In the WaPo, Barton Gellman reports that the dramatic meeting in John Ashcroft's hospital room was about Internet metadata:
Telephone metadata was not the issue that sparked a rebellion at the Justice Department, first by Jack Goldsmith of the Office of Legal Counsel and then by Comey, who was acting attorney general because John D. Ashcroft was in intensive care with acute gallstone pancreatitis. It was Internet metadata.How is this legally different from getting all of Verizon's phone metadata?
At Bush’s direction, in orders prepared by David Addington, the counsel to Vice President Richard B. Cheney, the NSA had been siphoning e-mail metadata and technical records of Skype calls from data links owned by AT&T, Sprint and MCI, which later merged with Verizon.
For reasons unspecified in the report, Goldsmith and Comey became convinced that Bush had no lawful authority to do that.
The legal challenge for the NSA was that its practice of collecting high volumes of data from digital links did not seem to meet even the relatively low requirements of Bush’s authorization, which allowed collection of Internet metadata “for communications with at least one communicant outside the United States or for which no communicant was known to be a citizen of the United States,” the NSA inspector general’s report said.
Lawyers for the agency came up with an interpretation that said the NSA did not “acquire” the communications, a term with formal meaning in surveillance law, until analysts ran searches against it. The NSA could “obtain” metadata in bulk, they argued, without meeting the required standards for acquisition.
Goldsmith and Comey did not buy that argument, and a high-ranking U.S. intelligence official said the NSA does not rely on it today.
When Comey finally ordered a stop to the program, Bush signed an order renewing it anyway. Comey, Goldsmith, FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III and most of the senior Bush appointees in the Justice Department began drafting letters of resignation.
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3 comments:
Today, Cheney said Snowden was a traitor. The fact Cheney isn't in jail or at the very least on the receiving end of a truth and rehabilitation committee's leniency, and the fact that he can with "authority" still defame true heroes, lays at the feet of Obama.
The fact Cheney isn't in jail or at the very least on the receiving end of a truth and rehabilitation committee's leniency, and the fact that he can with "authority" still defame true heroes, lays at the feet of Obama.
I'd start with Pelosi who refused to start any meaningful investigations of the Iraq War but I do agree that Obama has done nothing.
She also helped block Kucinich attempts to cut off funds.
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