Monitoring Communications by U.S. 'Persons'

The New York Times, the AP and even Druge - i.e., pretty much everyone except Powerline and Michelle Malkin - seem to have their knickers in a knot over purported post-9-11 monitoring by the NSA of overseas communications by as many as 500 "U.S. Persons" (a category btw, which does not directly equate to U.S. Citizens).

By way of context, what few people outside of IT security circles realize is that most if not all Blackberry traffic (even that moving within a particular country) is routed via servers in Canada. That means that the Canadian government enjoys far more power to track certain kinds of communications originating and/or terminating in the U.S. than does the U.S. government itself! That's especially true given Canada' s lesser regard for civil liberties.

Think about that for a moment.

In a world where voice-over-IP (VoIP) is becoming common - at the wholesale if not the retail level - the places through which one's voice communications (much less one's e-mail and instant message) traffic travels has little relation to national borders. The terrorists know this and no doubt exploit it. For us to fight with one arm tied behind our back in the information portion of this war is absolutely ludicrous.

For the New York times to cynically time the release of this classified information for political (and book-publishing) purposes - reversing itself on the principles that seemed so dear to it in the Plame affair, when it had the potential to embarass the president - is beyond contempt.

UPDATE: Writing for FrontPage magazine, Dr. Walid Phares nicely re-frames the NY Times slant (and yes, there is a slant) by asking simply: are we or are we not at war? (H/T: Jihad Watch)

I was surprised as I continued reading the AP report that it did not criticize the administration for not doing enough surveillance of terror-related activities but for doing too much... al-Qaeda must be laughing. In one of his caves in middle earth, Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri must be in disbelief, yelling, "By Allah, had we known we were barely monitored; we could have pulled out the big one!"...

The question is clear: Are we or are we not at war with the terrorists? Osama bin Laden declared that war in 1998. The bipartisan 9/11 Commission wondered why the administration held off until October 2001. The jihadists are present within the U.S., including those who carry U.S. passports. So are other terror jihadists in Spain, Britain, Holland, or France. By pure rationale, the U.S. government has the duty to use all means (approved by war conventions) to resist the penetration and infiltration of the United States. Doing otherwise is unlawful, unconstitutional, and more importantly to the detriment of the security, and therefore the liberty of the American people.

...Osama bin Laden changed the rules of engagement four years ago. The geopolitical reality changed, and laws had to serve the survival of Americans not to obstruct their global freedoms. Many questions are still being asked by the experts on terrorism: Are we fully prepared for them? Is our legal system, even when best interpreted ready to meet them? Apparently not: We are in a twilight zone. The Bush administration, inheriting a pre-9/11 American system, is struggling to balance between civil liberties and terror. But its critics haven’t moved past September 10th: They want to use a system designed against the mafia to play with the most lethal forces of the globe. [emphasis added]