Here we go again -- or rather, here they go again. How many times must we suffer the president or a member of his administration shaking his finger and peering into the camera and averring that he never had sexual relations with the Bill of Rights.
They just can’t be honest. There’s something deeply, morbidly ingrained in their psychological makeup that prevents them from being aboveboard.
The latest administration scam was a meeting of Internet executives called by the attorney general and FBI director to discuss, purportedly, the corporate record-keeping of Web-surfing activities that child pornography investigators could tap, if needed. That was the “hook” -- child pornography -- that has been publicly touted by the attorney general as the sole justification for expanded snooping powers. Who wouldn’t want to see child-porn purveyors nailed, right?
“In a speech in April,” recalls the NYT, “[Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales said that investigations into child pornography had been hampered because Internet companies had not always kept records that would help prosecutors identify people who traded in illegal images.”
“The investigation and prosecution of child predators depends critically on the availability of evidence that is often in the hands of Internet service providers,” said Mr. Gonzales. Good. Fantastic. Go get ‘em.
But when ISP executives were gathered by Mr. Gonzales of the Justice Department, accompanied by FBI Director Robert Mueller, to discuss ways of identifying these nefarious, on-line creatures, “they gathered that the department was interested in records that would allow them to identify which individuals visited certain Web sites and possibly conducted searches using certain terms” [emphasis added] -- and for purposes far outside the originally offered reason.
“An executive of one Internet provider that was represented at the first meeting said Mr. Gonzales began the discussion by showing slides of child pornography from the Internet. But later, one participant asked Mr. Mueller why he was interested in the Internet records. The executive said Mr. Mueller’s reply was, ‘We want this for terrorism.’”
Nor did it end there. Administration officials went on to talk of the records’ “value in investigating other crimes like intellectual property theft and fraud, said Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, who attended the session.”
“It was clear that they would go beyond kiddie porn and terrorism and use it for general law enforcement,” said a startled Rotenberg, adding that “This is a sharp departure from current practice. Data retention is an open-ended obligation to retain all information on all customers for all purposes, and from a traditional Fourth Amendment perspective, that really turns things upside down.”
Fourth Amendment? That old thing? Pshaw.
Kate Dean, the just-as-startled executive director of an ISP trade group, noted that “When they said they were talking about child pornography, we spent a lot of time developing proposals for what could be done. Now they are talking about a whole different ball of wax.”
Which is what we have for a government these days -- “A whole different ball of wax.”