Bits and Bytes of Islamic Terrorist Prevention

Fire of Liberty

Heather MacDonald, fellow of the Manhattan Institute and contributing editor of City Journal, has a good piece in yesterday's New York Post on how the critics of the administration are wrong in implying that the White House or the NSA have infringed on our civil liberties through "domestic spying," due to the fact that the only thing doing the work of scanning telephone numbers and e-mail addresses are computers and not actual humans. Even worse is the fact that these critics continue to wave FISA in the administrations face with regards to the current NSA program that they are making it much more harder for the folks who are given the task to man the gates against Islamic terrorists to do their jobs. I recommend that you read the whole article to get a better understanding on what's going on with regards to the defense of the nation but for the shortness of time here's several paragraphs I find interesting:

The barriers to using our computer capacity grow even more daunting when the government wants to use computers to find Jihadist language in communications. Remember: A computer can't eavesdrop on a conversation because it doesn't "know" what anyone is saying, and a key-word detection program would exclude from computer analysis all conversations and all parts of conversations that don't use suspicious language. Nevertheless, such an insensate tracking becomes "surveillance" for FISA purposes.

Thus, to put a computer to work sifting through thousands of phone conversations or e-mail messages a day, the NSA must convince the FISA court that there is probable cause to believe that every U.S. resident whose conversations will be dumbly scanned is an agent of a foreign power knowingly and illegally gathering intelligence or planning terrorism.

That requirement is both unworkable and unnecessary. It is wrong to consider computer analysis a constitutional "search" of data that haven't been selected for further inspection. Only when authorities order a followup investigation on selected results should a probable-cause standard come into play.

FISA's probable-cause standard is a belated encroachment on national defense that contravened centuries of constitutional thinking. The Fourth Amendment's probable-cause requirement governs criminal prosecution - to ensure that the government's police powers are correctly targeted and do not unreasonably invade privacy.

But judges and criminal evidentiary standards should be irrelevant when the government is gathering intelligence to prevent an attack on the country. A federal judge has no expertise in evaluating the need for and significance of foreign intelligence information. And the standard for gathering intelligence on our enemies should be lower than that for bringing the government's penal powers to bear on citizens.

At the very least, we should not make matters worse by equating computer interception of large-scale data with "surveillance" under FISA. Requiring probable cause for computer analysis of intelligence data would knock out our technological capacity in the War on Terror almost as effectively as a Jihadist strike against NSA's computers.

Thankfully MacDonald can bypass the hot air of our politicians and the continued cloudy reporting on FISA and the NSA's terrorist watch and get down to the bare bones.