My pal The Lawyer had returned to San Diego fast, and he called me up, furious. I was at the desk, looking out on a day in the Ballston neighborhood that was exquisite in its simple beauty. The heat was gone, and the women seemed to dress up for it. I wanted to go out and wander in the sunshine.
“Hey,” I said. “What’s up?” I punched the button on the speakerphone, put the handset back on the cradle and leaned back in my ergonometric chair.
“Did you see the FBI is issuing new investigative guidelines for its agents that will make it easier for agents to search commercial or law enforcement databases, search people’s trash and conduct physical surveillance without any suspicion of wrongdoing?”
“Yeah, there was an article in the New York Times. The Bureau says they are just doing some fine-tuning of existing authorities under the Patriot Act. That is a good thing, right?” I leaned forward and clicked through an alert that popped up on my screen.
“Just saw that asshole Ayman al-Zawahiri has taken command of al Qaeda. He was the brain behind much of the terror campaign strategy. Apparently he has vowed to get even with us for bin Laden’s martyrdom.”
“SEAL Team 6 did the job right. And don’t get me wrong,” he said. “I am against terrorists, and want the Justice Department to keep arresting them, and the DoD and CIA to keep killing them overseas.”
“I want them to get al-Zawahiri, too. Light him up.”
“Yeah, but here are the consequences of what getting even with a handful of assholes has done. The FBI out here in San Diego already uses the Patriot Act to remove the firewall between national security and domestic criminal investigations. They think they have a license to cyber-snoop on citizens for the most petty of reasons.”
“I am against that. That is what got us in such trouble back when the Bureau ran COINTELPRO operations against domestic groups in the Vietnam era. They surveilled and infiltrated legal domestic political groups.”
“It was covert and illegal, and now they have the law on their side to do the same thing,” he said, his voice dripping with sarcasm.
“As I recall, it was the domestic equivalent to what the Agency and parts of DoD was doing. I worked with an Army Security Agency guy in Korea who said they used military jamming gear against the walky-talkies of people organizing protest marches. Sergeant Volkso was a real piece of work.”
“The way COINTELPRO worked was that the Bureau was authorized to conduct PSYOPS against American citizens, forge letters, harass and bust people without warrant and without casue.”
“Mass busts in early May,” I said. “Wasn’t that how the song went?”
“Yeah. And they are at it again.
You remember that former Assistant Deputy SECNAV Wade Sanders is serving four years in federal prison in Texas because an ambitious Ass’t US Attorney in San Diego cyber-snooped the hard drive on his home computer?”
“I remember- wasn’t Wade the Swiftboat guy who came out against Bush in ’04? Wasn’t he a jerk?”
“Last I looked, being a jerk isn’t a crime in this country. What happened was that Wade was angling to get a nomination to run for Congress as a Democrat from San Diego.”
“That isn’t illegal either,” I said. “Idiotic, maybe, but not illegal.”
“That is my point. The Feds entered his house without just cause and confiscated his computers. He had some bad stuff on them- kiddie porn- and tracked his web history to see what websites he visited.”
“Anyone who has that sort of stuff ought to be horsewhipped. We used to find a lot of it on the hard drives of the terrorists. They are complete losers- but it was still illegal to look at it or keep it in the places we were doing forensic examination. We needed special law-enforcement permission to have analysts even look at the images to find the intelligence stuff on the computers.”
“All true, but beside the point. Imagine some starry-eyed federal prosecutor gets a hard-on about our politics and decides to check out everything you have on your computer to run a complete check on everything you do?”
“Crap. Just based on legal political speech?”
“Yes. And based completely on the whims of a Special Agent. The Fed that got Wade was so fired up that she put an image of a Swiftboat on the cover of her prosecution file and told others in her office that she was going to “Swiftboat” the bastard.”
“That was when Karl Rove prepared a hit list of US Attorneys- even Republican ones- who were not adequately politically motivated to undertake prosecutions to embarrass the political enemies of Bush and his cronies.”
“That is just like the Nixon Enemies List. Remember that?”
“Worse. It is not even just politically motivated. I can tell you from my own practice that the Office of Foreign Asset Control and the FBI used cyber-snooping to charge a retired high-ranking military officer and a pal of his with attempting to buy Cuban cigars from a website in Manila.”
“I have never heard of OFAC,” I said. “They got badges and guns, too? And worried about cigars?”
“The Website advertised a scheme by which the box of cigars would be unmarked, no hint they were from Cuba.”
“If they were coming from the PI, my guess is that the cigars were probably not Cuban.”
“Didn’t matter. OFAC sent the retired officer a letter claiming that he had violated the Cuban embargo and would be charged a substantial civil fine for that attempt.”
“Crap. I like a fine cigar once in a while, and I don’t think the government should be telling me where to buy them.”
“You see how the FBI is using the Patriot Act freedom at the local level? They are just fooling around trying to “get something” on important people, hoping it will accelerate their personal federal careers due to the political embarrassment the cyber-snooping generates for their patrons’ political enemies. And these new guidelines will make it all the easier for these local buffoons to simply snoop into private citizens lives just for the fun of it.”
“Screw them. We ought to do something about it. The way the pendulum swings, we are going to wind up right back where we were in 1971, when Schlesinger tried to fire cowboy in the CIA, and our pal Admiral Mac was hired to help clean it all up.”
“You better believe it. Already happening- you should see what the ATF just did to arm the Cartels in Mexico.”
“That is the gang that can’t shoot straight,” I said. “I remember the fun and games in Waco.”
“Get’s worse. I’ll tell you about it sometime. It was called “Operation Fast and Furious. I gotta go- have to be in Court in a half hour about cigars.”
“Have one for me,” I said as the red light on the phone went out. I thought that a fine cigar might be just the thing to smoke and watch the people outside. I would have to be very careful about where I got it, though and I certainly wasn’t going to look or them on-line.
Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com