Re: What’s Great About USA Today’s NSA Story is…
It’s not the exact same story at all, Josh. What’s really great about USA Today’s NSA story is that it goes further than the New York Times’ original story, uncovering a vast database of purely domestic calls — as the Times itself notes in its story today:
The New York Times first reported in December that the president had authorized the N.S.A. to conduct eavesdropping without warrants.The Times also reported in December that the agency had gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to get access to records of vast amounts of domestic and international phone calls and e-mail messages.
The agency analyzes communications patterns, the report said, and looks for evidence of terrorist activity at home and abroad.
The USA Today article on Thursday went further, saying that the N.S.A. had created an enormous database of all calls made by customers of the three phone companies in an effort to compile a log of “every call ever made” within this country. The report said one large phone company, Qwest, had refused to cooperate with the N.S.A. because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.
After the original Times article, the debate was mainly about whether the NSA should be intercepting calls in which one person was on foreign soil, because that’s what the Bush administration said the NSA was watching — international calls from and to Al Qaeda operatives. This is a very different debate, because it’s now clear the administration wasn’t telling the truth in its “foreign calls only” pushback on the original Times article. The new USA Today story shows that the administration is also compiling huge amounts of information on purely domestic calls.
This distinction is what a lot of editorialists are picking up on today. For example, the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson:
At least now we know that the Bush administration’s name for spying on Americans without first seeking court approval — the “terrorist surveillance program” — isn’t an exercise in Orwellian doublespeak after all. It’s just a bald-faced lie…You’ll recall that when it was revealed last year that the NSA was eavesdropping on phone calls and reading e-mails without first going to court for a warrant, the president said his “terrorist surveillance program” targeted international communications in which at least one party was overseas, and then only when at least one party was suspected of some terrorist involvement. Thus no one but terrorists had anything to worry about.
Not remotely true, it turns out, unless tens of millions of Americans are members of al-Qaeda sleeper cells — evildoers who cleverly disguise their relentless plotting as sales calls, gossip sessions and votes for Elliott on “American Idol.”
Agreed, it is a different debate. That needs to be flushed out fully. That is why it is unhelpful, Eli, when you post the Wash Post poll without any analysis regarding the type of questions the poll asked, or the general question of whether it is legitimate to run a poll on a complicated issue the night after it was on the front page of a national paper. The role of journalist is to explain and reveal news, not cement ignorant public opinion, which is what you are doing by blindly linking to the Wash Post poll.
Dan Froomkin does a good analysis in his Poll Watch section: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/linkset/2005/04/11/LI2005041100879.html