Key bloggers catching onto the TIA scenario

Josh Marshall blogs over at TPM that some technology is at the root of the NSA story.

This is what I've been saying.

Josh links to a Kevin Drum post at Political Animal that puts a lot of what underpins the possible scenario together.

Again, this is what I've been saying, only Drum takes a look at Echelon, an angle I hadn't considered:

"Lots of people have suggested that the NSA program has something to do with Echelon, a massive project that vacuums up communications of all kinds from all over the globe. The problem is that Echelon has been around for a long time and no one has ever complained about it before — so whatever this new program is, it's something more than vanilla Echelon. What's more, it's something disturbing enough that a few weeks after 9/11 the administration apparently felt that even Republicans in Congress wouldn't approve of it. What kind of program is so intrusive that even Republicans, even with 9/11 still freshly in mind, wouldn't have supported it?"

This is where I'd like to suggest that the new technology, inspired by the Total Information Awareness project at DARPA and possibly carried out there or at other places in the Pentagon, NSA, wherever, in the area of data mining of all U.S. citizens' (and possibly European allies' or more) personal information, which is then put into a keyword-searchable database that is the source of the "detections" Bush and his people keep saying they're doing, as opposed to "monitoring."

It's my theory that the Bushlings believe that the FISA court would not approve of the use of this technology because it intrudes too much on citizens' privacy. It might approve of "monitoring" communications where a warrant can actually be created with the constitutional requirement in the 4th Amendment: "particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized." The new technology intrudes without meeting the 4th Amendment requirement until too far into the "detection" process.

This is why the administration bypassed the FISA court: It knew it would be knocked down. So, as many people might suggest, it broke the law to achieve its ends.

Again, I refer readers to the GAO report that looks at these data mining efforts underway in spite of the supposed shutting down of DARPA's TIA.