warrantless wiretaps

Here we go again!

National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell is drawing up plans for cyberspace spying that would make the current debate on warrantless wiretaps look like a "walk in the park," according to an interview published in the New Yorker's print edition today.

Debate on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act “will be a walk in the park compared to this,” McConnell said. “this is going to be a goat rope on the Hill. My prediction is that we’re going to screw around with this until something horrendous happens.”

Hey Bush - you can look at my emails when I can look at yours. Oh wait you destroy yours.So to quote your VP "go fuck yourself!"

One of the arguments that we keep hearing about the warrantless wiretaps is
that it could of helped prevented 9/11 if the "tool" was available prior to the
attacks. That is another point that is totally false. The FBI actually wanted to
tap Moussaoui prior to the attacks but didn't do so because their lawyers had a
"misunderstanding" of how FISA actually worked.

This is proven in an article from September 25, 2002 in the Washington Post:

The frantic efforts of Minnesota FBI agents to search the computer and
belongings of suspected terrorist Zacarias Moussaoui in August 2001 were
thwarted by lawyers at FBI headquarters who misunderstood the law on foreign
intelligence surveillance warrants, a congressional committee was told
yesterday. Had the agents succeeded in obtaining a special intelligence
warrant in the weeks leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks, they would have
found materials that could have led them to al Qaeda members -- including
hijackers Khalid Almihdhar and Nawaf Alhazmi -- who had gathered for a key
meeting in Malaysia in January 2000, Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), a member of
the panel, said yesterday.

In the third of a series of critical reports, staff members of the
House-Senate committee probing the performance of intelligence agencies
reported that Minneapolis FBI agents spent three weeks trying to meet a
legal standard that was not required. The agents, fearful that Moussaoui was
somehow part of a U.S. plot, desperately tried to prove that Chechen rebels
to whom Moussaoui was linked were in turn agents of Osama bin Laden's terror
network.

This should really spark a heated discussion and calls of partisanship from
the right:

Former Vice President Al Gore will deliver a scathing speech Monday at
Constitution Hall in Washington -- just blocks from the White House -- at
which he will declare America is faced with a constitutional crisis, RAW
STORY has learned.

The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day speech is set to take place at noon at
the Daughters of the American Revolution's Constitution Hall. Gore will be
introduced by onetime Georgia Republican congressman Bob Barr.

A source close to the erstwhile vice president related details of Gore's
expected speech to RAW STORY Thursday. The source noted that Gore prepares
the final editions of his speeches just before he delivers them, but that
the tenor of the speech would focus on what the Tennessee Democrat has
described as a President acting above the law

Article continues

here.

We can expect the right wing pundits to counter with "Gore is trying to set
the stage for a 2008 White House run" or something along those lines. One key
here is the fact that Bob Barr will be introducing him. Barr has been one of the
most outspoken people on the right when it comes to condemning Bush's
warrantless wiretaps.