Crooks and Liars has the video of Senator Feingold introducing the motion to censure President Bush over his NSA warrantless surveillance program.

Josh Marshall reports on Sen. Specter's followup:

It was coming to this. Responding to Sen. Feingold, Sen. Specter is now arguing on the floor of the senate that FISA is unconstitutional. Ergo, President Bush couldn't have been violating the law becuase it's not valid law. Quite a way for Specter to end his career.

It's time to pick up the phone. ReddHedd at Firedoglake and Georgia 10 at Daily Kos explain how to take five minutes and support democracy. Here's the contact list. Reddhedd explains in greater detail here and here. Sen. Feingold took a risk, we need to show him we have his back.

Feingold wrote a post at Daily Kos today explaining his motion.

This would be just laughable if it weren't so serious. The CIA is not very good at keeping its own secrets, according to a new investigation by The Chicago Tribune. The paper was able to track covert and other CIA employees using commercially available databases.

When the Tribune searched a commercial online data service, the result was a virtual directory of more than 2,600 CIA employees, 50 internal agency telephone numbers and the locations of some two dozen secret CIA facilities around the United States.

Even though not all of the employees are covert, there is ample concern that those who are could become the targets of terrorists. Not only that:

A 330 page report (pdf version here) by the Inspector General for the Department of Justice was released yesterday on the FBI's erroneous fingerprint analysis in the Brandon Mayfield case. Mayfield is the Oregon attorney who was detained pursuant to a material witness warrant after the Madrid, Spain train bombings.

In addition to criticizing the FBI for its errors in fingerprint analysis, the report examines the role of the Patriot Act in the investigation. The enhancement of Government power in the Patriot Act did contribute to the unjust treatment of Mayfield....and but for some of its provisions, a different result might have been obtained. While finding that the Patriot Act changes to FISA did not contribute to the errors, other provisions did, specifically those that (1) allow information sharing between intelligence and law enforcement agencies and (2) provide for relaxed standards for the issuance of National Security letters. (See page 14.)

I wrote in January about Albany defense lawyer Terry Kindlon and his challenge to the NSA warrantless surveillance program. Details of the motion and Terry's case were outlined by the Albany Times.

On Friday, the Government submitted an ex parte (secret) response to the Judge. Later in the day, the Judge issued a one page order denying Terry's motion but refusing to share his reasons. He designated his order as classified.

Jim Hoagland wrote yesterday in the Washington Post that a White House aide told him, in attempting to defend the NSA warrantless surveillance program, Guantanamo and secret renditions:

"The powers of the presidency have been eroded and usurped to the breaking point. We are engaged in a new kind of war that cannot be fought by old methods. It can only be directed by a strong executive who alone is not subject to the conflicting pressures that legislators or judges face. The public understands and supports that unpleasant reality, whatever the media and intellectuals say."

Federal judges are appointed for life. What kind of pressures do they face besides their view of the dictates of the Constitution? That's about the stupidest thing I've heard in years.

Dan Froomkin appears to be equally non-plussed by the aide's statement. So much so, that he offers to turn his Friday column over to "red-staters." Here are the questions he'd like answered:

Security and tech guru Bruce Schneier writes the definitive rebuttal of data mining as a counterterrorism tool.

Rule number one:

Data mining works best when there's a well-defined profile you're searching for, a reasonable number of attacks per year, and a low cost of false alarms.

Example: credit card fraud. By examining records of your transactions, credit card companies can spot a spending pattern that indicates something nefarious may be afoot. It's different with terrorism:

Terrorist plots are different. There is no well-defined profile, and attacks are very rare. Taken together, these facts mean that data mining systems won't uncover any terrorist plots until they are very accurate, and that even very accurate systems will be so flooded with false alarms that they will be useless.

Breaking: The Washington Post reports:

The United Arab Emirates company that was attempting to take over management operations at six U.S. ports announced today that it will divest itself of all American interests.

Sen. John Warner (R-Va.) announced on the Senate floor shortly before 2 p.m. that Dubai Ports World would "transfer fully the operations of U.S. ports to a U.S. entity." Warner, who had been trying to broker a compromise on the issue, said DP World would divest itself of U.S. interests "in an orderly fashion" so as not to suffer "economic loss."

[Hat tip to Democratic Daily.]

There's lots of movement today in the NSA warrantless electronic surveillance lawsuit department:

• The Justice Department has released an e-mail under the FOIA Act in which a former official describes the Government's legal defenses to the NSA spying program as "weak" and "slightly after-the-fact," and opines they reflected Cheney's "philosophy... [the]best defense is a good offense.":

The Justice Department official who oversaw national security matters from 2000 to 2003 e-mailed (pdf) his former colleagues after revelation of the controversial warrantless wiretapping program in December 2005 that the Department's justifications for the program were "weak" and had a "slightly after-the-fact quality" to them, and surmised that this reflected "the VP's philosophy that the best defense is a good offense," according to documents released through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the Electronic Privacy Information Center and joined by the ACLU and the National Security Archive.

President Bush must be hopping mad today. By a vote of 62-2, the House Appropriations Committee voted to jettison the Dubai Ports deal:

The House Appropriations Committee defied President Bush this evening, voting overwhelmingly to scuttle a deal giving a Dubai company control of some major seaport operations without awaiting the outcome of a 45-day review of potential security risks.

Representative Jerry Lewis, the California Republican who is chairman of the panel, made good on his threat to keep the port terminal takeover from going forward. He added an amendment blocking the transaction to an essential emergency spending measure that provides money for the war in Iraq and for Hurricane Katrina recovery. "It is my intention to lay the foundation to block the deal," he said Tuesday.

Bush has promised to veto any legislation blocking the deal. But, because the amendment is tacked on to an Iraq/Afghanistan funding bill, he may change his mind.

In January, I wrote about Albany, New York defense lawyer (and frequent TalkLeft reader and commenter) Terry Kindlon being the first lawyer in the U.S. to file a motion challenging the Bush Administration's NSA warrantless electronic surveillance program.

U.S. News and World Reports this week has this article describing the several legal challenges mounted since. If I had any doubt that the Government might monitor TalkLeft, it's now erased:

The government has two weeks to respond to Kindlon's motions, which he says were inspired by a popular liberal criminal defense website, TalkLeft.com, created by Denver, Colo., defense attorney Jeralyn Merritt--one of Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh's principal trial lawyers. Now others, like Chicago public defender Mary Judge, are learning from Kindlon.

Mary Judge submitted a letter to the Government as I predicted lawyers would do here, and her opponent is none other than Patrick Fitzgerald:

Where's Osama? No one knows, but Bush is confident he'll get him.

"It's not a matter of if they're captured and brought to justice," Bush said at a news conference with Karzai at the war-battered presidential palace. "It's when they're brought to justice."

Maybe if he hadn't used so many of our military resources for an unnecessary war in Iraq, we'd have found him by now. I hope someone does a poll on how many Americans believe this lastest statement. I'd be it's fewer than the 34% who approve of his performance.