Obama Administration’s Criminal Negligence On National Security

19 Apr, 2010 by Melissa Clouthier

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A J Strata has done some amazing investigative work regarding the timelines of the Ft. Hood Massacre and now, comes this about the Obama administration’s treatment of gathered data:

Today comes more bizarre news on the liberals’ strained ‘legal logic’ as it applies to fighting terrorists . Some months back the FIS Court determined there was (or is) a technical error in the surveillance law fixes President Bush and Congress put in place in 2008. This determination apparently: makes certain types of simple, normal data collection on communications illegal (still wondering why precedence is not working here).

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which grants orders to U.S. spy agencies to monitor U.S. citizens and residents in terrorism and espionage cases, recently “got a little bit more of an understanding” about the NSA’s collection of the data, said one official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because such matters are classified.

The data under discussion are records associated with various kinds of communication, but not their content. Examples of this “metadata” include the origin, destination and path of an e-mail; the phone numbers called from a particular telephone; and the Internet address of someone making an Internet phone call. It was not clear what kind of data had provoked the court’s concern.

…

“This is a basic tool we used to have, and it’s now gone,” said one intelligence official familiar with the impasse. “Every day, every week that goes by, there’s just one more week of information that we’re not collecting. You sit there and say, ‘This is unbelievable that we have this gap.’ ”

The data could be used to help analysts learn whom a suspect was working and communicating with, and to “detect and anticipate” a plot, the official said. “It’s not a concern over what was being collected,” he said. “It’s just a question about whether the law was written in a way that allowed the information to be collected in a way that they were collecting it.”

Due to the court’s decision: the NSA has stopped monitoring threats! They stopped in December or January, just as Abdulmutallab was reaching his target here in the US.

The NSA voluntarily stopped gathering the data in December or January rather than wait to be told to do so, the officials said. The agency had been collecting it with court permission for several years, officials said.

This is just ridiculous. This kind of data has been available to investigators for decades. As technology advances the methods for access may change, but the class of information has been a staple for weeding out bad elements from innocent bystanders. This has to be really bad because the act of leaking this situation to the press (and therefore our enemies) is tantamount to admitting our defenses are down — and now would be a good time to attack.