissible under the Constitution, the two intelligence officials said.

Even with the N.S.A. lawyers' reported success in limiting its scope, the program represents a fundamental expansion of the agency's practices, one that critics say is illegal. For the first time since 1978, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed and began requiring court approval for all eavesdropping on United States soil, the N.S.A. is intentionally listening in on Americans' calls without warrants.

The spying that would become such a divisive issue for the White House and for General Hayden grew out of a meeting days after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush gathered his senior intelligence aides to brainstorm about ways to head off another attack.

"Is there anything more we could be doing, given the current laws?" the president later recalled asking.

General Hayden stepped forward. "There is," he said, according to Mr. Bush's recounting of the conversation in March during a town-hall-style meeting in Cleveland.

By all accounts, General Hayden was the principal architect of the plan. He saw the opportunity to use the N.S.A.'s enormous technological capabilities by loosening restrictions on the agency's operations inside the United States.

Hayden should be locked up instead of confirmed. I'm sure the blogosphere and netroots will be watching closely.

Sources said Morrison was advised to stay out of the negotiations entirely, to avoid any appearance of conflict of interest.

Those twenty words do not appear in the Gazette version of the story (or in the Montana Standard, as near as I can tell; they do appear in the Missoulian online).

Why were these twenty words omitted by these editors? Is it simply because it is anonymously sourced? That doesn't explain it — the editors allowed this paragraph to remain:

Some former staffers told the Gazette State Bureau they were troubled by fact that the settlement allowed Tacke to continue at the company and allow more shares to be sold, as part of an effort to pay off other investors. Tacke wasn't fined.

Is it a difference in how well sourced these two stories are? The lack of recusal in this case is a big deal. It's an even bigger deal if Morrison was specifically urged to fully recuse himself and decided not to.

John Morrison might refuse to answer questions but Lee Newspapers' readers deserve an explanation.

McCurry and his flacks are pulling the ultimate insider move - calling the 600,000 people who have signed the petition and the thousands of bloggers who have written about this issue childish rabble and unfit for discourse. Way to go and insult 600,000 people, Mike McCurry! McCurry's company (ironically titled Grassroots Enterprises) sure knows the grassroots!

Ok, now the substance. The ad makes a couple of claims. One, that web site operators don't pay for the internet. That is a lie. They pay massive sums of money for bandwidth, on the order of $10 billion last year alone. So does the public in tax subsidies for telecom companies, perhaps as high as $200 billion over the years (though it's hard to tell with all the mergers and weird accounting). Yes, that you read that right. Two, they claim they have never degraded a web site or service. Of course, executives for these companies are on record discussing their plans to do precisely that. The telco sponsored legislation would strip the FCC from being able to deal with degraded service or blocked web sites. Three, the telecom companies claim that net neutrality means intrusive government regulation. This claim is a bit harder to unpack, but it's worth following me here since what they are saying is in fact 180 degrees from the truth.

Here's the deal.  The internet has always had rules.  One of those rules is that even if you own a pipe, you're not allowed to tell people what they can put through that pipe.  You can't block web sites, you can't say 'don't stream video', and you can't dictate what people and can't say.  You do have to pay for the pipe you use; Google pays millions a month on one end, and millions of consumers pay smaller amounts ($20-$60) a month on the other.  But no one can tell you what you can do with those pipes.  It's very much the opposite of cable TV.  There are no gatekeepers, and that's by design.  This has created a highly competitive marketplace.

Through a series of regulatory decisions from 2002-2005, the FCC stripped these protections for broadband pipes.  Now telecom companies can do whatever they want, and they have basically announced business models that depend on their ability to turn the internet into a more cable-like service.  This new playground for them is tenous, because the FCC could at any point reverse themselves. To firm this up, the telecom companies want to legislate a change in the rules, stripping authority from the FCC to hold ISPs accountable for degrading service.

So that's what this is all about.

Now, in their ad campaigns, the telecoms are portraying something very different. They are trying to pretend that they don't want government regulating the internet. In fact, they just want to make sure that the rules that have worked for thirty years are stripped away so they can control it.

