33 – but that’s the case to an even greater degree with Clinton and McCain. Plus, you can’t even go into a thorough investigation on warrantless wiretaps and rendition without getting into Clinton’s shipments to Egypt and Clinton’s Latin American eavesdropping program coming up – so Hillary isn’t going to tackle any of that with the same gusto she brought to the flag burning amendments.

Obama’s lukewarm is as hot as it gets. *sigh*

Monty Hall has pulled back the drapes and what we have behind each of the curtains isn’t something that is worth trading for that hard boiled egg you tucked into your purse in hopes of your shot at the big deal.

From the Nov 2005 Wa Po article on NSLs that preceded the IG reports, Bob Barr(former representative, CIA analyst and prosecutor) on NSLs:

“There’s no checks and balances whatever on them. It is simply some bureaucrat’s decision that they want information, and they can basically just go and get it.”

And don’t forget that NSLs got the same blurring of the line between prosecutions and “political intell” that happened for FISA secret spying (and for non-FISA secret spying too I guess):

Under the old legal test, the FBI had to have “specific and articulable” reasons to believe the records it gathered in secret belonged to a terrorist or a spy. Now the bureau needs only to certify that the records are “sought for” or “relevant to” an investigation “to protect against international terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities.”

That story also mentions an ex-FBI chief of national security law unit, “Michael J. Woods [who] had helped devise the FBI wish list for surveillance powers” and his caution to use the NSLs for good and carefully, or the result might be that “Legislators [who had] granted the new authority and could as easily take it back [might]. When making that decision, he wrote, “Congress certainly will examine the manner in which the FBI exercised it.”

OK – he may have been wrong about that part – apparently what Congress does when faced with massive NSL abuse is to go figure out how much MORE power to give to the FBI.

Woods noted back in that story how badly he had misjudged the way in which the new powers would be used and the story goes on to supply some explanation – St. Ashcroft.

One thing Woods did not anticipate was then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft’s revision of Justice Department guidelines. On May 30, 2002, and Oct. 31, 2003, Ashcroft rewrote the playbooks for investigations of terrorist crimes and national security threats. He gave overriding priority to preventing attacks by any means available.

Ashcroft remained bound by Executive Order 12333, which requires the use of the “least intrusive means” in domestic intelligence investigations. But his new interpretation came close to upending the mandate.

The observations – that even John Gotti eventually gets to find out he was wiretapped – but not targets of NSL search and seizures.

Back then, Caprioni tried to minimze the effects, saying that while, sure, the FBI could use the low standards, lack of review, and lack of accountablity forever, to just pretty much go search everyone, why would they?

“Everybody’s connected” if investigators keep tracing calls “far enough away from your targeted bad guy,” [Caprioni] said. “What’s the point of that?”

One point is to fill government data banks for another investigative technique. That one is called “link analysis,” a practice Caproni would neither confirm nor deny.

The article goes on to discuss the fact that CASINOs as well as Universities (and unlike ATT & Verizon) seemed to think that they needed a piece of paper, and that NSLs were used to try to get them on board. One anonymous interviewee indicated to Gellman “that national security letters may eventually have been withdrawn” and for some reason, Caprioni declined to disuss the Casino information use of NSLs.

What happened in Vegas stayed in federal data banks. Under Ashcroft’s revised policy, none of the [Casino and Las Vegas]information has been purged.

And the emergency that started it all? A washout. Maybe the result of a tortured “confession” with no actual plot, just a need to make the torture stop or a hallucinating mind – who knows?

The North Carolina State U story in there too, from 2005. And the library showdown case.

The WaPo story also discusses the gag orders being taken to court and struck down, and the frustration of judges because “the FBI is not obliged to describe what it is looking for, or why” and the reference by one of the judges to an explanation so vague it would provoke laughter if she did mention it.
The FBI activities in the cases described in the story are pretty revealing. As was the position, then, of the Republicans on the Intel and Judiciary committees with oversight, who claimed that everything had to be fine with NSLs because Fine had power to investigate Patriot Act abuses if complaints were filed with him, and he hadn’t done any investigations, so things must be fine.

Fine’s response was to point out that it would be difficult for a person to file a protest over the searches of his personal records if he did not know they had taken place. Not to worry, said Caprioni at the time.

After all, the public could count on the oversight of the Congress [by which she meant the few members of congress who received briefings and of them, deducting out the Republicans who were relying on Fine to initiate investigations based on complaints and then deducting out the Democrats who had no power]

“People have to depend on their elected representatives to do the job of oversight they were elected to do,” Caproni said. “And we think they do a fine job of it.”

Aww – neato. Pat Roberts got a “Fine Job” sticker from the FBI.