Updates at the end

Are we to expect every day for the foreseeable future political partisans (and let’s be honest here, that is what is motivating these ‘whistleblowers’ – they want democrats in power) will be slowly dismantling our protection mechanisms as they leak to the press?

These liberal zealots, and the liberal media comrades, have apparently decided they cannot wait to dictate a change in policy through our legal, democratic processes. They have determined their desperation makes them above the law, and the rest of us expendable in their war against America.

Why else would we continue to see more details on how we have been protecting ourselves against terrorist attacks, thus providing the terrorists a clear road map on how to avoid our defenses. The Washington Post (and many others) have further disrupted our ability to monitor terrorists in our country!

Information from intercepts — which typically includes records of telephone or e-mail communications — would be made available by request to agencies that are allowed to have it, including the FBI, DIA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security, one former official said.

At least one of those organizations, the DIA, has used NSA information as the basis for carrying out surveillance of people in the country suspected of posing a threat, according to two sources.
…
Agencies that get the information can use it to conduct “data mining,” or looking for patterns or matches with other databases that they maintain, which may or may not be specifically geared toward detecting terrorism threats, he said. “They are seeking to separate the known from the unknown, relationships or associations,” he added.

The NSA would sometimes monitor telephones, e-mails or fax communications in cases where individuals in the United States — and sometimes people they contacted — were linked to an alleged foreign terrorist group, officials have said. The NSA, officials said, limited its decisions to follow-up with more electronic surveillance on an individual to those cases where there was some apparent link to terrorist sources.
…
DIA personnel stationed inside the United States went further on occasion, conducting physical surveillance of people or vehicles identified as a result of NSA intercepts, said two sources familiar with the operations, although the DIA said it does not conduct such activities.

First off, this report makes no claims any of this is illegal or unwarranted. It is simply a data dump to our enemies and their leftwing apologists who want to extend civil rights to terrorists, even it if means the terrorists’ plans succeed in killing lots of Americans.

The sources for Walter Pincus (name ring a bell?) are very similar to his Plame Game sources:

The NSA has turned such information over to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and to other government entities, said three current and former senior administration officials,…

Well, if one were to speculate the possible names for these leaks from former officials are

Dick Clark
Sany Berger
Rand Beers
Joe Wilson
Valerie Plame
Larry Johnson

The current official is a mystery – but hopefully not for long.

A while ago someone suggested a way for ‘We The People’ to fight back as these treasonous liberals expose us to attack. The idea was to bring a class action law suit against the media outlets who recklessly expose our defense mechanisms to our enemies.

We don’t need to win, as much as get millions and millions of people signing up against the New York Times, Washington Post, the reporters themselves. In my opinion these companies are impairing my civil rights by exposing me and my familiy to terrorist acts. I have the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and the partisan actions of these leakers is putting all of this at risk.

These are not whistleblowers, they never show a single instance of wrong doing – just theories and conjecture. Their motivations are purely partisan politics.

Time for us to remind everyone the power is in the people. So if anyone knows how to start a law suit against these people please let us all know.

UPDATE:

Well, the response has been strong enough for me to send out an email to a bunch of bloggers and see what they think about the idea. Some have questioned (Pierre my friend!) why I focus on the media and not the leakers. The answer is I expect the government to take care of them. But the government cannot take on the media corporations without a big constitutional crisis with the fourth estate. So while the Feds take care of their Benedict Arnolds, we the people should act on the media. And the best way to do that is remind them we have a say as well.

One thing I have not posted on is the seriousness of these leaks. I have hesitated to do the thinking for the terrorists on how to use this information. But I have decided to provide one simple example I think they will figure out on their own, partly to illustrate the damage done by these partisan idiots, but also to pre-empt some possible counter attacks by the foreign terrorists.

The one example of the damage I will explore is a how this ‘news’ allows terrorists to take cover in plain sight, and to roil our political process by making us fight amongst ourselves. The response is sadly simple, and relies on the desperation of the anti-Bush crowd to latch onto anything that could harm Bush for political payback. The problem with the liberals out of control is they are so damn easy to manipulate. They are not thinking, they are reacting.

For the terrorists to use the leak of the NSA spy program against us they simply have to start contact innocent Americans at random. That way their communications with their agents here in the US will be one contact within numerous fake contactsl. But it doesn’t stop there. If these terrorists target liberals and well known leftists, then it will become clear the Feds will be detecting calls to these anti-war types. And if that news were to break, then the left would go more hysterical than they are now and we would have a real problem in the country trying to stay focused on protecting ourselves. And that would give Al Qaeda the distraction they need to get a WMD in place.

There it is. A simple counter exploitation scenario. I have posted this because I realized the only possible way to pre-empt this scenario is to predict it before the next round of news stories come out with Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi being identified as targets of the NSA because terrorists were contacting them to disrupt us politically.

That is one simple scenario. I could think of hundreds more to exploit the national security information these Benedict Arnolds leaked. And Al Qaeda can too. These people are not stupid. In most cases they come from the smartest, most successful familiies in the region (e.g., Osama Bin Laden). So they are more than capable of dreaming up a list of responses as well.

The news media needs to decide whether they are Americans or simply chasing Pulitzers. They cannot do both.

UPDATE II:

Many discussions on this article out there. I liked Ed Morrissey’s take. He points to a great round up by Joe Gandelman .

UPDATE III:

A lot of people are seeing the NY Times and Washington Post as having crossed the line in the partisan fever to get Bush:

America spends $40 billion per year on intelligence operations aimed at discovering our enemies’ secret activities. All our enemies have to do is subscribe to the New York Times and, for as little as $4.65 per week, they can discover most of our secret operations — at least as long as a Republican is President.

Granted, reading the Times won’t give them an accurate picture of the growth of the U.S. economy, the progress in the Iraq War, or the average American’s political opinions. But it will provide them a detailed description of almost any classified military, CIA, or NSA operation designed to catch or kill them.

Dr Sanity brings her voice to the cause, as does The Anchoress. If these two exceptional women agree, we may be on to something.