Word: nsa
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...Representative Jane Harman, a California Democrat, has found herself in the crosshairs of a potential scandal following an April 19 Congressional Quarterly story alleging Harman was caught on a 2005 or 2006 NSA wiretap offering to lobby the Justice Department to soft-pedal charges against two AIPAC officials. In exchange, Harman allegedly sought a suspected Israeli agent's help in encouraging Nancy Pelosi - then the House minority leader - to appoint Harman as House Intelligence Committee chair after the 2006 elections...
...National Security Agency (NSA), which collects the vast bulk of chatter for this country, has no shortage of sophisticated equipment and no legal obstacles when it listens to chatter abroad. What it does have a problem with is making sense of the sea of chatter it sucks out of the air and the world's fiber-optic cables. The risk of misinterpretation or missing a vital piece of information is enormous. (See the top 10 Secret Service code names...
...risk of seriously irritating NSA's sing-along choir, I'll take the definition of chatter one step further. Chatter can be something as simple as an overheard conversation next to you at a café. Not too many years ago, CIA analysts asked operatives overseas to make daily notes of what the locals were saying - random conversations at dinners, on trains, at the post office. It all amounted to little more than impressions, the locals' hopes and frustrations. Not exactly hard intelligence, but it put the analysts into the swim of a particular country, allowing them...
...only question now is, How do we codify the collection of chatter? The NSA already has the legal authority to listen to chatter overseas - communications among foreigners. But what do you do when an American pops up calling a suspect telephone number or trying to e-mail al-Qaeda to volunteer his services? How long can the NSA sit on a line, figuring out whether it is of real interest, before applying for a warrant? I'll leave that one up to the constitutional lawyers, but I'll be eagerly listening for their answer...
...geography" to which Paglen refers is as much metaphorical and legal as physical. (Sorry conspiracy theorists, he does not actually infiltrate any hangars at Area 51). "Blank spots on the map begat dark spaces in the law," he writes, in reference to a raft of shady government incidents from NSA wiretapping to extraordinary renditions to secret CIA missions in 1980's Latin America...