The Boston Globe is reporting that Republican senatorial staff snooped on the computer files of Democratic senators for at least a year:
Republican staff members of the US Senate Judiciary Commitee infiltrated opposition computer files for a year, monitoring secret strategy memos and periodically passing on copies to the media, Senate officials told The Globe.If you read further on in the story, you'll find that Robert Novak is in the middle of this mess, just as he's at the centre of the Valerie Plame affair. He's like Richard Perle -- he turns up everywhere.From the spring of 2002 until at least April 2003, members of the GOP committee staff exploited a computer glitch that allowed them to access restricted Democratic communications without a password. Trolling through hundreds of memos, they were able to read talking points and accounts of private meetings discussing which judicial nominees Democrats would fight -- and with what tactics.
The office of Senate Sergeant-at-Arms William Pickle has already launched an investigation into how excerpts from 15 Democratic memos showed up in the pages of the conservative-leaning newspapers and were posted to a website last November.
With the help of forensic computer experts from General Dynamics and the US Secret Service, his office has interviewed about 120 people to date and seized more than half a dozen computers -- including four Judiciary servers, one server from the office of Senate majority leader Bill Frist of Tennessee, and several desktop hard drives.
But the scope of both the intrusions and the likely disclosures is now known to have been far more extensive than the November incident, staffers and others familiar with the investigation say.
George Paine at Warblogging has a good post up covering the story that includes this:
These Senators are the ones who decide how much surveillance power to give the Department of Justice. These people oversee the Department of Justice's use of surveillance against American citizens. They decide whether the DoJ abuses its power to surveil American citizens. And these very same people who must oversee the DoJ's use of surveillance are abusing their own power. They are exploiting a "computer glitch" to gain intelligence on the completely legal political machinations of their political opponents.This should be a major scandal. Whether it becomes one remains to be seen.How can we possibly expect these unethical dirty tricksters in the Senate to decide whether or not Department of Justice use of surveillance is ethical, proper or Constitutional? How can we expect these people who surveil their fellow senators to refrain from asking the Department of Justice to surveil political opponents?
