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December 20, 2005

hot spook on spook action

Some Jack Bauer-ish ex-spies are speaking out about the wiretapping scandal. (Hat tip atrios)

All of the sigint specialists emphasized repeatedly that keeping tabs on Americans is way beyond the bounds of what they ordinarily do -- no matter what the conspiracy crowd may think.

"It's drilled into you from minute one that you should not ever, ever, ever, under any fucking circumstances turn this massive apparatus on an American citizen," one source says. "You do a lot of weird shit. But at least you don't fuck with your own people." [full story]

Although it's heartwarming to hear that previous generations of spies were better lovers of the Constitution than the current lot, I don't think it's unreasonable to assume that all intelligence agencies engaged in active pursuit of "hostiles" (declared and undeclared) break the law at some point. The difference these days is that the lawbreaking has become endemic; instead of the standard conservative sin of hypocrisy, these folks are boastful and aggressive about their misdeeds and seek an Orwellian re-definition of any term that might impeach them, their motives and means. ("Torture," for example.) The arrogance of this administration, its messianic self-righteousness as it defines constitutional deviancy downward is mindboggling. Every single one of them - Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Condi, Colin - belongs in jail.

Dreams of the big house for George et al aside, the above spooky quote came from DefenseTech.org, a nifty site that's a fucking goldmine for the very conspiracy crowd it disavows. On pretty much any given day editor Noah Shachtman is serving up some super-weird, borderline science-fictional newsbit, as in this tasty news item:

Pain Ray Headed to Iraq?

It's been talked about for years. But the Pentagon's microwave-like pain ray may finally be headed to Iraq, Inside the Army reports.

DefenseTech's comments on the Tapgate go for the long ball, suggesting that there's a new technology at play in the wiretaps, and also catching the Total Information Awareness (TIA) reference in Senator Jay Rockerfeller's handwritten note (!) to Cheney. To those of you not in the conspiracy or defense tech crowds, TIA was DARPA's proposed plan to index, like, everything electronic, in hopes of finding the needle of terrorist communication in the haystack of the billion or so bits that have been produced and exchanged about Jessica Simpson's divorce.

Posted by ebogjonson in next levelish, on December 20, 2005 1:42 PM