SO, how many secret domestic spy programs are there anyway, and are they legal? [View All]

[L. Coyote]

To make a point, "More than there are stars in the heavens" (at least from a metropolitan perspective).
And, yes, they are legal. The NSA is forbidden by law from spying on Americans. Other agencies are not.

THIS THREAD: Focus - all domestic espionage programs. Purpose - provide actual context of current events.

Recent news events surrounding the Gonzales testimony re: Meuller, Comey, and Ashcroft's hospital visit, seems to convey a blissful ignorance about just what is happening on the domestic spying front, including the legal spying.

Much of the current investigation begaqn with the hacker-gate interception of all the Senate Committee on the Judiciary electronic communications, and Dem Senators began asking questions way back then, albeit without the power of the majority.

The "oversight era" could not begin until the People transformed the Congress. Now the sheer mass of corruption and abuses of power are difficult to deal with while, at the same time, attempting to stop an illegal war and run the country. Nonetheless, this issue has not yet evaporated, perhaps in no small part due to how it started with Republicans spying on the Senate Judiciary Democrats, and Dems wondering what they are up to this time. Watergate started with Republicans spying on Dems too, some might recall.

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Feb. 2004. Hacker-Gate, "Republicans stole thousands of Democratic documents.."
This alone is way worse than Watergate. In this case the criminals actually pulled off a
their "listening" program, instead of getting caught trying to bug the Dems. And, in retrospect
from several years later, the Department of Justice or the GOP Congressional leadership did NADA!!
So, do we have the proverbial crime of the cover-up to consider too?

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Dems: Stolen memo case should go to DOJ
by kos - Tue Feb 10, 2004 at 02:02:22 PM PDT
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2004/2/10/17222/9423

.... Senate Dems are now demanding a criminal investigation from the Department of Justice
after Republicans stole thousands of Democratic documents from a shared Justice committee server.

From the registration only Roll Call:

   Key Senate Democrats predicted Monday that the internal investigation into the 
   Judiciary Committee's leaked memos would be turned into a full-blown criminal investigation.

   Exiting a 90-minute briefing about the probe with Senate Sergeant-at-Arms Bill Pickle, a 
   quartet of senior Judiciary Democrats declared that what they had heard led them to believe 
   a criminal inquiry, most likely with the Justice Department handling it, should occur.

   "Eventually, this has to be looked at as a criminal matter," said Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.)...

   Leahy sat in on the Senators-only briefing with Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Dianne Feinstein 
   (D-Calif.) and Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), all of whom declined to speak of the details of where Pickle 
   stands in his three-month investigation ......

Republicans, in defending the theft, refer to the matter as a "technical glitch" and deny that the stolen memos amount to criminal wrongdoing .....

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Uncensored 'Hackergate' Report Accidentally Released; Perps' Names Revealed - March 30, 2004
Report on the Investigation Into Improper Access to the Senate Judiciary Committee's Computer System
http://www.subliminalnews.com/archives/000167.php

An uncensored version of the Senate Sergeant At Arms' report on his investigation into Republican hacking of sensitive Democrat computer servers was accidentally released to journalists on March 4. The 67-page report includes the names of the partisan cyber-thieves, other key figures on both sides of the scandal, and numerous footnotes that were redacted in the public version.

A copy of the full, uncensored report ( http://cryptome.org/judiciary-sys.htm ) is available at Cryptome.org, which highlights the previously censored sections in red text. A link to a PDF of the censored version ( http://www.calpundit.com/blogphotos/Pickle%20report.pdf ) is also provided.

It is unclear just how accidental the "accidental release" of the full report actually was. A letter issued by Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), who chairs the Judiciary Committee, said the release was due to "an administrative error" and that there "was no intention on anyone's part to release this version at this time..."

As reported by Subliminal News at the time ( http://www.subliminalnews.com/archives/000141.php ), the scandal -- now often referred to as "Hackergate" -- erupted publicly in late January, 2004, when the Boston Globe and other press outlets reported that Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee had secretly infiltrated Democrat computers for at least a year.

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FULL REPORT: http://cryptome.org/judiciary-sys.htm
PDF: http://www.calpundit.com/blogphotos/Pickle%20report.pdf
Joint Statement Of Senate Judiciary Chairman Orrin Hatch, (R-Utah)
And Ranking Member Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) .....

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Was the Senate File Pilfering Criminal?
Monday January 26, 2004 by Ed Felten
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/index.php?p=502

Some people have argued that the Senate file pilfering could not have violated the law, because the files were reportedly on a shared network drive that was not password-protected. (See, for instance, Jack Shafer’s Slate article.) Assuming those facts, were the accesses unlawful?

Here’s the relevant wording from the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (18 U.S.C. 1030):
Whoever … intentionally accesses a computer without authorization or exceeds authorized access, and thereby obtains … information from any department or agency of the United States … shall be punished as provided in subsection (c) …
…
the term ‘’exceeds authorized access'’ means to access a computer with authorization and to use such access to obtain or alter information in the computer that the accesser is not entitled so to obtain or alter......

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Enough of a preamble to the scandal. This is just part of the background of the current events.