"All too often, we find that before we can catch these offenders, Internet service providers have unwittingly deleted the very records that would help us identify these offenders and protect future victims," Mueller said. "We must find a balance between the legitimate need for privacy and law enforcement's clear need for access."

The speech to the law enforcement group, which approved a resolution on the topic earlier in the day, echoes other calls from Bush administration officials to force private firms to record information about customers. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, for instance, told Congress last month that "this is a national problem that requires federal legislation."

Justice Department officials admit privately that data retention legislation is controversial enough that there wasn't time to ease it through the U.S. Congress before politicians left to campaign for re-election. Instead, the idea is expected to surface in early 2007, and one Democratic politician has already promised legislation.

Law enforcement groups claim that by the time they contact Internet service providers, customers' records may have been deleted in the routine course of business. Industry representatives, however, say that if police respond to tips promptly instead of dawdling, it would be difficult to imagine any investigation that would be imperiled.

It's not clear exactly what a data retention law would require. One proposal would go beyond Internet providers and require registrars, the companies that sell domain names, to maintain records too. And during private meetings with industry officials, FBI and Justice Department representatives have cited the desirability of also forcing search engines to keep logs--a proposal that could gain additional law enforcement support after AOL showed how useful such records could be in investigations.

A representative of the International Association of Chiefs of Police said he was not able to provide a copy of the resolution.

Preservation vs. retention
At the moment, Internet service providers typically discard any log file that's no longer required for business reasons such as network monitoring, fraud prevention or billing disputes. Companies do, however, alter that general rule when contacted by police performing an investigation--a practice called data preservation.

A 1996 federal law called the Electronic Communication Transactional Records Act regulates data preservation. It requires Internet providers to retain any "record" in their possession for 90 days "upon the request of a governmental entity."

Because Internet addresses remain a relatively scarce commodity, ISPs tend to allocate them to customers from a pool based on whether a computer is in use at the time. (Two standard techniques used are the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol and Point-to-Point Protocol over Ethernet.)

In addition, Internet providers are required by another federal law to report child pornography sightings to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, which is in turn charged with forwarding that report to the appropriate police agency.

When adopting its data retention rules, the European Parliament approved U.K.-backed requirements saying that communications providers in its 25 member countries--several of which had enacted their own data retention laws already--must retain customer data for a minimum of six months and a maximum of two years.

The Europe-wide requirement applies to a wide variety of "traffic" and "location" data, including: the identities of the customers' correspondents; the date, time and duration of phone calls, VoIP (voice over Internet Protocol) calls or e-mail messages; and the location of the device used for the communications. But the "content" of the communications is not supposed to be retained. The rules are expected to take effect in 2008.

We have been here when President John Adams insisted that the Alien and Sedition Acts were necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use those acts to jail newspaper editors.

American newspaper editors, in American jails, for things they wrote about America.

We have been here when President Woodrow Wilson insisted that the Espionage Act was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that Act to prosecute 2,000 Americans, especially those he disparaged as "Hyphenated Americans," most of whom were guilty only of advocating peace in a time of war.

American public speakers, in American jails, for things they said about America.

And we have been here when President Franklin D. Roosevelt insisted that Executive Order 9066 was necessary to save American lives, only to watch him use that order to imprison and pauperize 110,000 Americans while his man in charge, General DeWitt, told Congress: "It makes no difference whether he is an American citizen-he is still a Japanese."

American citizens, in American camps, for something they neither wrote nor said nor did, but for the choices they or their ancestors had made about coming to America.

Each of these actions was undertaken for the most vital, the most urgent, the most inescapable of reasons.

And each was a betrayal of that for which the president who advocated them claimed to be fighting.

Adams and his party were swept from office, and the Alien and Sedition Acts erased.

Many of the very people Wilson silenced survived him, and one of them even ran to succeed him, and got 900,000 votes, though his presidential campaign was conducted entirely from his jail cell.

And Roosevelt's internment of the Japanese was not merely the worst blight on his record, but it would necessitate a formal apology from the government of the United States to the citizens of the United States whose lives it ruined.

