Bush Lets NSA Spy on Callers Without Courts

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts</font size></center>

By JAMES RISEN and ERIC LICHTBLAU
Published: December 16, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 - Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.

Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.

The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval was a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.

"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."

Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.

According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters. Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and impose more restrictions, the officials said.

The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so that the agency can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to the United States, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent attacks inside the United States.

Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to include communications confined within the United States. The officials said the administration had briefed Congressional leaders about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals with national security issues.

The White House asked The New York Times not to publish this article, arguing that it could jeopardize continuing investigations and alert would-be terrorists that they might be under scrutiny. After meeting with senior administration officials to hear their concerns, the newspaper delayed publication for a year to conduct additional reporting. Some information that administration officials argued could be useful to terrorists has been omitted.

Dealing With a New Threat

While many details about the program remain secret, officials familiar with it say the N.S.A. eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time. The list changes as some names are added and others dropped, so the number monitored in this country may have reached into the thousands since the program began, several officials said. Overseas, about 5,000 to 7,000 people suspected of terrorist ties are monitored at one time, according to those officials.

Several officials said the eavesdropping program had helped uncover a plot by Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting Al Qaeda by planning to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge with blowtorches. What appeared to be another Qaeda plot, involving fertilizer bomb attacks on British pubs and train stations, was exposed last year in part through the program, the officials said. But they said most people targeted for N.S.A. monitoring have never been charged with a crime, including an Iranian-American doctor in the South who came under suspicion because of what one official described as dubious ties to Osama bin Laden.

The eavesdropping program grew out of concerns after the Sept. 11 attacks that the nation's intelligence agencies were not poised to deal effectively with the new threat of Al Qaeda and that they were handcuffed by legal and bureaucratic restrictions better suited to peacetime than war, according to officials. In response, President Bush significantly eased limits on American intelligence and law enforcement agencies and the military.

But some of the administration's antiterrorism initiatives have provoked an outcry from members of Congress, watchdog groups, immigrants and others who argue that the measures erode protections for civil liberties and intrude on Americans' privacy.

Opponents have challenged provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the focus of contentious debate on Capitol Hill this week, that expand domestic surveillance by giving the Federal Bureau of Investigation more power to collect information like library lending lists or Internet use. Military and F.B.I. officials have drawn criticism for monitoring what were largely peaceful antiwar protests. The Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security were forced to retreat on plans to use public and private databases to hunt for possible terrorists. And last year, the Supreme Court rejected the administration's claim that those labeled "enemy combatants" were not entitled to judicial review of their open-ended detention.

Mr. Bush's executive order allowing some warrantless eavesdropping on those inside the United States - including American citizens, permanent legal residents, tourists and other foreigners - is based on classified legal opinions that assert that the president has broad powers to order such searches, derived in part from the September 2001 Congressional resolution authorizing him to wage war on Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, according to the officials familiar with the N.S.A. operation.

The National Security Agency, which is based at Fort Meade, Md., is the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence agency, so intent on remaining out of public view that it has long been nicknamed "No Such Agency." It breaks codes and maintains listening posts around the world to eavesdrop on foreign governments, diplomats and trade negotiators as well as drug lords and terrorists. But the agency ordinarily operates under tight restrictions on any spying on Americans, even if they are overseas, or disseminating information about them.

What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism. The program accelerated in early 2002 after the Central Intelligence Agency started capturing top Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The C.I.A. seized the terrorists' computers, cellphones and personal phone directories, said the officials familiar with the program. The N.S.A. surveillance was intended to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, they said.

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail messages to and from the Qaeda figures, the N.S.A. began monitoring others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United States, the officials said.

Under the agency's longstanding rules, the N.S.A. can target for interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if the recipients of those communications are in the United States. Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail messages in the United States by first obtaining a court order from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed sessions at the Justice Department.

Traditionally, the F.B.I., not the N.S.A., seeks such warrants and conducts most domestic eavesdropping. Until the new program began, the N.S.A. typically limited its domestic surveillance to foreign embassies and missions in Washington, New York and other cities, and obtained court orders to do so.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/16/p...WON&adxnnlx=1134733685-s495zOmaSoAMB9b8zfpBcw

 

[QueEx]

<font size="4">Bush Lets U.S. Spy on Callers Without Courts

Part Two</font size>

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their international communications, the officials said. The agency, for example, can target phone calls from someone in New York to someone in Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court.

A White House Briefing

After the special program started, Congressional leaders from both political parties were brought to Vice President Dick Cheney's office in the White House. The leaders, who included the chairmen and ranking members of the Senate and House intelligence committees, learned of the N.S.A. operation from Mr. Cheney, Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden of the Air Force, who was then the agency's director and is now a full general and the principal deputy director of national intelligence, and George J. Tenet, then the director of the C.I.A., officials said.

It is not clear how much the members of Congress were told about the presidential order and the eavesdropping program. Some of them declined to comment about the matter, while others did not return phone calls.

Later briefings were held for members of Congress as they assumed leadership roles on the intelligence committees, officials familiar with the program said. After a 2003 briefing, Senator Rockefeller, the West Virginia Democrat who became vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee that year, wrote a letter to Mr. Cheney expressing concerns about the program, officials knowledgeable about the letter said. It could not be determined if he received a reply. Mr. Rockefeller declined to comment. Aside from the Congressional leaders, only a small group of people, including several cabinet members and officials at the N.S.A., the C.I.A. and the Justice Department, know of the program.

Some officials familiar with it say they consider warrantless eavesdropping inside the United States to be unlawful and possibly unconstitutional, amounting to an improper search. One government official involved in the operation said he privately complained to a Congressional official about his doubts about the program's legality. But nothing came of his inquiry. "People just looked the other way because they didn't want to know what was going on," he said.

A senior government official recalled that he was taken aback when he first learned of the operation. "My first reaction was, 'We're doing what?' " he said. While he said he eventually felt that adequate safeguards were put in place, he added that questions about the program's legitimacy were understandable.

Some of those who object to the operation argue that is unnecessary. By getting warrants through the foreign intelligence court, the N.S.A. and F.B.I. could eavesdrop on people inside the United States who might be tied to terrorist groups without skirting longstanding rules, they say.

The standard of proof required to obtain a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court is generally considered lower than that required for a criminal warrant - intelligence officials only have to show probable cause that someone may be "an agent of a foreign power," which includes international terrorist groups - and the secret court has turned down only a small number of requests over the years. In 2004, according to the Justice Department, 1,754 warrants were approved. And the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court can grant emergency approval for wiretaps within hours, officials say.

Administration officials counter that they sometimes need to move more urgently, the officials said. Those involved in the program also said that the N.S.A.'s eavesdroppers might need to start monitoring large batches of numbers all at once, and that it would be impractical to seek permission from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court first, according to the officials.

