It seems an anonymous poster has been posting like nuts on TPMMuckraker for a while, but in the midst of the sudden need to push through a Congressional bill to grant more power to Cheney's cronies, the shit has hit the fan. Dkos is going nuts right now trying to parse and sort this guy's posts.
I spent the better part of 6 hours now parsing the stuff (didn't go to bed until 4am, wife thought I was nuts as always), and it seems genuine to me once you separate out the few posers. Its actually absolutely hypnotizing if you're into this sort of thing.
I can only personally corroborate a very few things that I had insider knowledge on, but the guy seems to fill in the gaps extremely well and paints a much bigger picture than I could.
Key points though (things I learned) -
The audit packages I occaisionally had to put together at my level went into a much bigger audit dump that was sent to be stored on EU servers. I didn't know we exported our audit info that far, I thought it stopped at the NSA.
Pre-Iraq war, the Bush admin was busted in an audit sting on intelligence info/legal info sharing. The Plame incident was a long-term result of this. No action was taken by Congress or the DOJ when the discrepencies were reported, but Cheney retaliated against the CIA anyways.
Congress was again notified of illegal activity as soon as the Dems took over this year. Conyers and Pelosi have sat on the info, doing nothing. They could have cut funding immediately to Cheney's programs based on doctored audits, and made the Republicans justify re-funding, but didn't. This makes them legally complicit in any illegal surveillance activity.
We have a huge amount of contractors for both law enforcement and intelligence gathering at the federal level. Almost 60% of the intelligence and federal law enforcement budgets now go toward "for-profit" security contracts. The poster makes reference to a few different operations in recent history and lays out exactly how the coordination took place for these and at what level.
As soon as SCOTUS turned over the claim of "executive privelege" in a recent case, the WH started erasing shit off their databases like crazy, but apparently didn't know that there were 3 ongoing audits on the RNC and WH databases. The actual info/emails can't be recovered, but there are holes now in the data audit trail with timestamps which can be compared to meeting logs and other records to determine what the data referred to.
I had no idea just how badly the CIA had been fucked over by this administration, and it seems they are logging everything for an airtight criminal case if they can find someone to prosecute it, but they can't. The anonymous poster seems to think that individual state DA's are the ticket to getting the ball rolling on this before its too late - like everything is made nicely legal by the bill being rammed through Congress right now.
Thoughts, opinions (please read the link before posting, if its way over your head then don't worry about it)?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/1/42635/43285
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/1/101840/7097
Personal thoughts is that this guy is fairly high placed, career bureaucrat. Has very good inside knowledge of sysadmin and tech audits, and has a very good grasp of FISA legal documentation and the law in general. His writing (makes it very easy to see the fakes) has a very rolling cadence to it and is very organized...and he makes me feel really dumb for not knowing more about what I was doing in my previous life. I pray to god this is the magic bullet, but I've gotten my hopes up before. My guess is that its more than one guy (at least one tech expert, one analyst, and one legal expert) piecing the stuff together in reports and then one guy actually posting it (barring the fake stuff), and probably a cry for help from a career CIA or NSA team pissed off with the politicized contractors.
It also makes me want to get back in the fight somehow now, instead of hiding in Eastern Europe making video games and ranting on 50 million different websites.
I spent the better part of 6 hours now parsing the stuff (didn't go to bed until 4am, wife thought I was nuts as always), and it seems genuine to me once you separate out the few posers. Its actually absolutely hypnotizing if you're into this sort of thing.
I can only personally corroborate a very few things that I had insider knowledge on, but the guy seems to fill in the gaps extremely well and paints a much bigger picture than I could.
Key points though (things I learned) -
The audit packages I occaisionally had to put together at my level went into a much bigger audit dump that was sent to be stored on EU servers. I didn't know we exported our audit info that far, I thought it stopped at the NSA.
Pre-Iraq war, the Bush admin was busted in an audit sting on intelligence info/legal info sharing. The Plame incident was a long-term result of this. No action was taken by Congress or the DOJ when the discrepencies were reported, but Cheney retaliated against the CIA anyways.
Congress was again notified of illegal activity as soon as the Dems took over this year. Conyers and Pelosi have sat on the info, doing nothing. They could have cut funding immediately to Cheney's programs based on doctored audits, and made the Republicans justify re-funding, but didn't. This makes them legally complicit in any illegal surveillance activity.
We have a huge amount of contractors for both law enforcement and intelligence gathering at the federal level. Almost 60% of the intelligence and federal law enforcement budgets now go toward "for-profit" security contracts. The poster makes reference to a few different operations in recent history and lays out exactly how the coordination took place for these and at what level.
As soon as SCOTUS turned over the claim of "executive privelege" in a recent case, the WH started erasing shit off their databases like crazy, but apparently didn't know that there were 3 ongoing audits on the RNC and WH databases. The actual info/emails can't be recovered, but there are holes now in the data audit trail with timestamps which can be compared to meeting logs and other records to determine what the data referred to.
I had no idea just how badly the CIA had been fucked over by this administration, and it seems they are logging everything for an airtight criminal case if they can find someone to prosecute it, but they can't. The anonymous poster seems to think that individual state DA's are the ticket to getting the ball rolling on this before its too late - like everything is made nicely legal by the bill being rammed through Congress right now.
Thoughts, opinions (please read the link before posting, if its way over your head then don't worry about it)?
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/1/42635/43285
http://www.dailykos.com/storyonly/2007/8/1/101840/7097
Personal thoughts is that this guy is fairly high placed, career bureaucrat. Has very good inside knowledge of sysadmin and tech audits, and has a very good grasp of FISA legal documentation and the law in general. His writing (makes it very easy to see the fakes) has a very rolling cadence to it and is very organized...and he makes me feel really dumb for not knowing more about what I was doing in my previous life. I pray to god this is the magic bullet, but I've gotten my hopes up before. My guess is that its more than one guy (at least one tech expert, one analyst, and one legal expert) piecing the stuff together in reports and then one guy actually posting it (barring the fake stuff), and probably a cry for help from a career CIA or NSA team pissed off with the politicized contractors.
It also makes me want to get back in the fight somehow now, instead of hiding in Eastern Europe making video games and ranting on 50 million different websites.
Last edited by GorillaTicTacs (2007-08-02 02:07:06)