But even so, somebody probably should have told President Bush that today was the exact 135th anniversary, to the day, that President Grant suspended habeas corpus in much of South Carolina for the noble and urgent purpose of dispersing the Ku Klux Klan and making sure the freed slaves had all their voting rights, neither of which has yet truly occurred. It is your principal defense against imprisonment without charge and trial without defense thrown away for no good reason, then and now.

Our fifth story on "Countdown": President Bush, happy Habeas Corpus Day.

First thing this morning, the president signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006, which does away with habeas corpus, the right of suspected terrorists or anybody else to know why they have been imprisoned, provided the president does not think it should apply to you and declares you an enemy combatant.

Further, the bill allows the CIA to continue using interrogation techniques so long as they do not cause what is deemed, quote, "serious physical or mental pain." And it lets the president to ostensibly pick and choose which parts of the Geneva Convention to obey, though to hear him describe this, this repudiation of the freedoms for which all our soldiers have died is a good thing.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

PRESIDENT BUSH: This bill spells out specific, recognizable offenses that would be considered crimes in the handling of detainees, so that our men and women who question captured terrorists can perform their duties to the fullest extent of the law. And this bill complies with both the spirit and the letter of our international obligations.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

OLBERMANN: Leading Democrats view it differently, Senator Ted Kennedy calling this "seriously flawed," Senator Patrick Leahey saying it's, quote, "a sad day when the rubber-stamp Congress undercuts our freedoms," and Senator Russ Feingold adding that "We will look back on this day as a stain on our nation's history."

Outside the White House, a handful of individuals protested the law by dressing up as Abu Ghraib abuse victims and terror detainees. Several of them got themselves arrested, but they were apparently quickly released, despite being already dressed for Gitmo.

To assess what this law will truly mean for us all, I'm joined by Jonathan Turley, professor of constitutional law at George Washington University.

The detainee legislation that the Congress has just passed, with the advice and consent of White House officials hungering for more legal latitude upon their conduct, represents a complete abdication of the legislative branch's vital duty to act as a brake upon the executive branch. Worse, Congress has now officially become an explicit co-conspirator along with the Bush administration in its five-year-long effort to freeze out of the equation the federal courts, the last bulwark against tyranny. The less-than-do-nothing Congress finally did something and in doing so made a bad situation an order of magnitude worse.

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Generations from now, historians and scholars and lawyers and judges will look back upon the past five years, and last month's formal legislative reaction to it, and marvel at the vast gulf between cause and effect. It is of course inapt to compare this atrocious law to the decrees that caused the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II. But it is not too early to predict that our heirs will look back upon this law, and the dark effort behind it, with the same mixture of astonishment and disgust which our generation feels over what our government did in our name following Pearl Harbor. A Sept. 28 New York Times editorial compared this law with the notorious Alien and Sedition Act of the late 18th Century and, indeed, it is that bad and maybe even worse given what we know of the current war on terrorism.

But back to the grand disconnect that exists between what this law does -- gives the President new broad power -- and what preceded it -- the White House's often bungled use of its already-existing broad power. Long after both President Bush and Osama Bin Laden are gone from the scene, our successors-in-interest will look at this wretched law in particular, and the events upon which it is based, and wonder why Congress dramatically loosened the Bush Administration's legal leash at this time rather than severely restricting it.

Reasoned voices will then ask: What did the White House do between 9/11/01 and 9/11/06 to earn the trust and added authority that the Congress now has given it? What did President Bush do along the terror law front since the Twin Towers fell to cause Congress to place so much faith in him and his Administration when it comes to tiptoeing the tightrope between security and freedom?

The answer to these questions is nothing. So far, some legal experts say, the Bush Administration's track record when it comes to exercising unbridled power has been lame. To put it less mildly, as some legal experts have, it is actionable. Over and over again, they say, the executive branch has deceived Congress and the courts. Over and over again, the Administration has oversold its terror cases. Over and over again it has tried to hide its errors under the veil of "national security."

