This just in: retroactive immunity, now in effect. (Well, not quite yet.)

After months of wrangling, Democratic and Republican leaders in Congress struck a deal on Thursday to overhaul the rules on the government’s wiretapping powers and provide what amounts to legal immunity to the phone companies that took part in President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The deal, expanding the government’s powers in some key respects, would allow intelligence officials to use broad warrants to eavesdrop on foreign targets and conduct emergency wiretaps without court orders on American targets for a week if it is determined important national security information would be lost otherwise. If approved, as appears likely, it would be the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years.

It's Legacy time. Read the full text of the bill, courtesy of the majority leader.

WaPo offers this:

ACLU and some Democratic leaders have argued that the bill does not go far enough in protecting civil liberties. The proposal would give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that can show the court that they received assurances from government officials that the program was legal and that they have "substantial evidence" in the form of classified letters from authorities to support their position.

To quote Condi Rice out of context:

“Obviously, in any compromise, there are compromises."

From the archive, a favorite:

About the failure everyone now agrees. But what was the problem? And what should be done to make us safe?

It wasn't respect for the Constitution that kept the NSA from reading the "Tomorrow is zero hour" message until the day after the disaster. It was lack of translators. To meet that kind of problem, the Comint professionals have a default solution: more. Not just more Arab linguists but more of everything -- more analysts, more polygraph examiners and security guards, more freedom to listen in on more people, more listening posts, more coverage, more secrecy.

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Deal Reached in Congress to Rewrite Rules on Wiretapping

Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it too broad an intrusion on Americans' privacy, even after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

But the data-sifting effort didn't disappear. The National Security Agency, once confined to foreign surveillance, has been building essentially the same system.

(This was previously recommended by Decius here, but I missed it at the time.)

NSA's Domestic Spying Grows As Agency Sweeps Up Data

James T. Walsh was one Republican who questioned the value of the session. “What we heard was marginally classified,” he said. “The really secret stuff, we couldn’t talk about.”

“We saved him,” one said. “He probably would have been disciplined.”

From the headlines:

They discussed his reputation as a "difficult" man who sometimes asked "to do things you might not think were safe."

"I mean, it’s just kind of like ... whatever ... I’m here for a purpose. I know what my purpose is. I am not a ... moron, you know what I mean."

From the archive:

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

To be disciplined is to follow in a good way. To be self-disciplined is to follow in a better way.

Outsiders sometimes find it tempting to dismiss such wheel-spinning as bureaucratic silliness, but I believe that the Judiciary Committee will find, if it is willing to persist, that within the large pointless program there exists a small, sharply focused program that delivers something the White House really wants. This it will never confess willingly.

Secret session 'was a total waste of time', says Congressman

On Friday, a deeply divided House rebuffed President Bush's demand for retroactive immunity, then defiantly left Washington for a two-week spring break.

Republicans said the secret session proved to be deflating, not because of the quality of the evidence, but because of Democrats' unwillingness to listen.

A few from the archive:

Lisa: "Can't you see the difference between earning something honestly and getting it by fraud?"

Bart: Hmm, I suppose, maybe, if, uh ... no. No, sorry, I thought I had it there for a second."

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

Defiant, House Heads to Havasu

"Twittering" is unobjectionable because you are deciding what information you want to put out. More problematic is the amount of unintended sharing going on. Most troubling of all is the growing inclination of Web sites to spread personal information without users’ consent.

But push-back is becoming more common.

One Friend Facebook Hasn’t Made Yet: Privacy Rights

The outcome in the Senate amounted, in effect, to a broader proxy vote in support of Mr. Bush’s wiretapping program. The wide-ranging debate before the final vote presaged discussion that will play out this year in the presidential and Congressional elections on other issues testing the president’s wartime authority, including secret detentions, torture and Iraq war financing.

Have you seen Taxi to the Dark Side?

Republicans hailed the reworking of the surveillance law as essential to protecting national security, but some Democrats and many liberal advocacy groups saw the outcome as another example of the Democrats’ fears of being branded weak on terrorism.

“Unfortunately, those who are advocating this notion that you have to give up liberties to be more secure are apparently prevailing. They’re convincing people that we’re at risk either politically, or at risk as a nation.”

... the White House has agreed to give House lawmakers access to internal documents on the wiretapping program.

From the archive:

About the failure everyone now agrees. But what was the problem? And what should be done to make us safe?

It wasn't respect for the Constitution that kept the NSA from reading the "Tomorrow is zero hour" message until the day after the disaster. It was lack of translators. To meet that kind of problem, the Comint professionals have a default solution: more. Not just more Arab linguists but more of everything -- more analysts, more polygraph examiners and security guards, more freedom to listen in on more people, more listening posts, more coverage, more secrecy.