The N.S.A. domestic spying operation has stirred such controversy among some national security officials in part because of the agency's cautious culture and longstanding rules.

Widespread abuses - including eavesdropping on Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists - by American intelligence agencies became public in the 1970's and led to passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which imposed strict limits on intelligence gathering on American soil. Among other things, the law required search warrants, approved by the secret F.I.S.A. court, for wiretaps in national security cases. The agency, deeply scarred by the scandals, adopted additional rules that all but ended domestic spying on its part.

After the Sept. 11 attacks, though, the United States intelligence community was criticized for being too risk-averse. The National Security Agency was even cited by the independent 9/11 Commission for adhering to self-imposed rules that were stricter than those set by federal law.

Concerns and Revisions

Several senior government officials say that when the special operation began, there were few controls on it and little formal oversight outside the N.S.A. The agency can choose its eavesdropping targets and does not have to seek approval from Justice Department or other Bush administration officials. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with the program, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, a former senior Bush administration official said. Before the 2004 election, the official said, some N.S.A. personnel worried that the program might come under scrutiny by Congressional or criminal investigators if Senator John Kerry, the Democratic nominee, was elected president.

In mid-2004, concerns about the program expressed by national security officials, government lawyers and a judge prompted the Bush administration to suspend elements of the program and revamp it.

For the first time, the Justice Department audited the N.S.A. program, several officials said. And to provide more guidance, the Justice Department and the agency expanded and refined a checklist to follow in deciding whether probable cause existed to start monitoring someone's communications, several officials said.

A complaint from Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the federal judge who oversees the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Court, helped spur the suspension, officials said. The judge questioned whether information obtained under the N.S.A. program was being improperly used as the basis for F.I.S.A. wiretap warrant requests from the Justice Department, according to senior government officials. While not knowing all the details of the exchange, several government lawyers said there appeared to be concerns that the Justice Department, by trying to shield the existence of the N.S.A. program, was in danger of misleading the court about the origins of the information cited to justify the warrants.

One official familiar with the episode said the judge insisted to Justice Department lawyers at one point that any material gathered under the special N.S.A. program not be used in seeking wiretap warrants from her court. Judge Kollar-Kotelly did not return calls for comment.

A related issue arose in a case in which the F.B.I. was monitoring the communications of a terrorist suspect under a F.I.S.A.-approved warrant, even though the National Security Agency was already conducting warrantless eavesdropping.

According to officials, F.B.I. surveillance of Mr. Faris, the Brooklyn Bridge plotter, was dropped for a short time because of technical problems. At the time, senior Justice Department officials worried what would happen if the N.S.A. picked up information that needed to be presented in court. The government would then either have to disclose the N.S.A. program or mislead a criminal court about how it had gotten the information.

Several national security officials say the powers granted the N.S.A. by President Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by Congress under the USA Patriot Act, which is up for renewal. The House on Wednesday approved a plan to reauthorize crucial parts of the law. But final passage has been delayed under the threat of a Senate filibuster because of concerns from both parties over possible intrusions on Americans' civil liberties and privacy.

Under the act, law enforcement and intelligence officials are still required to seek a F.I.S.A. warrant every time they want to eavesdrop within the United States. A recent agreement reached by Republican leaders and the Bush administration would modify the standard for F.B.I. wiretap warrants, requiring, for instance, a description of a specific target. Critics say the bar would remain too low to prevent abuses.

Bush administration officials argue that the civil liberties concerns are unfounded, and they say pointedly that the Patriot Act has not freed the N.S.A. to target Americans. "Nothing could be further from the truth," wrote John Yoo, a former official in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, and his co-author in a Wall Street Journal opinion article in December 2003. Mr. Yoo worked on a classified legal opinion on the N.S.A.'s domestic eavesdropping program.

At an April hearing on the Patriot Act renewal, Senator Barbara A. Mikulski, Democrat of Maryland, asked Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and Robert S. Mueller III, the director of the F.B.I., "Can the National Security Agency, the great electronic snooper, spy on the American people?"

"Generally," Mr. Mueller said, "I would say generally, they are not allowed to spy or to gather information on American citizens."

President Bush did not ask Congress to include provisions for the N.S.A. domestic surveillance program as part of the Patriot Act and has not sought any other laws to authorize the operation. Bush administration lawyers argued that such new laws were unnecessary, because they believed that the Congressional resolution on the campaign against terrorism provided ample authorization, officials said.

The Legal Line Shifts

Seeking Congressional approval was also viewed as politically risky because the proposal would be certain to face intense opposition on civil liberties grounds. The administration also feared that by publicly disclosing the existence of the operation, its usefulness in tracking terrorists would end, officials said.

The legal opinions that support the N.S.A. operation remain classified, but they appear to have followed private discussions among senior administration lawyers and other officials about the need to pursue aggressive strategies that once may have been seen as crossing a legal line, according to senior officials who participated in the discussions.

For example, just days after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Mr. Yoo, the Justice Department lawyer, wrote an internal memorandum that argued that the government might use "electronic surveillance techniques and equipment that are more powerful and sophisticated than those available to law enforcement agencies in order to intercept telephonic communications and observe the movement of persons but without obtaining warrants for such uses."

Mr. Yoo noted that while such actions could raise constitutional issues, in the face of devastating terrorist attacks "the government may be justified in taking measures which in less troubled conditions could be seen as infringements of individual liberties."

The next year, Justice Department lawyers disclosed their thinking on the issue of warrantless wiretaps in national security cases in a little-noticed brief in an unrelated court case. In that 2002 brief, the government said that "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

Administration officials were also encouraged by a November 2002 appeals court decision in an unrelated matter. The decision by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, which sided with the administration in dismantling a bureaucratic "wall" limiting cooperation between prosecutors and intelligence officers, cited "the president's inherent constitutional authority to conduct warrantless foreign intelligence surveillance."

But the same court suggested that national security interests should not be grounds "to jettison the Fourth Amendment requirements" protecting the rights of Americans against undue searches. The dividing line, the court acknowledged, "is a very difficult one to administer."

.

 

[Greed]

interesting. i think the role of congress should be explored more.

 

[QueEx]

[frame]http://www.cnn.com/2005/LAW/12/16/bush.nsa/index.html[/frame]

 

[VegasGuy]

Who believes any of this shit is brand new only after the 9/11 attack? I hate it when some prick wants to sell a new book he just wrote, which if you don't know is the reason this shit is in the news all of a sudden, just to get everybody all pumped up, pissed off to run to the polls to vote next year.

Ask any playa if he believed the feds haven't been doing this shit all along even before 9/11. If they tell you it hasn't been going on they lying there asses off. Fuck these politician thug ass republicrats in Washington. They want to run this Orsen Wells bullshit to get you to vote and for me this is no reason to re-elect these punks. How is this bullshit spy novel shit going to improve anything? Fuck em, they need a new game because this one doesn't move me.

