…because you just never know how many people are on the line with you.

The Inspector General released the “unclassified stuff the general public is allowed to see” version of the report on the Bush Illegal Wiretapping. I haven’t read the whole thing, but others have. And they point out some things that are missing from the report:

1. Any ballpark estimate — any number at all, really — of how many Americans had their communications intercepted by the NSA through the “President’s Surveillance Program.” The fact that this is missing from an inspectors general report is a glaring oversight.
2. The error rate in collecting terrorism communications. According to the inspectors general of the CIA, FBI and NSA, much if not most of the information collected by the program was unrelated to terrorism. The NSA inspector general found “no evidence of intentional misuse” of the surveillance efforts. Which is groovy. But it still doesn’t tell us how much irrelevant data the program collected, which is a crucial question when determining its efficacy.
3. How much so-called Fruit of the Poisoned Tree resulted. That’s a legal doctrine referring to evidence that has to be thrown out of court. Long story short: if an investigation or a technique to get information is inadmissible in court, no evidence yielded by such methods can be used either. Warrantless surveillance is most certainly a case that would generate inadmissible evidence. That’s one of the issues at stake in yesterday’s al-Haramain filing that I wrote about. And it’s huge. If information from warrantless surveillance made its way into indictments or prosecutions, then those cases are jeopardized. That’s the sort of thing that lets terrorists out on the streets.

-Stuff That’s Missing From the Inspectors General Report on Warrantless Surveillance

The first one is a bit worrying. For as long as this discussion has been going on in the public square, you would think that we would at least have a vague idea of just how many Americans had their rights violated. But I guess shredding the Bill of Rights is the only way to protect it from terrorists.

Anyone who has even the slightest knowledge of the methods generally used in data monitoring will laugh at the second one. If the error rate is under 50% you know they are lying about it. Likely closer to 75%. Ask anyone who works in any government related sector that filters data about their false positive rate. Talk about a joke.

But I especially like the last bit. Ironic that morons screaming about Obama turning terrorists out to run free in America over gitmo closings defend Bushes illegal wiretaps, which may actually free terrorists in America. Does the funny ever stop?

No, it doesn’t. As Glenn Greenwald points out the scariest thing not mentioned is that there were still more “surveillance efforts” going on at the same time that made even people like Ashcroft would approve of.

Think about that for just a minute. Nearly a dozen lawyers (insert lawyer joke here) were so upset by a range of surveillance that the Bush regime practiced that they threatened to resign. And these were people who approved of warrentless wiretapping of Americans.

As Ed Brayton says:

Imagine if you will a surveillance program so blatantly unconstitutional that even John Ashcroft thought it was worth resigning over. A program, or programs, that bad were in place for at least two years after 9/11. But this report invents a euphemistic name for them and goes into no detail at all on what they were.

And after the Bush DOJ decided that these activities were illegal? What does a president do when his own extremist justice department says “sorry what you are doing is too far over the line even for us”?

Why you tell them to go on with the job anyway. Naturally.

And just how much of this continues under the current administration? Well, we may never know. One of the great tragedies of the Bush corruption of the American system of government is that the genie has been let out of the bottle, and even if Obama is a thousand times better than his predecessor (which remains to be seen) he has the ability to do many things he never should have been able to do, thanks to Bush and the right wing stooges that gave him cover fire in the name of fighting terror. Bush and the useful fools that defended him have opened a very special Pandora’s box on the American people.

There is a certain irony in the campaign slogans of the next generation and the Pandora story. I am not sure if that is good or bad. Some scholars think that hope was not a gift to aid in the fight against the evils released from the box, but rather an evil itself, all the more seductive for appearing to be a good.

Still, we maintain. Noli nothi permittere te terere. (Thanks Becky)