Our media continues to get it wrong on the topic of the NSA warrantless wiretaps/datamining program that was kicked into high gear after the 9-11 attacks. Check out the following headline:
Bush Aide Defends Eavesdropping on Phone Calls
Just as a reminder to the New York Times/International Herald Tribune reporters and editors, here’s what “eavesdropping” actually means:
To listen secretly to the private conversation of others.
Has anyone at the New York Times or International Herald Tribune ever heard of a dictionary before? The calls are being datamined to detect unusual CALLING PATTERNS.
This is just one more in a long list of examples of how our media joins hands with the hate-Bush wing of the Democratic party in what I believe is a deliberate distortion of the news as part of an effort to hurt the President and, by association, Republicans in general in an election year. Congressional Democrats have shown that they will stop at nothing - even demagoguing issues that are paramount to our national security - in order to get a leg up on Republicans going into the fall elections and with headlines like this one coming out of the pages of the NYT, the media as usual is complicit.
More: In a related story, the Washington Post trumps up comments made by U.S. intelligence chief John Negroponte where he claimed that the US was “absolutely not” monitoring domestic calls without warrants. To WaPo reporter Dan Eggen, Negroponte’s comments were made to look false after the ‘revelations’ reported by the USA Today in their story about the NSA’s datamining of ‘millions’ of US phone calls:
Three days later, USA Today divulged details of the NSA’s effort to log a majority of the telephone calls made within the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — amassing the domestic call records of tens of millions of U.S. households and businesses in an attempt to sift them for clues about terrorist threats.
What Eggan and the editors of the Washington Post don’t get is that the USA Today story was not new news … had they bothered to check, they’d have seen that the New York Times had already reported on this story back in late December 2005:
WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials.
The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system’s main arteries, they said.
As part of the program approved by President Bush for domestic surveillance without warrants, the N.S.A. has gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to obtain backdoor access to streams of domestic and international communications, the officials said.
So not only was the WaPo article poorly researched, but Eggan falsely implies that the calls themselves were monitored as if to say people’s private conversations had been listened to - what is actually being monitored are calling PATTERNS.
The media reporting on this story is beyond bad - it’s grossly misleading and negligently researched. What really makes this so bad is that the media are the ones who are supposed to help keep our politicians honest by reporting the facts - in this case, as it has been the case with so many other non-scandal ’scandals’, the media has gotten it horribly wrong. And their getting it wrong comes with a price: it hurts our chances of catching the REAL enemy, which as sane people know is NOT President Bush but instead the likes of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations hell bent on destroying the west.
More: Big Lizards analyzes a couple of recent polls on the issue of NSA dataminining - make sure you read the entire post. Dan Riehl participated in one of the polls and has some insight as to the questioning.
Hat tip for the WaPo link: Outside The Beltway
Flashback: Anyone remember Echelon?
Related Toldjah So posts:
- NSA ’scandal’ leak fallout continues - AT&T and Verizon being sued
- Latest NSA scandal leaves Americans unfazed
- The ACLU has a database of its own - and more NSA news
- The latest non-scandal scandal news involving the NSA
- FDR and domestic surveillance
- Sen. Russ Feingold demagogues NSA surveillance ’scandal’
- It doesn’t get any better than Jeff Goldstein (re: Feingold’s stunt)
- Senator Russ Feingold calls for censure of Bush
- House approves Patriot Act, Senate panel rejects broad NSA inquiry
- NSA Surveillance Program ’scandal’ - update
- Congressional probe of NSA surveillance may not happen afterall
- Admin briefs Congress on NSA surveillance
- Thomas Sowell on the NSA ’scandal’ controversy
- NSA ’scandal’ fallout: convicted terrorist conspirators wanting cases thrown out
- Intelligence officials: NSA leak has undermined ability to fight terrorism
- On politicizing the Patriot Act and the NSA ’scandal’
- NYT: NSA scandal is worse than WWII Japanese internment camps
- Link between disposable phone sale surge and NSA leak?
Congress won’t ask who had access.
Comment by Byrone @ 5/15/2006 - 9:03 am
Based on these two links, I’d say that the latest NSA program is quite legal, well at least if they buy them, like everybody else.
LINK
LINK
This issue moot.
Comment by Neo @ 5/15/2006 - 9:22 am
- What you see, accentened by the Libtard quixotic “NSA scandals”, where in all Americans are suddenly made aware that their telephone bills are actually recorded, is a systamatic shift to a new paradigm from the old; the new “reach” for legislative control over the executive with which the left will try to replace their lost hegemony in the SCOTUS, using the “living document” warpage of the Constitution they managed by parlor trick and inside ringers, and allowed treating it like so much silly putty, but which now is lost to them, and desperately must be replaced.
- The propaganda wars have already begun; “Bush above the law”, “Congressional oversight”, “Rogue leadership”, etc, hoping that the general public doesn’t really understand the true meaning of seperation of powers.
- Intrestingly, nothing will be put forth as to the most infantisimal reason that our Executive leadership would want to accomplish what in effect would be an overthrow of itself, given the speaker of the House is in fact the third highest member of the Executive, among his other duties, but none-the-less we’ll be treated to a constant drumbeat of this nattering propaganda until the left manages to do what they do so well, yet again in 2008:
- Perfect at running polls that show without a doubt that only the left and their ideas have the favor of all Americans.
- Perfect at finding fault with any GOP administration, and convincing the public of their own infallibility, while obstructing any and all legislation that could reflect faborable on the GOP in the slightest way.
- Perfect at performing any and all possible acts of “patriotism”, by rote of seditious leaks through the media, underming the WOT, and outright fabrication of the most outreageous smear campaigns, showing their deep love of France.
- Perfect at running exit polls, distinquished by their absolute dedication to accuracy. while demanding recounts, because its just not possble that they lost.
- Unable to win National elections.
- Bang
Comment by Big Bang Hunter @ 5/15/2006 - 11:24 am
My trackback for my post did not go through. It said your trackback number was not good; it is so long it is hard to capture it.
Talk about MSM distortion. The NSA is not “logging” those calls, they are getting records from the telephone companies of telephone numbers called for a database.
Comment by Don Singleton @ 5/15/2006 - 11:24 am
Bang, I moved this to my open post thread. –ST
Comment by Big Bang Hunter @ 5/15/2006 - 12:34 pm
Okies - Thanx sweets -
- Bang
Comment by Big Bang Hunter @ 5/15/2006 - 12:46 pm
Very good posts today ST.
ST wrote, “This is just one more in a long list of examples of how our media joins hands with the hate-Bush wing of the Democratic party in what I believe is a deliberate distortion of the news as part of an effort to hurt the President and, by association, Republicans in general in an election year”
It’s why I was a liberal pre 1991. The lazy negligent, not learning economics, science, policy, not researching, repeating Democrat talking points had me thinking of voting for Paul Tsongas or Bill Clinton. Good thing my conversion happened in time for the election and I voted for Bush Senior but too bad Perot was in the picture and Clinton won.
Comment by Baklava @ 5/15/2006 - 1:07 pm
This is interesting, and perhaps the real reason the MSM and the Democrats are so hard over against this NSA non-issue of phone records:
LINK
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.
Hmmm…seems to be two good things about coming out against this in the minds of the Democrats and the MSM, first, it is GET BUSH all the time, and secondly, try and derail this before it outs the leakers and their allies in the news.
Wheels within wheels…
Comment by Severian @ 5/15/2006 - 1:44 pm
Comment by Baklava @ 5/15/2006 - 2:11 pm