While John McCain is still hawking that ‘maverick’ tag, don’t believe the hype, instead, let’s look at some recent statements he made that perked my interest, coming out in favor of the Bush administrations’ stance on FISA, warrantless wiretapping/eavesdropping and executive power. Funny thing is, he had the exact opposite opinion on these topics when he was asked in December 2007!

On Wednesday, I documented John McCain’s complete reversal of views — in the last six months alone — on FISA, warrantless eavesdropping and executive power. McCain’s diametrically opposite views were contained in a questionnaire McCain completed for The Boston Globe last December (wherein he rejected many of the Bush/Cheney theories of presidential omnipotence and warrantless eavesdropping) and then a statement McCain issued this week to National Review (wherein he embraced those same theories in order to persuade the Right that he approves of and would continue Bush’s lawless surveillance policies).

Another source states more of what transcribed at the National Review:

A top adviser to Senator John McCain says Mr. McCain believes that President Bush’s program of wiretapping without warrants was lawful, a position that appears to bring him into closer alignment with the sweeping theories of executive authority pushed by the Bush administration legal team.

In a letter posted online by National Review this week, the adviser, Douglas Holtz-Eakin, said Mr. McCain believed that the Constitution gave Mr. Bush the power to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor Americans’ international phone calls and e-mail without warrants, despite a 1978 federal statute that required court oversight of surveillance…

Wiretaps approved by a secret U.S. court overseeing foreign intelligence rose last year, even as Congress was debating a Bush administration request for more authority to fight terrorism.  “The Justice Department said on Wednesday that government applications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for wiretap approval rose to 2,371 in 2007, from 2,176 a year earlier. The court’s approval is required to intercept a call involving an American or calls routed through the United States. It was the fifth annual increase in wiretap approvals since the September 11 attacks in 2001 spurred President George W. Bush’s administration to incorporate foreign intelligence wiretaps into its strategy to fight global terrorism. Civil liberties groups and other opponents, angered by a secret warrantless domestic wiretapping program have urged sharp restrictions and oversight of the wiretaps. The latest figures were released as the Justice Department announced it was reorganizing its national security division, which represents the government before the secret court, to cope with the increased workload and staff. The division’s intelligence staff, which has grown to more than 100 lawyers from 20 in 2000, will work in a new office of intelligence, which will be given an expanded role in overseeing foreign wiretapping to ensure it complies with the law.“

EFF has a great writeup of a LAtimes article that covers why the fight against illegal wiretaps and surveillance is so important, and how it threatens our most basic right.

Going back to the ’20s, Sanchez reviews multiple occasions when authorities have used spying powers not to protect the country, but to further the political aims of parties and politicians:

The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a thorough congressional investigation headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts — and the presidents they served — had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices — even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often “collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action.”

Sanchez traces the history of US government surveillance abuses by both Democrats and Republicans throughout the 20th century. He emphasizes that surveillance isn’t just a threat to privacy — it’s a threat to free speech. That’s why today’s wiretapping debate matters, even to those who may think they have nothing to fear.”

This is the bottom line, and why I’m such a ardent supporter of EFF.  Feel free to join if you are so inclined, but either way, thanks for reading 

Nice to see that others are coming to the same conclusion, after considering all the facts, that telecoms don’t deserve any immunity (retroactive or otherwise) in regards to their illegal wiretapping activities.

Classified documents and testimony about the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program show that it’s not necessary to grant retroactive immunity to telephone companies accused of unlawfully opening their networks to government spies, key congressional Democrats said on Wednesday. In a five-page statement (PDF), U.S. House of Representatives Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and 18 Democrats on that panel contended the Bush administration has “not established a valid and credible case justifying the extraordinary action of Congress enacting blanket retroactive immunity.” Skepticism about the Bush administration’s once-secret eavesdropping program is nothing new for the Democrats who signed onto the statement. The key difference here is that they say their latest conclusions are based on a series of classified reports and briefings to which many of them only recently had access. “Our review of classified documents has reinforced serious concerns about the potential illegality of the administration’s actions in authorizing and carrying out its warrantless surveillance program,” they wrote.

Now que Dubya squawking on about how we’re less safe because he can’t pardon AT&T and others from breaking the law and ignoring our constitutional rights. Big Business meet Big Brother.

While data-mining techniques used for marketing should be viewed with a skewed eye, the fact that AT&T has developed a C language variant called Hancock to mine gigabytes of telephone and Internet records should raise red flags automatically. “…the phone company uses Hancock-coded software to crunch through tens of millions of long distance phone records a night to draw up what AT&T calls “communities of interest” — i.e., calling circles that show who is talking to whom. The system was built in the late 1990s to develop marketing leads, and as a security tool to see if new customers called the same numbers as previously cut-off fraudsters — something the paper refers to as “guilt by association.” [...] recent revelations that the FBI has been requesting “communities of interest” records from phone companies under the USA PATRIOT Act without a warrant. Where the bureau got the idea that phone companies collect such data has, until now, been a mystery. According to a letter from Verizon to a congressional committee earlier this month, the FBI has been asking Verizon for “community of interest” records on some of its customers out to two generations — i.e., not just the people that communicated with an FBI target, but also those who talked to people who talked to an FBI target.” Yep, let’s spread that net far and wide…here’s hoping AT&T is held accountable in it’s current federal court trial on its secret internet spying rooms in its domestic internet switching facilities for the NSA.

During a hearing to review the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act, Congress was told by intelligence official Donald Kerr that, “…it is time people in the United States changed their definition of privacy. Privacy no longer can mean anonymity, says Donald Kerr, the principal deputy director of national intelligence. Instead, it should mean that government and businesses properly safeguards people’s private communications and financial information.” Right, because we all know what a great job businesses are doing keeping our data safe! It is unacceptable for an official to declare that our rights need to be usurped and then have us rely on businesses to keep our records safe; they’ve been failing to do that for years, why would there be any difference now? In fact, if Mr. Kerr’s plan went through, these companies would be bigger targets for exploitation as they’d hold a bigger payout for would be attackers. Come on, no more ‘give up your rights to survive’ rhetoric, we’ve had enough.  There’s more good coverage on this at Wired.