McLAUGHLIN on snoopgate

yesterday i mentioned the JMc interview on lehrer. the transcript is now up. here are some of the interesting snippets.

"JOHN McLAUGHLIN: What's happened in the communications revolution, though, is that people today jump from one phone number to another, one telephone to another. When you capture a terrorist overseas if you're lucky enough to capture all of the electronic media with that terrorist, you may have terabytes as data as much data as we have in a small public library. "

we've reached the age of library-totin terrorists. be afraid.

and here's another glimpse into the technical details of the program:

"JOHN McLAUGHLIN: You may have two or three hundred phone numbers that are related to people in the United States or e-mail addresses. If you were to get FISA's on all of those people, two or three hundred, it would take a tremendous amount of time; whereas, if you use some of the procedures that have been adopted under this particular program, you can quickly scour through that and figure out that maybe 90 percent of it, 99 percent of it is innocent or harmless or meaningless but there are two or three or four that are seriously connected to terrorists and you want to focus in on them. You might get FISA authority for those and dig deep on them."

how do they quickly scour 300 email addresses and determine that they are clean? somehow they can locate and spy on every one of those people - and presumably not just monitor their email - but all of their phone calls as well. and its not obvious how they can 'quickly' determine that someone isnt a terrorist just by monitoring their communications. how long does it take them to stop spying on someone so long as that person doesnt say anything terroristy? a day? a week? the alternative is that they literally have an enormous cache of every email message ever sent so that when they look into someone, they can retroactively search their comms (?)

and here's another odd defense of the program:

"JOHN McLAUGHLIN: And also let me just add one other point here. Even though there are emergency procedures where you can get a warrant and then have 72 hours to justify it, it's also true that in that 72 hours in this modern communication era, it's highly likely that the terrorist you're following is on a different phone number, a different cell phone and you'd be getting warrants one after another, which let me come back to it and say that's not to say that FISA is not an important instrument. It's been very effective for a certain type of terrorist target. But we need more agility and more speed and I think that's what the president was searching for here."

surely 'the enemy' has always changed phones or pigeons or whatever - but the odd thing is that if their argument is valid, they could simply argue that congress should change the laws so that (international) warrants are person-specific, not phone-specific. problem solved.

and then he made this odd argument:

"JOHN McLAUGHLIN: This is the kind of program that filled in a gap in our coverage. People say: Well, didn't the terrorists know we were listening to them? Don't we know we intercept their conversations? Well we don't know that.
Well, we don't think that they know that we are as good as we have been. They now know that. They know a lot more today than they did before this leak."

again - this is specious (at least given what we know). the 'terrorists' used to think that they were vulnerable to being spied on, and now they know that the USG doesnt need to get fisa warrants to do so. aka - there is no change.

so many lies, so little time.

i wont be surprised if they dont put JMc on the tv again. he did a pretty bad job, and i think he let slip a couple of things that he wasnt supposed to.