-VG

 

[Hung Lo]

Who believes any of this shit is brand new only after the 9/11 attack? I hate it when some prick wants to sell a new book he just wrote, which if you don't know is the reason this shit is in the news all of a sudden, just to get everybody all pumped up, pissed off to run to the polls to vote next year.

Ask any playa if he believed the feds haven't been doing this shit all along even before 9/11. If they tell you it hasn't been going on they lying there asses off. Fuck these politician thug ass republicrats in Washington. They want to run this Orsen Wells bullshit to get you to vote and for me this is no reason to re-elect these punks. How is this bullshit spy novel shit going to improve anything? Fuck em, they need a new game because this one doesn't move me.

-VG

You tell 'em VG.

Some people don't understand the shit that goes down, and all the undertakings that these organizations do. 9/11 was just a visual "reason" to publicly and privately give their acts credence.

This is just one of the many organizations out that are given carte blanche privileges to violate civil liberties.

 

[Makkonnen]

Bush acknowledges secret order for domestic spying
Sat Dec 17, 2005 3:55 PM GMT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - President George W. Bush on Saturday acknowledged he signed a secret order after the September 11, 2001, attacks to allow the surveillance of people in the United States.

In a rare live radio address, Bush defended the practice as a "vital tool" in defending the United States against another such attack.

The presidential order was first reported in The New York Times on Friday. The report said the order allowed the National Security Agency to track international telephone calls and e-mails of hundreds of people without the court approval normally required for domestic spying.

The report immediately prompted concerns among both Democrats and Republican in Congress and the Bush administration initially declined to confirm it.

In the radio address, Bush called for renewal of the USA Patriot Act, an anti-terror measure stalled in Congress.

Some opponents of the renewal have cited the report as adding to their concerns about the need to insure that Americans' civil liberties are protected.

Bush said his order was constitutional and has been carefully reviewed by legal authorities. He also criticised the leak of the information to the media.

"In the weeks following the terrorist attacks on our nation, I authorised the National Security Agency, consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution, to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organisations," he said.

"This is a highly classified program that is crucial to our national security," Bush said.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/new..._RTRUKOC_0_UK-SECURITY-NSA.xml&archived=False

 

[Makkonnen]

Who believes any of this shit is brand new only after the 9/11 attack? I hate it when some prick wants to sell a new book he just wrote, which if you don't know is the reason this shit is in the news all of a sudden, just to get everybody all pumped up, pissed off to run to the polls to vote next year.

Ask any playa if he believed the feds haven't been doing this shit all along even before 9/11. If they tell you it hasn't been going on they lying there asses off. Fuck these politician thug ass republicrats in Washington. They want to run this Orsen Wells bullshit to get you to vote and for me this is no reason to re-elect these punks. How is this bullshit spy novel shit going to improve anything? Fuck em, they need a new game because this one doesn't move me.

-VG

the nsa monitors all phone,fax,emails etc worldwide and has been for a long time


project echelon

[frame]http://duncan.gn.apc.org/echelon-dc.htm[/frame]







Loud and Clear
The most secret of secret agencies operates under outdated laws.

By James Bamford

Sunday, November 14, 1999; Page B01

On the Yorkshire moors in northern England, dozens of enormous white globes sit like a moon base, each one hiding a dish-shaped antenna aimed at a satellite. Acres of buildings house advanced computers and receiving equipment, while tall fences and roving guards keep the curious at a distance. Known as Menwith Hill station, it is one of the most secret pieces of real estate on Earth. It is also becoming one of the most controversial.

For decades, Menwith Hill has been the key link in a worldwide eavesdropping network operated by America's super-secret National Security Agency (NSA), the agency responsible, among other things, for electronic surveillance and code breaking. It is the NSA's largest listening post anywhere in the world. During the Cold War, the station played a major role in the West's ability to monitor the diplomatic, military and commercial communication behind the Iron Curtain. But rather than shrinking in the decade since the fall of the Berlin Wall, Menwith Hill has grown.

People in Europe and the United States are beginning to ask why. Has the NSA turned from eavesdropping on the communists to eavesdropping on businesses and private citizens in Europe and the United States? The concerns have arisen because of the existence of a sophisticated network linking the NSA and the spy agencies of several other nations. The NSA will not confirm the existence of the project, code-named Echelon.

The allegations are serious. A report by the European Parliament has gone so far as to say "within Europe all e-mail, telephone and fax communications are routinely intercepted" by the NSA. As one of the few outsiders who have followed the agency for years, I think the concerns are overblown--so far. Based on everything I know about the agency, and countless conversations with current and former NSA personnel, I am certain that the NSA is not overstepping its mandate. But that doesn't mean it won't.

My real concern is that the technologies it is developing behind closed doors, and the methods that have given rise to such fears, have given the agency the ability to extend its eavesdropping network almost without limits. And as the NSA speeds ahead in its development of satellites and computers powerful enough to sift through mountains of intercepted data, the federal laws (now a quarter-century old) that regulate the agency are still at the starting gate. The communications revolution--and all the new electronic devices susceptible to monitoring--came long after the primary legislation governing the NSA.

The controversy comes at an interesting time. Throughout much of the intelligence community, the cloak of secrecy is being pulled back. The CIA recently sponsored a well-publicized reunion of former American spies in Berlin and is planning a public symposium on intelligence during the Cold War later this month in Texas. Even the National Reconnaissance Office, once so secret that even its name was classified, now offers millions of pages of documents and decades of spy satellite imagery to anyone with the time and interest to review them.

The NSA is the exception. As more and more questions are being raised about its activities, the agency is pulling its cloak even tighter. It is obsessively secretive. Last spring, for the first time, it denied a routine request for internal procedural information from a congressional intelligence committee.

Headquartered at Fort Meade, halfway between Washington and Baltimore, the NSA is by far America's largest spy agency. It has about 38,000 military and civilian employees around the world; the CIA, roughly 17,000. The agency's mandate is to monitor communications and break codes overseas; it also has a limited domestic role, with targets such as foreign embassies. It can monitor American citizens suspected of espionage with a warrant from a special court. It is potentially the most intrusive spy agency. Where scores of books have been written about the CIA, the only book exclusively on the NSA is the one I wrote in 1982.

Echelon, which links the NSA to its counterparts in the U.K., Canada, Australia and New Zealand, amounts to a global listening network. With it, those agencies are able to sift through great quantities of communications intercepted by satellites and ground stations around the world, using computers that search for specific names, words or phrases.

Whether the NSA will go too far with Echelon is not an idle question. In the mid-1970s, the Senate and House Select Committees on Intelligence were created in part as a result of NSA violations. For decades, the NSA had secretly and illegally gained access to millions of private telegrams and telephone calls in the United States. The agency acted as though the laws that applied to the rest of government did not apply to it.

