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Pat Leahy: Canary in a Data Mine
Hat Tip: American ThinkerThe new chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee is demanding he be kept apprised of covert technologies our intelligence agencies use to thwart terrorism. The legislation he's cosponsoring would compel the White House to provide regular reports on all current and future intelligence data-mining operations. Such a plan to trust Congress not to expose mechanisms which inherently demand obscurity would certainly be ill-advised regardless of its source. But this scheme was hatched by the Senator once voted least likely to keep a top secret -- Patrick Leahy. As you may recall, Leahy was stripped of his Senate Intelligence Committee vice-chair during the mid 80's for making good on threats to sabotage classified strategies he didn't personally care for. During Ronald Reagan's own war on terror, the Vermont Democrat was aptly nicknamed "Leaky Leahy" for proving time and again that he would do absolutely anything to discredit the Republican President -- including revealing the most vital of national security secrets In 1985, he was charged with disclosing a top-secret communications intercept which had led to the capture of the murderous Achille Lauro hijacking terrorists. That leak likely cost an Egyptian counterterrorist agent his life shortly thereafter. Then, in 1986, Leahy threatened to leak secret information about a covert operation to topple Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi. When the details of the operation later appeared in the Washington Post, the mission was immediately aborted. The loose-lipped liberal was finally forced to resign his post a year later when he was caught singing like a canary to an NBC reporter about classified information on the Senate Iran-Contra hearings. On his third strike he was out, but, unfortunately, the game was not over. Data Mining for Democrats Now somehow holding his own committee gavel 20 years later, Leahy has promised to uncover abuses related to his latest pet peeve -- the balance of privacy and security in government use of evolving investigative technologies. So it came as no surprise when his first target was the liberal-dreaded predictive analysis technique known as Data Mining (DM). On January 10th, hearings began to investigate both the efficacy and legality of applying the process to counterterrorism. In his opening remarks, Leahy complained that: "Although billed as counterterrorism tools, the overwhelming majority of these data mining programs use, collect, and analyze personal information about ordinary American citizens. Despite their prevalence, these government data mining programs often lack adequate safeguards to protect privacy and civil liberties." These words betray a man investigating a process he doesn't understand. Even those dimly illuminated understand that in order to isolate the extraordinary, you first define the ordinary. Here's why. rest at link Posted by: FOTSGreg 2007-01-23 |
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