Barack Hussein Obama (mm mmm mmmm) and his minions want the FBI to have the power to make companies turn over records of an individual’s Internet activity without a court order if agents deem the information relevant to a terrorism or intelligence investigation.

It comes down to just four words which the administration wants to add to a list of items that the law says the FBI may demand without a judge’s approval.  Those words are electronic communication transactional records.   According to government lawyers this would include the addresses to which an Internet user sends e-mail; the times and dates e-mail was sent and received; and possibly a user’s browser history. The lawyers are very quick to point out that it would not include the “content” of e-mail or other Internet communication.  Uh Huh.

While Obama and the gang are trying to portray this breach of freedom as a technical clarification designed to remedy a legal ambiguity, industry lawyers and privacy advocates say this would be an expansion of the power the government wields through national security letters.  The letters, which can be issued by an FBI field office on its own authority, require the recipient to provide the requested information and to keep the request secret.  These letters are how the government would obtain the electronic records.

Stewart A. Baker is a former senior Bush administration Homeland Security official who practices national security and surveillance law.  According to him, the proposed change would broaden the bureau’s authority:

It’ll be faster and easier to get the data.  And for some Internet providers, it’ll mean giving a lot more information to the FBI in response to an NSL.

A lot of Internet service providers have resisted the government’s demands to turn over electronic records.  They argue that surveillance law as written does not allow them to do so, advised by industry lawyers . One anonymous senior administration government official countered that “most” Internet or e-mail providers do turn over such data.

As seen by disillusioned Liberals, the move is another example of an administration retreating from campaign pledges to enhance civil liberties in relation to national security. 

Michelle Richardson, American Civil Liberties Union legislative counsel said that the proposal is:

…incredibly bold, given the amount of electronic data the government is already getting.

Of course, if Scooter gets his wish, the effect would be to greatly expand the amount and type of personal data the government can obtain without a court order.  Liberals can not believe what they are hearing.

Michael Sussmann, a Justice Department lawyer under President Bill Clinton who now represents Internet and other firms, states the obvious:

You’re bringing a big category of data — records reflecting who someone is communicating with in the digital world, Web browsing history and potentially location information — outside of judicial review.

If hindsight is 20/20, how valuable would the ability to chart future activities accurately from internet chatter be?

The investment arms of the CIA and Google are both supporting Recorded Future, a company that monitors the web in real time — and says it uses that information to predict the future.

The goal is to figure out for each incident the actors, the location, and when it’s going down. The company then analyzes the online information, showing  “momentum” for any given event.

According to company CEO Christopher Ahlberg, a former Swedish Army Ranger with a PhD in computer science:

The cool thing is, you can actually predict the curve, in many cases.

And that’s the reason the 16-person Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm now has two ardent suitors in Google Ventures, the search giant’s investment division, and in In-Q-Tel, which handles similar duties for the CIA and the wider intelligence community.

This is not the first time Google has done business with America’s spy agencies. Long before it reportedly enlisted the help of the National Security Agency to secure its networks, Google sold equipment to the secret signals-intelligence group. In-Q-Tel backed the mapping firm Keyhole, which was bought by Google in 2004 — and then became the backbone for Google Earth.

But this is the first time that the intelligence community and Google have provided the money for the same startup company at the same time. Nobody’s saying that Google is buddy-buddy with the CIA.  However, the investments are going to feed the theories of the critics of Google, who believe the search giant is in some sort of business arrangement with the U.S. government.

America’s espionage agencies have become more focused in using “open source intelligence”.  That’s information that’s available to everyone, but often hidden in the daily avalanche of TV shows, newspaper articles, blog posts, online videos and radio reports.

Then CIA-director General Michael Hayden told a conference in 2008:

In fact, there’s a real satisfaction in solving a problem or answering a tough question with information that someone was dumb enough to leave out in the open.