Based on the findings of a commission appointed by President Ford, the Justice Department launched an unusually secret criminal investigation of the agency, known only to a handful of people. Senior NSA officials were read Miranda warnings and interrogated. It was the first time the Justice Department had ever treated an entire federal agency as a suspect in a criminal investigation. Eventually, despite finding numerous grounds on which to go forward with prosecution, Justice attorneys recommended against it. "There is the specter," said their report, which the government still considers classified, "in the event of prosecution, that there is likely to be much 'buck-passing' from subordinate to superior, agency to agency, agency to board or committee, board or committee to the President, and from the living to the dead."

As a result of the investigations, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which stated in black and white what the NSA could and could not do. To overcome the NSA's insistence that its activities were too secret to be discussed before judges, Congress created a special federal court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, to hear requests for warrants for national security eavesdropping. In case the court ever turned down an NSA request, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Appeals Court was created. It has never heard a case.

In the more than two decades since the FISA was passed, the law has remained largely static, while cell phones, e-mail, faxes and the Internet have come to dominate how we communicate. The point hasn't been lost on the NSA. Last month, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael Hayden, director of the NSA, gave a speech inside the agency. I was one of the few outsiders invited to attend. Hayden warned of the "new challenges" in "information technology" that the agency now faces. "The scale of change is alarmingly rapid," he said, noting that "the world now contains 40 million cell phones, 14 million fax machines, 180 million computers, and the Internet doubles every 90 days."

That's not all Hayden acknowledged. He had just returned from England, he said, where he had met with colleagues at Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), Britain's equivalent of the NSA. He added that they had renewed a long-standing commitment to work together. No director had ever spoken publicly of that close partnership. "We must go back to our roots with GCHQ," Hayden said.

The cooperation between the Echelon countries is worrying. For decades, these organizations have worked closely together, monitoring communications and sharing the information gathered. Now, through Echelon, they are pooling their resources and targets, maximizing the collection and analysis of intercepted information. Officials from many of the European Union countries fear that the NSA may be stealing their companies' economic secrets and passing them on to American competitors. "We're hoping we can use our position to alert other parliaments and people throughout the European Union as to what's going on," Glyn Ford, a member of the European Parliament, told the BBC. "Hopefully that will lead to a situation where some proper controls are instituted and that these things are done under controlled conditions."

The issue has also caught the attention of the House and Senate intelligence committees, and the NSA's response has been anything but reassuring. As part of its normal oversight responsibilities, the House Select Committee on Intelligence last spring requested from the NSA a number of legal documents that outline the agency's procedures for its eavesdropping operations. The agency, in essence, told the committee to take a hike. It refused to release any of the documents based on a unique claim of "government attorney-client privilege." Despite repeated requests by the intelligence committee, the NSA insisted that those documents "are free from scrutiny by Congress." Eventually, after months of negotiation, the NSA complied.

It is highly unlikely that Echelon is monitoring everyone everywhere, as critics claim. It would be impossible for the NSA to capture all communications. It has had personnel cutbacks in the past five years as its national security targets have increased in number: North Korean missile development, nuclear testing in India and Pakistan, the movement of suspected terrorists and so on. Listening in on European business to help American corporations would be a very low priority, and passing secret intercepts to companies would quickly be discovered.

Still, the NSA's stonewalling of Congress should serve as a warning bell. Under Section 502 of the National Security Act of 1947, as amended, the heads of all U.S. spy agencies are obligated to furnish "any information or material concerning intelligence activities . . . which is requested by either of the intelligence committees in order to carry out its authorized responsibilities." Rep. Porter J. Goss (R-Fla.), the House committee's chairman and a former CIA officer, has long argued for a stronger intelligence community, and even he seemed stunned by the NSA's arrogance. The NSA's behavior, he said, "would seriously hobble the legislative oversight process contemplated by the Constitution."

Rather than disappear further from view, the agency should publicly address these concerns, and the intelligence committees should hold hearings to update the laws governing the NSA and to close what now amount to loopholes. For example, the 1978 FISA prohibits the NSA from using its "electronic surveillance" technology to target American citizens. But that still leaves open the possibility that Britain's GCHQ or another foreign agency could target Americans and turn the data over to the NSA. Another problem is that the FISA appears not to apply to the NSA's monitoring of the Internet. While covering such things as "wire" and "radio" communications, there is no mention of "electronic communications," which is the legal term for communicating over the Internet as defined by the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986. Worse, FISA applies only "under circumstances in which a person has a reasonable expectation of privacy."

In the recent film, "Enemy of the State," the NSA was portrayed as an out-of-control agency listening in on unwitting citizens. As the nation begins a new century, congressional hearings to redefine the agency's boundaries are the best way to prevent life from imitating art.

James Bamford, author of "The Puzzle Palace: A Report on America's Most Secret Agency" (Viking Penguin), is working on a new book about the NSA.

© Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company

 

[Hung Lo]

It's real amazing how how I posted links to most of these organizations concerning their mission and purpose, and all the shady shit they do as well. Just to get a backlash of responses from some on this board that my posts were in vain.

Now, all of this stuff is starting to come out about the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, and I won't be surprised when others come to light as well.

But it appears to me that a lot of these people that post threads(mods included) would rather keep their own threads alive, with threads they started
back in the summer.

So everytime one of these threads get started I'm going to put the home page to the organization in the thread as well.
[FRAME]http://www.nsa.gov/home.cfm[/FRAME]

 

[QueEx]

It's real amazing how how I posted links to most of these organizations concerning their mission and purpose, and all the shady shit they do as well. Just to get a backlash of responses from some on this board that my posts were in vain.

Stop crying and acting like you were right. If you STILL don't know what was wrong with what you were trying to say, then you probably never will.

Now, all of this stuff is starting to come out about the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA, and I won't be surprised when others come to light as well.

Look at the date of some of the articles posted by Mak. This is not shit JUST coming out, they date back to the 80's. But, I take it you still don't know where you went wrong in those "OTHER" posts/threads.

But it appears to me that a lot of these people that post threads(mods included) would rather keep their own threads alive, with threads they started back in the summer.

Again, stop moaning. I "UPDATE" threads from damn near every poster, as I come across interesting information relating to them. Some of them happen to be threads I've started, because they tend to be in my memory, and others that I remember more vaguely that I use the search function to look up -- or at least to see if similar information has been posted in a topic before.

Lastly, nothing in this thread validates your prior thread where you said "this has CIA all over it" ... where you tried to make your point by posting a host of unrelated threads on the CIA that had shit to do with what you were arguing.

QueEx

 

[QueEx]

... But it appears to me that a lot of these people that post threads(mods included) would rather keep their own threads alive, with threads they started back in the summer.

It just occurred to me, you're sulking because no one bumped/updated your threads. LOL. Git a grip. Don't be a whinner like BP.