This was on full display at a lobbyist sponsored event I attended yesterday put on for community groups.  They asked me not to record it so I don't have verbatim transcripts, but let's just say it was a bunch of bad faith in fancy suits. Company flacks scaremongered about telemedicine and how it can't be reliably delivered unless you get rid of network neutrality and allow phone companies to control the innards of the internet.  They talked about how the government will somehow destroy the internet (even though the government did, you know, build the internet).  They implied that there will be no parental controls if Congress doesn't get rid of net neutrality.  They said if they don't get their way 'internet freedom will vanish forever'.  They said that the government doesn't regulate the internet yet you shouldn't worry because under their plan the FCC has authority to protect consumers from abusive behavior by telecoms on the internet, as if that's not a regulation.

I'm getting really tired of this. We're trying to discuss policy options on how to make the internet work. They are lying about us and what we're after. There is no debate here. What's remarkable is that this industry likes to pretend it's in a competitive marketplace when it receives billions of subsidies for network build-outs, as well as government franchises to eliminate competition. It literally profits from the public treasury while insulting the public with dishonest PR campaigns. I am beginning to think that these telecom companies and cable operators, with their billions in tax subsidies and monopoly franchises, want to see legislation that removes their government determined advantages. I mean why else would they treat the public as if we're stupid? Why else would they kick up this hornets nest and then insult us with hysterics? Why else would they call us rabble? If they really want competition, and that means no more assistance from the public treasury, maybe that's what they should get. If they really want a competitive broadband market, then maybe we should give it to them.

How does that sound, Mr. McCurry, grassroots internet expert?

"I think it's really doable," he says. "We're going to win." If he does, it will be the upset of the year, maybe the decade. Senators typically have a re-election rate of about 85%, and only three of them have been defeated in primaries in the past quarter-century. In a Quinnipiac College poll released last week, Mr. Lieberman, who is seeking a fourth term, led Mr. Lamont among registered Democrats, 65% to 19%.

Then again, Connecticut is far from a Bush stronghold, even though the president was born in New Haven. So it's not inconceivable that a campaign whose literature promises "a Senator who will stand up to George Bush" will catch on. Mr. Bush's statewide approval rating in that same Quinnipiac poll was just 25%. What's more, only Democrats can vote in the primary, and their approval rating for Mr. Bush was a minuscule 6%, with 91% disapproving.

Party leaders in Washington frown on challenges to incumbents, and Minority Leader Harry Reid has reportedly asked Mr. Lamont to back off. But the challenger can count on strong support from the "netroots"--left-wing blogs like DailyKos.com and Web sites like MoveOn.org--which bring in money and moral support from around the country. Call him a Kos celeb, though the world of blogs is new to him.

I think a lot of people lost a lot of respect for Harry Reid coming to the defense of somebody who has constantly undermined the Democratic caucus, but it is clear that people are taking the netroots as seriously -- if not more seriously -- then the Democratic Minority Leader when it comes to the 2006 Democratic Party primary in Connecticut.

It's not enough, he says, to be anti-Bush, although he certainly is that. "This administration may be leading the country in the wrong direction . . . but there's also a sense that the Democrats aren't standing tall and being constructive and offering real alternatives, and [voters] want the Democrats to stand up and offer real alternatives."

Yet he faults Mr. Lieberman for doing just that, in ways that, in Mr. Lamont's view, depart from Democratic principles: "If you think vouchers or education savings accounts are a constructive alternative to investing in our public education infrastructure, yes. But within the party, I think there's a sense that that is taking resources away from public education. When it comes to private savings accounts as an alternative to Social Security as a defined benefit, he's always right at the edge, saying this is something we've got to consider, something we've got to think about. When it comes to universal health care for everybody in this country as a basic right, that's a principle of the Democratic Party that Sen. Lieberman has never quite embraced. He's come up with tax incentives for businesses to see if they might be a little more inclined to insure their people. So he generally has not embraced a lot of the Democratic goals and certainly the Democratic methods to achieving where we want to go."

He says his experience as a businessman informs his views on policy. "I think the progressives are a little more creative about coming up with solutions--it doesn't have to be a government solution, but they're striving to solve these problems. I think they're more entrepreneurial--it's a more entrepreneurial party."

Except for Joe Lieberman who only wants to water down the GOP approach.