A Very Strange Story

A short while back, some Democrats joined with Republicans in the Senate to pass a bill that essentially legalizes warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens. This really pissed off the liberal blogosphere, and with good reason. At the time, lots of bloggers were really confused as to why the Dems would do something so obviously stupid.

Well, the New York Times has a story out this morning that purports to explain it....except that it doesn't, not really:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 10 — At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

You would think that I would have excerpted the part where the reporter explains why the number of intercepted communications had dropped so much, since surely that would be important, right? I mean, the obvious reason for the decrease would be a variety of court cases and laws that "hindered" the national intelligence apparatus from doig their job.

I didn't excerpt that paragraph because I couldn't find it. It's not in the story. I mean, there is this:

A ruling a month or two later — the judge who made it and its exact timing are not clear — restricted the government’s ability to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications passing through telecommunication “switches” on American soil.

The security agency was newly required to seek warrants to monitor at least some of those phone calls and e-mail messages. As a result, the ability to intercept foreign-based communications “kept getting ratcheted down,” said a senior intelligence official who insisted on anonymity because the account involved classified material. “ We were to a point where we were not effectively operating.”

Mr. McConnell, lead negotiator for the administration in lobbying for the bill, said in an interview that the court’s restrictions had made his job much more difficult.

“It was crazy, because I’m sitting here signing out warrants on known Al Qaeda operatives that are killing Americans, doing foreign communications,” he said. “And the only reason I’m signing that warrant is because it touches the U.S. communications infrastructure. That’s what we fixed.”

But that's just bullshit. There's no reason a warrant is unnecessary there. McConnell does a good job normalizing the idea that warrants are unnecessary, but I'm not buying. It is not, in fact, crazy to sign warrants that deal with Al-Qaeda. It was, until fairly recently, standard procedure, and it worked. Warrants did not cause September 11, which is what McConnell is very subtly implying here.

For that matter, it's not like anyone was asking that this information be made public anyway - all that the lawsuits did was require that the Bush Administration go through an existing secret court, the FISA court, which hardly ever turned down warrant applications anyway.

In fact, for many people, cutting down the number of intercepted communications is in and of itself a good thing, since trust for McConnell, Gonzales, and the like is pretty low. Let me make that clearer: Many people, myself included, have so little trust for them that we consider limiting their power more important than intercepting communications willy-nilly.

While the NYT does ask McConnell and Co. why communications were down, it doesn't actually examine the answer he gave. That's just bad reporting - but it's par for the course these days.