QueEx

 

[QueEx]

Ried Calls For Congressional Hearings

interesting. i think the role of congress should be explored more.

<font size="5"><center>Reid Seeks Probe of Bush Domestic Spying</font size></center>

Associated Press
Dec 18, 10:17 AM (ET)

WASHINGTON (AP) - Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid called Sunday for congressional hearings and investigations into President Bush's authorization of domestic spying as part of the war on terror.

"This Congress has done very little oversight," Reid, D-Nev., said on "Fox News Sunday.""There should be an investigation and hearings."

Reid acknowledged that he was briefed by the administration about the surveillance program "a couple of months ago." But he said the program apparently has been going on for four years and "there's no way the president can pass the buck."

Bush acknowledged Saturday that since October 2001 he has authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails of people within the United States without seeking warrants from courts.


The New York Times disclosed the existence of the program in a story last week. Bush and other administration officials initially refused to discuss the surveillance.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said Sunday that public disclosure of surveillance programs used to wage the war on terror damages those efforts.

Rice, who was Bush's national security adviser when the program began, acknowledged that she was aware of it.

In appearances on news shows, she echoed Bush's defense of domestic spying, calling it necessary and within his legal authority, as well as his criticism of reports disclosing it.

"It is really a serious matter when we get the disclosure of a program like this because, after all, what we must do is protect, from those trying to hurt us, knowledge of how we follow them, how we follow their activities," Rice said on "Fox News Sunday."

Reid said whoever disclosed the existence of the surveillance program should be prosecuted, but he said the president should not have unchecked authority to disregard the Constitution.

Rice said that listening to terror leader Osama bin Laden's telephone conversations had been successful until news reports disclosed it and bin Laden stopped using the phone.

"The more that we get the exposure of these very sensitive programs, the more it undermines our ability to follow terrorists, to know about their activities," she said.

Rice could not cite the constitutional and other authority she contended allowed Bush to authorize the domestic spying. However, she said the program had been reviewed by administration lawyers and that congressional leaders had been briefed.

"This is a war where intelligence is the long pole in the tent," Rice said on "Meet the Press" on NBC.

http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20051218/D8EINR9O0.html?PG=home&SEC=news

 

[QueEx]

[frame]http://www.eff.org/Censorship/Terrorism_militias/fisa_faq.html[/frame]

 

[QueEx]

<font size="5"><center>Lawmakers Call for Domestic Spying Probe</font size></center>

Dec 18, 2:40 PM (ET)
Associated Press
By HOPE YEN

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democrats and Republicans called separately Sunday for congressional investigations into President Bush's decision after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to allow domestic eavesdropping without court approval.

"The president has, I think, made up a law that we never passed," said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis.

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Penn., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he intends to hold hearings.

"They talk about constitutional authority," Specter said. "There are limits as to what the president can do."


Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid of Nevada also called for an investigation, and House Democratic leaders asked Speaker Dennis Hastert to create a bipartisan panel to do the same.

Bush acknowledged Saturday that since October 2001 he has authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on international phone calls and e-mails of people within the United States without seeking warrants from courts.

The New York Times disclosed the existence of the program last week. Bush and other administration officials initially refused to discuss the surveillance or their legal authority, citing security concerns.

Administration officials said congressional leaders had been briefed regularly on the program. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said there were no objections raised by lawmakers who were told about it.

"That's a legitimate part of the equation," McCain said on ABC's "This Week." But he said Bush still needs to explain why he chose to ignore the law that requires approval of a special court for domestic wiretaps.

Reid acknowledged he had been briefed on the four-year-old domestic spy program "a couple months ago" but insisted the administration bears full responsibility. Reid became Democratic leader in January.

"The president can't pass the buck on this one. This is his program," Reid said on "Fox News Sunday.""He's commander in chief. But commander in chief does not trump the Bill of Rights."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said in a statement Saturday that she had been told on several occasions about unspecified activities by the NSA. Pelosi said she expressed strong concerns at the time.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on "Fox News Sunday" that Bush "has gone to great lengths to make certain that he is both living under his obligations to protect Americans from another attack but also to protect their civil liberties."

Several lawmakers weren't so sure. They pointed to a 1978 federal law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which provides for domestic surveillance under extreme situations, but only with court approval.

Specter said he wants Bush's advisers to cite their specific legal authority for bypassing the courts. Bush said the attorney general and White House counsel's office had affirmed the legality of his actions.

Appearing with Specter on CNN's "Late Edition," Feingold said Bush is accountable for the program regardless of whether congressional leaders were notified.

"It doesn't matter if you tell everybody in the whole country if it's against the law," said Feingold, a member of the Judiciary Committee.

Bush said the program was narrowly designed and used in a manner "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." He said it targets only international communications of people inside the U.S. with "a clear link" to al-Qaida or related terrorist organizations.

Government officials have refused to define the standards they're using to establish such a link or to say how many people are being monitored.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called that troubling. If Bush is allowed to decide unilaterally who the potential terrorists are, he becomes the court," Graham said on CBS's "Face the Nation."

"We are at war, and I applaud the president for being aggressive," said Graham, who also called for a congressional review. "But we cannot set aside the rule of law in a time of war."

The existence of the NSA program surfaced as Bush was fighting to save the expiring provisions of the USA Patriot Act, the domestic anti-terrorism law enacted after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Renewal of the law has stalled over some its most contentious provisions, including powers granted law enforcement to gain secret access to library and medical records and other personal data during investigations of suspected terrorist activity.

Democrats have urged Bush to support a brief extension of the law so that changes could be made in the reauthorization, but Bush has refused, saying he wants renewal now.



http://apnews1.iwon.com//article/20051218/D8EIRMJO0.html?PG=home&SEC=news

 

[dannyromans]

And I Thought That George Orwell Shyt Was A Crok Of Made Up Shyt

 

[Makkonnen]

nice to know the other 2 branches of government are keeping bush in check
since people are blaming bush for this and he is taking responsibility for it

 

[QueEx]

Analysis l

<font size=5"><center>Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers</font size></center>

By Barton Gellman and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, December 18, 2005; Page A01

In his four-year campaign against al Qaeda, President Bush has turned the U.S. national security apparatus inward to secretly collect information on American citizens on a scale unmatched since the intelligence reforms of the 1970s.

The president's emphatic defense yesterday of warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens and residents marked the third time in as many months that the White House has been obliged to defend a departure from previous restraints on domestic surveillance. In each case, the Bush administration concealed the program's dimensions or existence from the public and from most members of Congress.

Since October, news accounts have disclosed a burgeoning Pentagon campaign for "detecting, identifying and engaging" internal enemies that included a database with information on peace protesters. A debate has roiled over the FBI's use of national security letters to obtain secret access to the personal records of tens of thousands of Americans. And now come revelations of the National Security Agency's interception of telephone calls and e-mails from the United States -- without notice to the federal court that has held jurisdiction over domestic spying since 1978.

