{"id":196252,"date":"2008-05-13T19:42:00","date_gmt":"2008-05-14T00:42:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/13\/they-are-spying-on-us-but-they-arent-prosecuting-terrorists\/"},"modified":"2008-05-13T19:42:00","modified_gmt":"2008-05-14T00:42:00","slug":"they-are-spying-on-us-but-they-arent-prosecuting-terrorists","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2008\/05\/13\/they-are-spying-on-us-but-they-arent-prosecuting-terrorists\/","title":{"rendered":"They Are Spying on US, but They Aren&#8217;t Prosecuting Terrorists"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The LA Times is reporting that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/nationworld\/nation\/la-na-justice12-2008may12,0,4309444.story?track=rss\">despite an enormous expansion in surveillance of Americans, there has been no increase in terror prosecutions<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.washingtonmonthly.com\/archives\/individual\/2008_05\/013713.php\">Kevin Drum has a useful pictorial perspective<\/a>:<br \/><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/pic60.picturetrail.com\/VOL1689\/10590113\/19633101\/317154070.jpg\" \/><br \/>He also has a perspective that is even more alarming:<\/p>\n<blockquote style=\"color: rgb(0, 0, 153);\"><p>If anything, the real situation is almost certainly even worse than this: &#8216;Warrants&#8217; understates the vast increase in surveillance, which also includes things like national security letters and the warrantless programs run by the NSA, while &#8216;prosecutions&#8217; overstates the number of genuine terrorists who have been taken to court. It would be nice if Congress actually took a serious look at this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Needless to say, I&#8217;m not sanguine about the likelihood of a Congressional investigation, but I do have a theory as to why you would have an explosion in surveillance without any increase in anti-terror actions: surveillance of political enemies.<\/p>\n<p>By expanding surveillance to unprecedented levels, it allows a few dozens of actions to be taken against political opponents.  For people who are actually conducting the surveillance, typically non-poltical civil service appointees, it would be easy to miss the political surveillance among the hundreds discreet actions, but someone *cough* Karl Rove *cough* would have the clearance to get the data that they wanted.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The LA Times is reporting that despite an enormous expansion in surveillance of Americans, there has been no increase in terror prosecutions. Kevin Drum has a useful pictorial perspective:He also has a perspective that is even more alarming: If anything, the real situation is almost certainly even worse than this: &#8216;Warrants&#8217; understates the vast increase &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[971,970,1062,1102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-196252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-civil-rights","category-corruption","category-espionage","category-intelligence"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196252"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=196252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/196252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=196252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=196252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=196252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}