An oldie but a goodie #2

I'm sorry to keep bring up these ancient items - this one is a week old, f'r gunness sake - but sometimes there's just something that gnaws at me until I have to publicly gripe about it.

I haven't written anything about the Able Danger business because it seemed to me - and it still does seem to me - that the more that comes out about it, the less there is to it. In fact, it seems at this point the only reason anyone is talking about it is because the wingers want to use it in some really screwy (screwy even for them) fashion to smear Jamie Gorelick and through that blame 9/11 on Bill Clinton.

The argument in a nutshell is this: In 2000 the Defense Department figured out that Mohammed Atta and three others who became 9/11 hijackers were in the country and members of an al-Qaeda cell. But the DOD couldn't tell the FBI because an internal 1995 Justice Department memo that Gorelick authored created a "wall" between the criminal and intelligence divisions of the DOJ. Therefore, the cell wasn't broken up, therefore 9/11 is the Clinton administration's fault. QED. The inconvenient facts that the memo created no wall, that in fact this "wall" did not exist, that there is no way an internal DOJ memo could bind the DOD, and that it's even questionable if Able Danger did finger Atta and company more than - and even this is a perhaps - names on a considerably longer list, don't concern them, as facts often don't.

But I'm getting off the track here. This is what I wanted to gripe about: According to an August 22 story by UPI Homeland and National Security Editor Shaun Waterman,

Shaffer told UPI that the project was tasked with "developing targeting information for al-Qaida on a global scale," and used data-mining techniques to look for "patterns, associations and linkages" in a huge collection of open source databases to which the team had access.

He said the kinds of information available included travel and immigration records, and information about credit card and telephone use.

Just when the flaming hell did things like travel, credit card, and telephone records become "open source databases?"

Now, it simply may be - probably is - that Lt. Col. Shaffer, who has yet to produce the massive documentation he claims to have and admits ignorance of just how the data-mining project worked and how it obtained its information, simply doesn't know what the hell he's talking about. I expect the information was gathered the usual way: Either it was stolen, obtained through the use of one of those "national security letters," the ones that enable to feds to say "we don't need no stinkin' warrant," or, perhaps most likely, was just happily passed on by your airline/credit card provider/telephone company "in response to a request from a law enforcement agency" that their "privacy" policies list as one of the times they'll do a data dump about you.

The thing is, even though those alternatives would pretty much limit access to the cops while "open source" would mean the info is available to anyone with the bucks to buy it, that doesn't make me feel a whole lot better.