Defiant in the face of criticism, the Bush administration has portrayed each surveillance initiative as a defense of American freedom. Bush said yesterday that his NSA eavesdropping directives were "critical to saving American lives" and "consistent with U.S. law and the Constitution." After years of portraying an offensive waged largely overseas, Bush justified the internal surveillance with new emphasis on "the home front" and the need to hunt down "terrorists here at home."

Bush's constitutional argument, in the eyes of some legal scholars and previous White House advisers, relies on extraordinary claims of presidential war-making power. Bush said yesterday that the lawfulness of his directives was affirmed by the attorney general and White House counsel, a list that omitted the legislative and judicial branches of government. On occasion the Bush administration has explicitly rejected the authority of courts and Congress to impose boundaries on the power of the commander in chief, describing the president's war-making powers in legal briefs as "plenary" -- a term defined as "full," "complete," and "absolute."

A high-ranking intelligence official with firsthand knowledge said in an interview yesterday that Vice President Cheney, then-Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet and Michael V. Hayden, then a lieutenant general and director of the National Security Agency, briefed four key members of Congress about the NSA's new domestic surveillance on Oct. 25, 2001, and Nov. 14, 2001, shortly after Bush signed a highly classified directive that eliminated some restrictions on eavesdropping against U.S. citizens and permanent residents.

In describing the briefings, administration officials made clear that Cheney was announcing a decision, not asking permission from Congress. How much the legislators learned is in dispute.

Former senator Bob Graham (D-Fla.), who chaired the Senate intelligence committee and is the only participant thus far to describe the meetings extensively and on the record, said in interviews Friday night and yesterday that he remembers "no discussion about expanding [NSA eavesdropping] to include conversations of U.S. citizens or conversations that originated or ended in the United States" -- and no mention of the president's intent to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

"I came out of the room with the full sense that we were dealing with a change in technology but not policy," Graham said, with new opportunities to intercept overseas calls that passed through U.S. switches. He believed eavesdropping would continue to be limited to "calls that initiated outside the United States, had a destination outside the United States but that transferred through a U.S.-based communications system."

Graham said the latest disclosures suggest that the president decided to go "beyond foreign communications to using this as a pretext for listening to U.S. citizens' communications. There was no discussion of anything like that in the meeting with Cheney."

The high-ranking intelligence official, who spoke with White House permission but said he was not authorized to be identified by name, said Graham is "misremembering the briefings," which in fact were "very, very comprehensive." The official declined to describe any of the substance of the meetings, but said they were intended "to make sure the Hill knows this program in its entirety, in order to never, ever be faced with the circumstance that someone says, 'I was briefed on this but I had no idea that -- ' and you can fill in the rest."

By Graham's account, the official said, "it appears that we held a briefing to say that nothing is different . . . . Why would we have a meeting in the vice president's office to talk about a change and then tell the members of Congress there is no change?"

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...21701233_2.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

 

[QueEx]

<font size="5">Pushing the Limits Of Wartime Powers
Part Two</center></font size>

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (Calif.), who was also present as then ranking Democrat of the House intelligence panel, said in a statement yesterday evening that the briefing described "President Bush's decision to provide authority to the National Security Agency to conduct unspecified activities." She said she "expressed my strong concerns" but did not elaborate.

The NSA disclosures follow exposure of two other domestic surveillance initiatives that drew shocked reactions from Congress and some members of the public in recent months.

Beginning in October, The Washington Post published articles describing a three-year-old Pentagon agency, the size and budget of which are classified, with wide new authority to undertake domestic investigations and operations against potential threats from U.S. residents and organizations against military personnel and facilities. The Counterintelligence Field Activity, or CIFA, began as a small policy-coordination office but has grown to encompass nine directorates and a staff exceeding 1,000. The agency's Talon database, collecting unconfirmed reports of suspicious activity from military bases and organizations around the country, has included "threat reports" of peaceful civilian protests and demonstrations.

CIFA has also been empowered with what the military calls "tasking authority" -- the ability to give operational orders -- over Army, Navy and Air Force units whose combined roster of investigators, about 4,000, is nearly as large as the number of FBI special agents assigned to counterterrorist squads. Pentagon officials said this month they had ordered a review of the program after disclosures, in The Post, NBC News and the washingtonpost.com Web log of William M. Arkin, that CIFA compiled information about U.S. citizens engaging in constitutionally protected political activity such as protests against military recruiting.

In November, The Post disclosed an exponentially growing practice of domestic surveillance under the USA Patriot Act, using FBI demands for information known as "national security letters." Created in the 1970s for espionage and terrorism investigations, the letters enabled secret FBI review of the private telephone and financial records of suspected foreign agents. The Bush administration's guidelines after the Patriot Act transformed those letters by permitting clandestine scrutiny of U.S. residents and visitors who are not alleged to be terrorists or spies.

The Post reported that the FBI has issued tens of thousands of national security letters, extending the bureau's reach as never before into the telephone calls, correspondence and financial lives of ordinary Americans. Most of the U.S. residents and citizens whose records were screened, the FBI acknowledged, were not suspected of wrongdoing.

The burgeoning use of national security letters coincided with an unannounced decision to deposit all the information they yield into government data banks -- and to share those private records widely, in the federal government and beyond. In late 2003, the Bush administration reversed a long-standing policy requiring agents to destroy their files on innocent American citizens, companies and residents when investigations closed.

Yesterday's acknowledgment of warrantless NSA eavesdropping brought the most forthright statement from the president that his war on terrorism is targeting not only "enemies across the world" but "terrorists here at home." In the "first war of the 21st century," he said, "one of the most critical battlefronts is the home front."

Bush sidestepped some of the implications by citing examples only of foreigners who infiltrated the United States -- Saudi citizens Nawaf Alhazmi and Khalid Almihdhar, two of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers. But the most fundamental changes undertaken in the Bush administration's surveillance policy are the ones that have broadened the powers of the NSA, FBI and Pentagon to spy on "U.S. persons" -- American citizens, permanent residents and corporations -- on American soil.

Roger Cressey, who was principal deputy to the White House counterterrorism chief when terrorists destroyed the World Trade Center and a wing of the Pentagon, said "the amount of domestic surveillance is an admission of fundamental gaps in our understanding of what is happening in our country."

Those anxieties about unknown threats have ebbed and flowed since World War I, according to a bipartisan government commission chaired by Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan. President Woodrow Wilson warned against "the poison of disloyalty" and another loyalty campaign created black lists of accused Communists in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s, the Army and the NSA collected files and eavesdropped on thousands of anti-Vietnam War and civil rights activists.