Is more what we really need?

In my opinion not.

But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get.

Get it? Got it. Not so good.

Attendant: More anything?
Jerry: More everything!

Senate Votes for Expansion of Executive Power

Rattle quoted WSJ:

President Bush has promised a frugal budget proposal next month, but one big-ticket item is stirring controversy: an estimated $6 billion to build a secretive system protecting U.S. communication networks from attacks by terrorists, spies and hackers.

Then Decius asked:

Could it be related to this?

And by that you mean The Spymaster, which I recommended earlier this month. The article recommended by Rattle is here in full text. Significantly, the figure cited above is only the starting point:

The administration’s plan is to reduce points of access between the Internet and the government and to use sensors to detect intrusions displaying potentially nefarious patterns, said former top intelligence officials. The program would first be used on government networks and then adapted to private networks. Former officials said the final price tag is approaching an estimated $30 billion over seven years, including a 2009 infusion of around $6 billion, though those numbers could change significantly as the plan develops.

This Chertoff quote is either amusing or disturbing, depending on your perspective:

"There is a lot of thought being given to: How do you organize this in a way that protects an incredibly valuable asset in the United States but does it in a way that doesn’t alarm reasonable people, and I underline reasonable people, in terms of civil liberties?"

Finally:

The CIA and the Pentagon didn’t want other agencies mucking about ...

This tussle is referred to at the end of the Washington Post coverage just now recommended here.

What's silly here is that no one is talking about ROC curves. How can you even propose to monitor the open Internet? The human resources involved would be outrageous, no? Not quite as bad as having human telephone switch operators, but as presented, this proposal simply doesn't scale, and as such is not credible. The stated intention to "protect US networks from hackers" is not credible, because the proposed task cannot be resourced. How much can they really accomplish, anyway? Consider the following:

Insertion, Evasion, and Denial of Service: Eluding Network Intrusion Detection

All currently available network intrusion detection (ID) systems rely upon a mechanism of data collection -- passive protocol analysis -- which is fundamentally flawed.

Maybe they intend to install normalizers at every access router in the US?

Network Intrusion Detection: Evasion, Traffic Normalization, and End-to-End Protocol Semantics

A fundamental problem for network intrusion detection systems is the ability of a skilled attacker to evade detection by exploiting ambiguities in the traffic stream as seen by the monitor. We discuss the viability of addressing this problem by introducing a new network forwarding element called a traffic normalizer. The normalizer sits directly in the path of traffic into a site and patches up the packet stream to eliminate potential ambiguities before the traffic is seen by the monitor, removing evasion opportunities.

Of course even then you face The Eavesdropper's Dilemma.

RE: WSJ | Bush Looks to Beef Up Protection Against Cyberattacks

National Book Award winner Tim Weiner:

The principles of how to arrive at good intelligence estimates are not new. Mike McConnell, the director of national intelligence, said last month that he learned them 17 years ago, while serving under Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

“ ‘Look, I have got a rule,’ ” he said General Powell told him. “ ‘As an intelligence officer, your responsibility is to tell me what you know. Tell me what you don’t know. Then you’re allowed to tell me what you think. But you always keep those three separated.’ ”

At last, it is more likely now that those rules will be heeded.

...

Good information can win wars. But bad ideas can lose the battles in between.

Pssst: Some Hope for Spycraft

Transcript of remarks and Q&A by the Principal Deputy Director of National Intelligence, Dr. Donald Kerr, at the 2007 GEOINT Symposium, an event sponsored by the United States Geospatial Intelligence Foundation.

Too often, privacy has been equated with anonymity; and it’s an idea that is deeply rooted in American culture. The Lone Ranger wore a mask but Tonto didn’t seem to need one even though he did the dirty work for free. You’d think he would probably need one even more. But in our interconnected and wireless world, anonymity – or the appearance of anonymity – is quickly becoming a thing of the past.

Protecting anonymity isn’t a fight that can be won. Anyone that’s typed in their name on Google understands that. Instead, privacy, I would offer, is a system of laws, rules, and customs with an infrastructure of Inspectors General, oversight committees, and privacy boards on which our intelligence community commitment is based and measured. And it is that framework that we need to grow and nourish and adjust as our cultures change.

Don Kerr, on Anonymity and Privacy

The question is not whether or not a surveillance society will occur, particularly in Western societies like the United States and the United Kingdom. The question is more what the unavoidable ubiquity of surveillance will mean to the individual and the collective. The question is how society should deal — how society will deal — with routine, widespread, nearly constant surveillance, not just by government but by private entities as well, now that surveillance technology is quite clearly not only common but also here to stay.

Living Under Surveillance | The New American