James Risen: NSA rockstar

CNN.com - Officials: Error tipped Iran to CIA agents - Jan 3, 2006
WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Several U.S. agents in Iran were rounded up after the CIA mistakenly revealed clues to their identities to a covert source who turned out to be a double agent, according to a book that hit shelves Tuesday...

Risen's new book get megadittoes for revealing a great many dark things about Bush, the CIA and the NSA. Cryptome has a useful chunk of the book. Discussing it on Volokh.com from the grouchy anti-libertarian wing.

Some other parts about the book: Guardian: George Bush insists that Iran must not be allowed to develop nuclear weapons. So why, six years ago, did the CIA give the Iranians blueprints to build a bomb? Amazing story: the CIA forks over slightly flawed bomb plans, to clever people who will probably find the tiny flaws.

Peter Dale Scott: Cheney-Rumsfeld Surveillance Plans Date Back to 1980s. Scott is one of your paratypical parapolitical writers of the shadow conspiracy etc.

An equation for our times: via ThisModernWorld.

Heck of a Job, Hayden! - by Ray McGovern. Ray McGovern is an old hand at the CIA, a bit crusty, but with key insights into the structural problems over there. This is the kind of perspective I support in Washington.

• Stygius: NSA data-mining preceded 9/11 as well as Law, liberty, security, etc.
• Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy - Why the NSA's snooping is unprecedented in scale and scope. By Shane Harris and Tim Naftali.
• NSA Report to Congress on Legal Standards for Electronic Surveillance (dead letters, currently).
• newsrack blog: NSA background: the old Project Shamrock was a bit like this situation.

Has sparked some rather unusual speculations about the political consequences of domestic monitoring. Bill Richardson and Christiane Amanpour are the leading 'NSA political targets' of the moment. Albuquerque Tribune reports that Bill Richardson fears the NSA eavesdropped on him, in part due to a Wayne Madsen report.

Bizarre case that ricoched around the Internet and CNN over the last couple days. Sort of a paradigm-shaking omniscient big brother hullabaloo: NBC changes official transcript of Andrea Mitchell interview, deletes reference to Bush possibly wiretapping CNN's Christane Amanpour. AmericaBlog: What it means to John Kerry, Wesley Clark, and Bill Clinton if Bush wiretapped CNN's Christiane Amanpour.

Steve Clemons advises cooling it with connecting Bolton's NSA intercept shenanigans with the current mess. Also talks about an NSA advertisement and its weird phrasing:

Rather than saying that you are looking for "intelligent and imaginative people" to "protect U.S. information systems", the line should be that you are looking for such people to protect the Constitution and Democratic government as well as the general welfare and liberty of the American people.

NY Times: Noah Feldman on the situation with executive power (via DailyKos):

Not since Watergate has the question of presidential power been as salient as it is today. The recent revelation that President George W. Bush ordered secret wiretaps in the United States without judicial approval has set off the latest round of arguments over what the president can and cannot do in the name of his office. Over the past few years, the war on terror has led to the use of executive orders to authorize renditions and the detention of enemy combatants without trial. . . . The limits of presidential power will almost surely be a major topic of discussion during Samuel A. Alito Jr.'s Supreme Court confirmation hearings, which are scheduled to begin this week.

"[P]residentialism" . . . is not the system envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. The framers meant for the legislative branch to be the most important actor in the federal government: Congress was to make the laws and the president was empowered only to execute them. The very essence of a republic was that it would be governed through a deliberative legislature, composed carefully to reflect both popular will and elite limits on that will. The framers would no sooner have been governed by a democratically elected president than by a king who got his job through royal succession.

From the repressed homosexual Okie preacher department: Tulsa Pastor Arrested In OKC On Lewdness Charge. Ha.

CNET: Windows flaw spawns dozens of attacks. Huge security holes, terrible. Glad I have a Mac.