I couldn’t believe it myself when Gonzales said Washington and Lincoln had authorized electronic surveillance, but now we have a corroborative account that shows that Washington did authorize grand electrical schemes. Remember, he had the assistance of Franklin, so it isn’t that implausible, is it?
Washington got his warrantless electic surveilance. And though the resulting confligration left 233 people dead, and the Barbary pirates avoided detection, a vital precedent was set. Nobody could tell the President to do diddly squat. He was the President, after all. This would come in handly four score and seven years later, when Lincoln was using electricity to shock the genitals of Southern prisoners—a new kind of electric surveilance, to be sure, but another great chapter in the history of freedom.
That explains the little white wires dangling from the ears of the statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial – he was listening to an ipod. You have noticed them, haven’t you?
We need to be clear about what is being defended by Gonzales here. It isn’t wiretapping, it’s data mining. Wiretapping, whether legal or illegal involves only a few individuals. Data mining involves ideas that are deemed to be somehow suspect. Washington’s interception of British messages during the Revolutionary war is no precedent at all for the sort of extensive data mining the Bush administration is trying to excuse today.
Well, I don’t know about surveillance, but I do know that Washington was an aristocrat who represented the rich. Does it mean Bush has a good precedent to steal from the poor and give to the rich?
What, you never heard of the celebrated midget telegraph spies who hid under the desks of confederate generals keying a morse transcript of the enemies’ plans?
What possible kind of electronic surveillance could they have done, back then? I didn’t even know electricity was even in practical use.
I believe anonymous is right about data mining. Bush could easily have obtained warrants after the fact is they were, indeed, wiretapping only a limited number of individuals or lines (say, a thousand or so?). But of course he couldn’t get a warrant that would allow the government to tap every electronic communication in the country. I believe that’s the real story.
What, you doubt our Attorney General? If Alberto Gonzales says it, it must be true! How could it be otherwise?
You’re one of them al-Qaeda loving liberals, aren’t you?
As I suggested, telegraph communications were available when Lincoln was in office.
http://www.civilwarhome.com/telegraph.htm
Of course, it’d be pretty hard to conceal the cables. I wonder if anyone ever tried to tap telegraph lines, though. This would also not be electronic surveillance in the conventional sense of the term, since telegraphs are electromechanical devices that simply use the presence or absence of electric power to send a signal.
This is by no means intended to defend Gonzales’s remark, but it turns out that wiretapping of telegraphs was common during the civil war. From the link I just posted:
Eavesdropping on telegraphs would not be “electronic”, it would be “electrical”.
Abu Gonzalez is still dumber than a bag of wet mice.
Yes, I made that point. But it’s still an interesting piece of Civil War history. I was responding to Steven Sutton’s question of whether electricity was in “practical use”–left unspecified whether he meant in the time of Washington or Lincoln, but telegraphs were definitely in practical use when Lincoln was president.
Intercepting the communications of an enemy army is a far cry from listening in to the conversations of citizens.