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I assume you are referring to items such as the PATRIOT Act and FISA. These are done in the open where the public has an opportunity to review the standards and regulations. The Pat. Act has a sunshine clause which guards against long term use and abuse of the Act as well as Congressional and Judicial oversight. FISA has been in place for the last 5 or 6 presidents, there have been few changes to FISA in that time.  Bush updated the FISA out of a need for clarification on particular provisions. He did not rewrite the law, he strengthened its ability to hold up in court during oversight hearings.


Bush has added checks and balances in regards to oversight of Executive programs. I am more frightened by programs that I do not know exist, than the ones I can freely read about.


ECHELON:


ECHELON is more of a Civil Rights issue than one of Checks and Balances. The program is composed of intelligence agencies from five English-speaking nations. ECHELON was created during the cold war and has seen many changes in its lifetime. There are rumors it has been used domestically, which is in violation of a 1978 Presidential Executive Order. ECHELON is so secret, I am not positive on what the acronym stands for.




ECHELON is very secretive so there is little concrete knowledge about the program, all we know for sure is what it does and who controls it. Congressional oversight, if any, is done in secret and off the public books. The differences between the inner workings of the program during the Clinton and Bush administrations are as follows. Under Clinton, ECHELON was revealed to exist in 1998. The program gathered intelligence by "snooping" for key words; bomb, terrorist, hijack, assassination etc. As Technology has advanced, finding and isolating intelligence a great deal faster, which also nets much better results. There have been several foiled terrorist plots, at least one a year, that programs like ECHELON are directly responsible for uncovering.


Clinton was nearing the end of his second term when ECHELON was uncovered, there were already plans to greatly expand the program which went ahead. There have no doubt been many incidents of Civil Rights violations but kept secret as a matter of National Security. There are fewer Civil Rights violations with the new program since TIA* was removed from the ECHELON program in 2004.


TIA: Total Information Awareness




Thats a dossier on every single American, real domestic spying and Civil Rights violations on a grand scale. Safire went on to lead the charge in having TIA (part of the IAO) removed. Safire exposed it in 2002, Congress defunded the program in 2003 and it was eliminated from ECHELON in 2004.


The TIA program continues its objective despite being defunded and removed from public scrutiny. 2006 article


IAO: Information Awareness Office



The IAO was, and likely still is, a part of DARPA. The program was taken out of the public in 2003. Because DARPA receives its own budget separate from that of the NSA, IOA likely exists and is secretly funded under the direction of DARPA.

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ML2007,


Welcome to the HOP.


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