Congress asserted itself in the 1970s, imposing oversight requirements and passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said FISA "expressly made it a crime for government officials 'acting under color of law' to engage in electronic eavesdropping 'other than pursuant to statute.' " FISA described itself, along with the criminal wiretap statute, as "the exclusive means by which electronic surveillance . . . may be conducted."

No president before Bush mounted a frontal challenge to Congress's authority to limit espionage against Americans. In a Sept. 25, 2002, brief signed by then-Attorney General John D. Ashcroft, the Justice Department asserted "the Constitution vests in the President inherent authority to conduct warrantless intelligence surveillance (electronic or otherwise) of foreign powers or their agents, and Congress cannot by statute extinguish that constitutional authority."

The brief made no distinction between suspected agents who are U.S. citizens and those who are not. Other Bush administration legal arguments have said the "war on terror" is global and indefinite in scope, effectively removing traditional limits of wartime authority to the times and places of imminent or actual battle.

"There is a lot of discussion out there that we shouldn't be dividing Americans and foreigners, but terrorists and non-terrorists," said Gordon Oehler, a former chief of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center who served on last year's special commission assessing U.S. intelligence.

By law, according to University of Chicago scholar Geoffrey Stone, the differences are fundamental: Americans have constitutional protections that are enforceable in court whether their conversations are domestic or international.

Bush's assertion that eavesdropping takes place only on U.S. calls to overseas phones, Stone said, "is no different, as far as the law is concerned, from saying we only do it on Tuesdays."

Michael J. Woods, who was chief of the FBI's national security law unit when Bush signed the NSA directive, described the ongoing program as "very dangerous." In the immediate aftermath of a devastating attack, he said, the decision was a justifiable emergency response. In 2006, "we ought to be past the time of emergency responses. We ought to have more considered views now. . . . We have time to debate a legal regime and what's appropriate."

Staff writers Charles Lane and Walter Pincus and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report

 

[Greed]

looks like there wont be any sacrificial lambs with this NSA program.

even before last night's presidential speech i was getting the impression that both parties would rather the sensationalism leaves this story and the story itself to fade away.

now the more aggressive bush43 gets and the more non-responses from the dem leadership i am convinced that this is now the status quo. if it wasnt already.

 

[QueEx]

It might go away, maybe not. I saw his speech today and noted that Bush said he authorized the eavesdropping on Al Qaeda and the like - presumably in the U.S. or communicating with elements in the U.S. Frankly, with communications being as rapid as they are today, I can understand the need, on occassion, when the FISA is by-passed when a target suddenly lights up and may be gone well before the court can be consulted. That is, if we are truly talking about targets covered by the FISA (Under FISA, surveillance is generally permitted based on a finding of probable cause that the surveillance target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power - and Al Qaeda and agents of same are covered under the definition of foreign power).

There is the implication, however, that some of those eavesdropped upon were not Al Qaeda -- but maybe ordinary citizens, perhaps, checking them out to see if they <u>might</u> have some dubious connection. If it turns out that is the case, this may not (and should not) disappear so easily.

QueEx

 

[Mr. Equator]

Somebody should edit Hung LO's NSA POST!!! Just for the hell of it!

 

[Makkonnen]

I can understand the need, on occassion, when the FISA is by-passed when a target suddenly lights up and may be gone well before the court can be consulted. That is, if we are truly talking about targets covered by the FISA (Under FISA, surveillance is generally permitted based on a finding of probable cause that the surveillance target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power - and Al Qaeda and agents of same are covered under the definition of foreign power).

Under FISA they don't need to pre-clear the surveillance, they only have to present the reason why they needed to do whatever they did within 72 hours. So that doesn't apply.
The only thing accomplished by his executive order is the total removal of oversight and the removal of warrants. This was illegal.
They consulted the heads of both parties in congress regarding changing the FISA law in 2002 when they could have gotten anything approved and the feedback they received told them they would not be able to change the law, so they issued this order instead. Circumventing changing a law they knew they wouldnt be able to change in order to get their way regardless. Illegal bullshit
fuck King George


As for the surveillance of American Citizens aspect you mentioned, the Pentagon has been investigating Quakers and other non-violent war protesters here in the US - that came out last week and is getting less press. The ACLU is suing them for violating federal law too.

Why are all these fuckin newspapers sleeping on this shit for years??????????????

Fuckin NYTimes knew about this last year pre-election and didnt print it

 

[Greed]

Democrats Say They Never OK'd Wiretapping

now things are getting interesting.

Democrats Say They Never OK'd Wiretapping
By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 52 minutes ago

WASHINGTON - Some Democrats say they never approved a domestic wiretapping program, undermining suggestions by President Bush and his senior advisers that the plan was fully vetted in a series of congressional briefings.

"I feel unable to fully evaluate, much less endorse, these activities," West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Senate Intelligence Committee's top Democrat, said in a handwritten letter to Vice President Dick Cheney in July 2003. "As you know, I am neither a technician nor an attorney."

Rockefeller is among a small group of congressional leaders who have received briefings on the administration's four-year-old program to eavesdrop — without warrants — on international calls and e-mails of Americans and others inside the United States with suspected ties to al-Qaida.

The government still would seek court approval to snoop on purely domestic communications, such as calls between New York and Los Angeles.

Some legal experts described the program as groundbreaking. And until the highly classified program was disclosed last week, those in Congress with concerns about the National Security Agency spying on Americans raised them only privately.

Bush, accused of acting above the law, on Monday issued a forceful defense of the program he first authorized shortly after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. His senior aides have stressed the program was narrowly targeted at individuals with a suspected link to al-Qaida or affiliated extremist groups. And Bush said it was "a shameful act" for someone to have leaked details to the media.

He bristled at the suggestion at a White House news conference that he was assuming unlimited powers.

"To say 'unchecked power' basically is ascribing some kind of dictatorial position to the president, which I strongly reject," he said angrily. "I am doing what you expect me to do, and at the same time, safeguarding the civil liberties of the country."

Despite the defense, there was a growing storm of criticism in Congress and calls for investigations, from Democrats and Republicans alike. Until the past several days, the White House had only informed Congress' top political and intelligence committee leadership about the program that Bush has reauthorized more than three dozen times.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said he and other top aides were just now educating the American people and Congress. "The president has not authorized ... blanket surveillance of communications here in the United States," he said.

The spying uproar was the latest controversy about Bush's handling of the war on terror. It follows allegations of secret prisons in Eastern Europe and of torture and other mistreatment of detainees, and an American death toll in Iraq that has exceeded 2,150.

The eavesdropping program was operated out of the NSA, the nation's largest and perhaps most secretive spy operation. Employees there appreciate their nicknames: No Such Agency or Never Say Anything.

Decisions on what conversations to monitor are made at the Fort Meade, Md., headquarters, approved by an NSA shift supervisor and carefully recorded, said Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of intelligence.

