The news outlets this morning are exploding with news that either Alberto Gonzales lied to Congress about the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping in the United States without a warrant, or the FBI Director lied to Congress about it. But there’s an additional detail that isn’t receiving as much attention.
In his defense, Alberto Gonzales trotted out his spokesman to refer to “intelligence activities that have not been publicly disclosed and that remain highly classified.” According to Gonzales’ spokesman, there were intense political debates about whether these undisclosed additional classified intelligence activities were legal.
Gonzales, contradicting not only the FBI Director’s testimony to Congress but the accounts of multiple other Bush administration officials, says there was no debate over the legality of wiretapping without a warrant, although there clearly should have been, since the 4th Amendment expressly prohibits warrantless searches. Yet Gonzales says there was some other, additional, highly classified intelligence activity that made even the callous Bush administration break out into fervent debate over legality. If this purported intelligence activity exists outside of Alberto Gonzales’ fertile imagination, it is by Gonzales’ own characterization an activity that is less legal than wiretapping without a warrant, and that’s scary.
Alberto Gonzales may be lying further to cover his ass — or he may be referring to something that makes wiretapping without a warrant look like a Sunday school picnic. What are these activities? What is the Bush administration capable of?
(Source: New York Times July 27 2007)
Well, the crime we know about is targeted at conversations which include at least one person outside the US, so maybe he’s referring to purely domestic wiretapping. Maybe he’s referring to efforts to listen in on US citizens who aren’t on phone calls, by using cellphones as microphones. Maybe he’s referring to efforts to track the movements of US citizens by implanting RFID tags and placing RFID readers in lamp posts.
All of these are hypothetical, but they’re all within the realm of possibility, and all of them would arguably be worse than the crime we know about.
Sounds like the “Vast Machine” of the Traveler trilogy by John Twelve Hawks emerging in Orwellian fashion while we all laugh and distract ourselves, mostly unknowingly. We’re kept busy so we don’t notice the world has become more like that
of the Truman show for each of us. Next step, the panopticon. (ooooh)