this 'pretending' by the administration that this story has wrecked, wrecked I tell you, our effort to track down the evil-doers is a joke, not to mention patently false. I'll be posting shortly, I hope, a relevant portion from Ron Suskind's new book about just this.

...has as a whole potentially hampered efforts to chase these mutts down, and has particularly told these guys that the efforts towards tracking them extend well beyond what most people would have thought prior to the revelations.

I've read about the IC for years, so it really wasn't a surprise to me that the US was collecting on many of the categories of SIGINT targets it has been, but certain elements of that story are things that I sure wouldn't have thought of (such as how many foreign to foreign calls are routed through US based switches, among other things), and I don't think most of the oppo would have picked up on it either. Similarly, I sure figured the US would be studying its own financial transactions pretty carefully, but the notion that they would be plugged into the whole international net on that scale, that's a new one that many wouldn't have posited.

The oppo's known since day one that they could be hunted effectively if the US got onto them - what I'm pretty sure they didn't know is how low the detection threshold could potentially be (i.e., that the US could end up "onto them" without much very specific information at all) and I'm real sure that they didn't know how vast the scale this whole effort could be. The real threat here, to my mind, is that these guys now know how multi-modal everything is - how it hops across various modes of communications, integrates with commercially available data, and into transaction records. Before, in their minds switching cellphones and talking about "apples" and "celebrations" and using draft e-mail folders was enough - now I think they know it potentially isn't. Now we may well find it harder to play the game with the rules rigged to our historical strengths.

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

in the world of global commerce and finance would know how easily it is to track money when it is moving between large, even medium sized global institutions. It's not a secret, nor was it ever. That's the business I was in. I had clients all over the world. People knew this stuff. I listen very closely when you make suggestions and arguments about intel matters and often back down from a position I had previously based on the evidence you provided. That's what I am asking you to do here: think about what I am saying, based upon my personal knowledge and experience. This kind of tracing was not and never really was a secret, before 9/11 or after.

...and I'll defer to your expertise. The one possible wrinkle that I would add would be that if they were paying attention to what was happening in the courts (which were their best window into American operational practice), I suspect that their bias would be towards thinking that they could easily be hunted post facto rather than in real time. Much that they've experienced could well lead them to believe that the American law enforcement colossus, while immensely powerful, is just too slow to keep up with them so long as they keep the tempo up.

'course, one could cogently argue that the int colossus, even with these powers, is also too slow to keep up with them...

"We declared war on terror, it's not even a noun, so, good luck. After we defeat it, I'm sure we'll take on that bastard ennui." - Jon Stewart.

disclosures: you may be right. It may have hurt our efforts. But the necessity of publishing that story to me was never about harming our fight against al Qaeda. It was about holding our leaders accountable. They were quite possibly doing something illegal. Democracy is about a balance. In Canada, I believe similar measure have been used, but are legal. And, as I have stated, if the same measures had already been legal here in the US, I would have no problem with them. Had they been requested int eh aftermath of 9/11 and added into the original Patriot Act, I probably would have not had a problem with them. However, knowing this administration's penchant for lying and secrecy. Well, I think the balance shifts in the favor of needing to know, in order to hold accountable at some point.

Life requires hard choices and this is one of them. Were the choice mine, as it was Bill Keller's, I would have made the same one. Under different circumstances? Well,who knows.