TOC Ready Room 10 March 2022: NFZs, convoys, and Iran follies, oh my

Keeping it short and sweet for now, as things keep updating on the long-running Phase II of the “IT in Russiagate” topic.  The first subject in today’s Ready Room grab-bag is the no-fly zone proposal for Ukraine.

It’s a bad idea.  All I will do here is copy in an email sent earlier with my reflections on the matter.  They were forwarded in response to a piece by former Senator Joe Lieberman in the Wall Street Journal (apologies for the paywall).

The email text:

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The IT role in Russiagate: Part I – Taking (brief) stock with graphics

[Links to Parts II and III at the bottom. – J.E.]

This article started out to be a somewhat different one, developing a couple of points about the monitoring of EOP (Executive Office of the President) communications referenced in the John Durham court filings.

But with a firehose of new information coming in, it seems necessary to take stock and put in perspective the things we know up to this point.  I don’t think most will find it a waste of time.  The stock-taking is relatively short, and the principal feature is something we haven’t had yet:  schematic diagrams of how the major IT pieces fit together to make the surveillance of “Trump” possible, and facilitate the concoction of an anti-Trump narrative about supposed links to Russia.

The graphics are very simplified, which I suspect many readers will consider a blessing.  My hope is to spare some unnecessary efforts to sort out confusion when it need not be at work.

Magic wand: U.S. intel egregiously whitewashes Iran in latest threat assessment

Painting fences. (Image: Reuters, Kevin Lamarque via Salon)

New post up at Liberty Unyielding.  Enjoy!

The curious case of the al Qaeda threat warning

One thing struck me immediately about the recent al Qaeda threat warning, when U.S. officials claimed that the Hoover-like NSA surveillance program was what enabled us to detect the threat.  Senator Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), ranking member on the Senate Intelligence Committee, was emphatic in making this claim:

Those [NSA] programs “allow us to have the ability to gather this chatter,” Chambliss said. “If we did not have these programs then we simply wouldn’t be able to listen in on the bad guys.”

What struck me was that this simply isn’t true – at least, not in terms of the comprehensive implication Chambliss seems to suggest.

Stuff and nonsense: The NSA data mining

It wouldn’t be an American political scandal if there weren’t an element of farce in it.  There is a whole periodic table of farce in this one, so it’s hard to choose, but I guess I pick, as Farce Number One, the inability of U.S. national intelligence to find Edward Snowden after he fled overseas and checked into a Hong Kong hotel.  I’ll let you know if that changes.

I imagine readers have a clear picture of what’s going on with this NSA collection scandal, but let’s clarify one aspect of it.  The phone data collection involves metadata only, at least as far as we have been told; it’s not about collecting the content of phone calls.  The collection of data on emails and other web-brokered information is about content, as well as about metadata.  NSA is collecting content from our online correspondence.

So it is inaccurate to say that NSA isn’t collecting content created by presumed-innocent citizens with First and Fourth Amendment rights.  NSA is doing exactly that.  This form of collection doesn’t