And after this foreboding pattern and practice by the executive branch what does the Congress do? Does it increase its oversight until it is satisfied that its partners in the White House are doing a better job of fighting the war on terror? Does it give the White House clear and unequivocal limits for its authority? Does it point to the abuses and excesses of the past five years and say, "no more"? No. It does none of these things. Instead, it rewards the White House's behavior with more discretion, authority, and power. And then, to ensure that the White House can safely use its new freedom, the Congress also tries to ensure that the federal courts cannot subsequently come in and put a stop to it all.

Enormous and unchecked new power now has been given to a White House whose officials at first called Zacarias Moussaoui the "20th hijacker" but were wrong; who at first called Jose Padilla the "dirty bomber" but were wrong; who at first called Yaser Hamdi such a threat to national security that he could not even be allowed to talk to his attorney -- until they decided to set him free. Freedom from judicial review now has been given to the same administration officials who allowed Maher Arar, a Canadian citizen whom we now know that they knew was not a terrorist, to be transferred to Syria for torture. Vague or narrow definitions of torture now have been given to the executive branch operatives who are responsible for Abu Ghraib. New powers have been given to the people who brought us the National Security Agency's domestic spying program, the one that some legal experts say violates both federal law and the Constitution.

The list goes on and on. The draconian USA Patriot Act, enacted just weeks after September 11, 2001 without any meaningful review or discussion on Capitol Hill, seems like the Bill of Rights compared with this effort. And yet despite the breadth and weight of this evidence, Congress, our national fact-finding body, has just reached its verdict: The culpable party doesn't just get acquitted -- it goes free with permission to operate under a brand new set of laws made especially for it, laws that will make it even more difficult to ever find it guilty again. This isn't Orwell. It's the Marx Brothers. Only there is absolutely nothing funny about it. Our elected officials have just traded the promise of more security for the actual loss of our liberty.

Thanks to this new law, fewer judges will be willing or able to look behind the curtain and help tell us all what is really happening to those individuals who, under the new law, can be rounded up and denied fundamental rights (like the right to face charges or the right to a trial). Remember the old Reagan saw? Trust but verify? Here, Congress has given the President its trust and ours without verifying whether the White House truly deserved either. The record establishes that it doesn't.

Andrew Cohen writes Bench Conference and this regular law column for washingtonpost.com.

This was one of the easier cases for the State Department, which declared it a fake that probably came from a right-wing group out of Brazil. But the forgery still makes the rounds via e-mail and picks up new believers.

It's the kind of thing that keeps Todd Leventhal busy. He's the U.S. State Department's sole counter-misinformation officer. As such, he tracks conspiracy theories and urban legends, dissecting the inaccuracies and identifying the origins of questionable information that reflects poorly on the nation and its government.

Go to the State Department's "Identifying Misinformation" website usinfo.state.gov/media/misinformation.html and you'll find Leventhal's research. It's a curious body of work, and impressive in scope. Research posted there covers everything from a brief mention of the legend of the woman who tried drying her dog by microwave oven to an exhaustively researched report - nearly 6,000 words - on rumors of Americans kidnapping children for organ and cornea transplants.

Besides the glut of 9/11 conspiracy theories, counter-misinformation work takes on various false rumors: AIDS was invented in a Pentagon laboratory; the author of an 1830 Islam-bashing book is President Bush's grandfather (though he was the cousin of Bush's great-great-great grandfather). It works over Hugo Chavez's oft-repeated claims that the U.S. plans to invade Venezuela (he's confused it with a Spanish military war game that has no U.S. involvement, the State Department says).

Many of the entries' titles are in question form, and "no" is almost always the answer. "Is the U.S. harvesting organs from Iraqis?" "Did the U.S. create Osama Bin Laden?" "Was Saddam's capture faked?"

Another debunker of misinformation says she's impressed with the thoroughness of the enterprise.

"Clearly, they've been putting a lot of time and effort into it," says Barbara Mikkelson. She's one of the founders of Snopes.com, the popular website that tracks urban legends and assigns each a verdict of true or false.

It's probably good thinking on the government's part, she says. "Generally, it is better to combat rumors than to let them lie," she says. "The best way to combat misinformation is with information."

