
U.S. surveillance architecture includes collection of Internet, phone metadata - declan
http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-surveillance-architecture-includes-collection-of-revealing-internet-phone-metadata/2013/06/15/e9bf004a-d511-11e2-b05f-3ea3f0e7bb5a_print.html
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tptacek
If you haven't read Gellman's _Angler_ yet, you really should; it's riveting.
Read this whole article; towards the end, it reports that acting AG James
Comey, along with FBI Director Robert Mueller, threatened to resign if NSA
continued slurping Internet metadata out of American signals intercepts on
orders from David Addington, a Cheney henchman.

Gellman's underselling the drama here a bit, but he captured it in _Angler_.
Comey and Mueller didn't just threaten to resign. First, Comey simply refused
to authorize the program. Comey was acting AG at the time because John
Ashcroft --- a punching bag figure for civil libertarians (like myself) ---
was hospitalized with appendicitis, doped up, and incapacitated. When Comey
pushed back on the Addington order, future AG Alberto Gonzalez went to
hospital to try to get Ashcroft to override Comey. Ashcroft, who Gellman
(IIRC) reported was barely lucid, refused to override Comey. Comey and Mueller
threatened to resign. The rest is history.

It is really hard to fathom just how bad the first Bush administration ---
really, the Cheney shadow administration, which is what it was in the first
term --- was. The last time mass senior resignations were a tool of influence
in Washington was Watergate.

Incidentally: Comey and Mueller were both Republicans. From everything else we
know about NSA surveillance post 9/11, we have every reason to believe that
Addington's plan was stupid, but not much reason to believe its goal was to
target anything other than foreign terrorists. Both Comey and Mueller were
prepared to resign, from a Republican administration, over what most Americans
would consider a legal technicality --- in a program whose goal they
supported, and whose harm to the American people was abstract. This squares
with my experience talking to judges and law enforcement people: their belief
in the rule of law and in the importance of the law is profound.

Comey's been tapped to run the FBI for Obama.

~~~
brown9-2
It might be a small nuance here, but I think they were prepared to resign
because the law required the AG to approve of the actions, Comey did not, and
the President ordered the NSA to continue anyway. I think it is less that they
disagreed with the surveillance action and more that they could not serve in
an Administration that was going to ignore and overrule legal officials like
that.

~~~
mpyne
Well this is the same Mueller who was testifying in Congress just the other
day, right? So it does seem the program itself was less of a crisis to them as
opposed to the lengths Bush was prepared to in order to implement with
Executive authority alone.

------
jacquesm
I shudder to think what a modern day McCarthy or Hoover could do with all this
information at his disposal.

~~~
wavefunction
Maybe he (or she) is already doing it.