But for all the work, the State Department doesn't do much to promote the results, at least here in the U.S. When we called Leventhal at his home in Washington, the former Bolton resident said he'd be happy to talk about his work, but that the State Department rarely allows him to give interviews.

The State Department did agree, though, to answer a series of questions by e-mail. Responses were attributed to "a State Department official." The State Department declined to say whether the unnamed official was a man or a woman.

The official said the State Department doesn't promote its counter-misinformation work in the U.S. because, by law, work in the International Information Programs Bureau is directed toward foreign audiences.

What's the budget for counter-misinformation work? The diffuse nature of the work "makes it difficult to assign an exact figure."

How does counter-misinformation work? When U.S. embassies become concerned about misinformation gaining credence in their region of the world, the official said, they contact Leventhal.

"Mr. Leventhal leads the effort to collect information on 'myth busting,' drawing on the expertise of other offices to craft a response." Embassy officials then decide how best to use Leventhal's research to counteract the bad information.

Conspiracies Run Amok

Thanks to the Internet and the enormity of 9/11, there may be more conspiracy theories circulating the globe than ever.

Among the most egregious "disinformers" singled out by the State Department is "Islam Memo," a "pro-al Qaeda, pro-Iraqi insurgency, Arabic-language" website in Saudi Arabia.

And there's "Loose Change," a documentary available on the Internet that's been a prodigious source of 9/11 conspiracy theories. Although not mentioned by name, the movie's claims (planted explosives brought down the World Trade Center towers; an American missile, not a plane, hit the Pentagon, etc.) are dissected in the "Top September 11 Conspiracy Theories" section.

Conspiracy theorists - no surprise - aren't impressed. Many cite the number of times the U.S. government has played a hand in media affairs in the past few years - paying columnists to promote government policies, planting military-boosting stories in Iraqi newspapers, etc. - and say the government has lost the authority to counteract propaganda.

John Perkins' book, "Confessions of an Economic Hitman," is featured prominently on the "Identifying Misinformation" website and denounced as largely a work of fiction. Perkins claims the National Security Agency paid him to sabotage the economies of other nations.

But Perkins says denials from the National Security Agency don't hurt his credibility. "Their mission statement is a lie, so when they use their mission statement to say my book is a lie, I think it speaks for itself," he says. "I think anything like this helps books sales."

Correcting Lies

How much damage can a few crackpot theories do? Actually, says the State Department official, a great deal of harm can result "when people believe these lies and then act on the basis of their mistaken beliefs."

For example, the official says Al-Qaida members "were encouraged to 'join the jihad' at least in part because of disinformation."

And an American woman visiting Guatemala in 1994 was attacked and permanently disabled. The attackers were spurred on by the story of Americans adopting Latin American children for organ transplants.

In 1979, rumors of U.S. involvement in the takeover of a Saudi Arabian grand mosque caused a mob in Pakistan to attack and kill two U.S. servicemen and two Pakistani employees at an embassy in Islamabad.

Even when you can't pinpoint the effects of false information "it is clearly not in the interests of the U.S. government or the American people if foreign audiences believe outrageous lies about Americans or their government."

And, of course, "crackpot" is a relative term. Stories that sound absurd to one group of people may well fit the worldview of others, says Herb Romerstein, who held an earlier version of Leventhal's job up through the 1990s. For those who already think poorly of the United States, he says, any story with a U.S. villain could seem credible.

Romerstein doesn't agree with the State Department's keeping a low profile on its counter-misinformation work. "I think they should be disseminating this information," he says. "There's a desire for it."

But whenever you rebut a claim, you're also publicizing it. Perkins knows this. He was unaware of the State Department's website until somebody called his attention to its section on the Venezuelan "invasion" plan. Right above it was a section about "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man," arguing they were "fantasies," not confessions.

Suddenly, major newspapers started paying attention to the book.

"Mainstream journalists weren't touching the book because no one thought they should give it any play," he says. "But once the State Department admitted the book was out there, it kind of broke the code of silence."