"The reason I emphasize that this is done at the operational level is to remove any question in your mind that this is in any way politically influenced," said Hayden, who was NSA director when the program began.

Since the program was disclosed last week by The New York Times, current and former Congress members have been liberated to weigh in.

Former Sen. Bob Graham (news, bio, voting record), D-Fla., who was part of the Intelligence Committee's leadership after the 9/11 attacks, recalled a briefing about changes in international electronic surveillance, but does not remember being told of a program snooping on individuals in the United States.

"It seemed fairly mechanical," Graham said. "It was not a major shift in policy."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., received several briefings and raised concerns, including in a classified letter, her spokeswoman Jennifer Crider said.

Former Senate Democratic leader Tom Daschle said he, too, was briefed by the White House between 2002 and 2004 but was not told key details about the scope of the program.

Daschle's successor, Sen. Harry Reid (news, bio, voting record), D-Nev., said he received a single briefing earlier this year and that important details were withheld. "We need to investigate this program and the president's legal authority to carry it out," Reid said.

Republicans, too, were skeptical.

Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has promised hearings next year and said he would ask Bush's Supreme Court nominee, Samuel Alito, his views of the president's authority for spying without a warrant.

Bush said the electronic eavesdropping program lets the government move faster than the standard practice of seeking a court-authorized warrant under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. "We've got to be fast on our feet, quick to detect and prevent," the president said.

And he was cool toward investigations. "An open debate would say to the enemy, `Here is what we're going to do.' And this is an enemy which adjusts," he said.
___
On the Net:
Rockefeller's handwritten note: http://wid.ap.org/documents/051219rockefeller.pdf

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20051220...exI2ocA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

 

[QueEx]

Re: Democrats Say They Never OK'd Wiretapping

[frame]http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB24/press20051219.htm[/frame]

 

[Makkonnen]

Re: Democrats Say They Never OK'd Wiretapping

FBI Papers Show Terror Inquiries Into PETA; Other Groups Tracked

By Spencer S. Hsu
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 20, 2005; A11

FBI counterterrorism investigators are monitoring domestic U.S. advocacy groups engaged in antiwar, environmental, civil rights and other causes, the American Civil Liberties Union charged yesterday as it released new FBI records that it said detail the extent of the activity.

The documents, disclosed as part of a lawsuit that challenges FBI treatment of groups that planned demonstrations at last year's political conventions, show the bureau has opened a preliminary terrorism investigation into People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the well-known animal rights group based in Norfolk.

The papers offer no proof of PETA's involvement in illegal activity. But more than 100 pages of heavily censored FBI files show the agency used secret informants and tracked the group's events for years, including an animal rights conference in Washington in July 2000, a community meeting at an Indiana college in spring 2003 and a planned August 2004 protest of a celebrity fur endorser.

The documents show the FBI cultivated sources such as a "well insulated" PETA insider, who attended the 2000 meeting to gain credibility "within the animal rights/Ruckus movements." The FBI also kept information on Greenpeace and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, the papers show.

The disclosure comes amid recent revelations about the extent of domestic spying by the government after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Those disclosures include the expansion within the United States of military intelligence and databases covering, among others, peace activists; increased use of "national security letters" by the FBI to examine personal records of tens of thousands of citizens; and, most recently, warrantless eavesdropping of overseas telephone calls and e-mails by U.S. citizens suspected of ties to terrorists.

ACLU leaders contend that the memos show that FBI and government Joint Terrorism Task Forces across the country have expanded the definition of domestic terrorism to people who engage in mainstream political activity, including nonviolent protest and civil disobedience.

"The FBI should use its resources to investigate credible threats to national security instead of spending time tracking innocent Americans who criticize government policy, or monitoring groups that have not broken the law," ACLU Associate Legal Director Ann Beeson said. Previously released papers showed that the FBI kept files that mentioned the organizations, she said, "But we didn't know that they actually launched counterterrorism investigations into these groups."

FBI officials said that the agency is not using the threat of terrorism to suppress domestic dissent and that is has no alternative but to investigate if a group or its members have ties to others that are guilty or suspected of violence or illegal conduct.

"As a matter of policy, the FBI does not target individuals or organizations for investigation because of any political belief. Somewhere, there has to be a crime attached," FBI spokesman John Miller said. "At the same time, the fact that you have ties to an organization or political beliefs does not make you immune from ending up in FBI files when you go and commit a crime."

The status of the PETA inquiry is unclear. Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said: "The Justice Department does not comment on or confirm the existence of criminal investigations. All matters referred to the department by the intelligence agencies for purposes of further investigation are taken seriously and thoroughly reviewed."

PETA general counsel Jeff Kerr called the FBI's conduct an abuse of power that punishes activists for speaking out.

"These documents show a disturbing erosion of freedom of association and freedom of speech that we've taken for granted and that set us apart from oppressive countries like the former Iraq," Kerr said, adding that the documents show no illegal activity by PETA. "You shouldn't have to wonder when you go to a speech at a college campus, or when you go to a meeting, whether you're being surveilled by the FBI. It goes back to the dark days of Nixon and the enemies list."

John Lewis, the FBI's deputy assistant director for counterterrorism, told a Senate panel in May that environmental and animal rights militants posed the biggest terrorist threats in the United States, citing more than 150 pending investigations.

The ACLU said it received 2,357 pages of files on PETA, Greenpeace, the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the ACLU itself. One file referring to the committee included a contact list for students and peace activists who attended a 2002 conference at Stanford University aimed at ending sanctions then in place in Iraq.

The FBI has said that when it interviewed members of groups planning demonstrations at last year's conventions, it did not yield information into criminal activity. But the agency said the interviews were prompted by specific threats. The latest data lay out a similar, broader pattern regarding 150 groups whose FBI files the ACLU has asked to see.

For example, a June 19, 2002, e-mail cites a source offering information on Greenpeace regarding "activists who show a clear predisposition to violate the law." Other documents contain suspicions that PETA funds, supports or otherwise acts as a front for "eco-terrorist" groups that use arson, bombs or vandalism, such as the Animal Liberation Front or Earth Liberation Front.

Researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

© 2005 The Washington Post Company

 

[hoodedgoon]

It might go away, maybe not. I saw his speech today and noted that Bush said he authorized the eavesdropping on Al Qaeda and the like - presumably in the U.S. or communicating with elements in the U.S. Frankly, with communications being as rapid as they are today, I can understand the need, on occassion, when the FISA is by-passed when a target suddenly lights up and may be gone well before the court can be consulted. That is, if we are truly talking about targets covered by the FISA (Under FISA, surveillance is generally permitted based on a finding of probable cause that the surveillance target is a foreign power or an agent of a foreign power - and Al Qaeda and agents of same are covered under the definition of foreign power).

There is the implication, however, that some of those eavesdropped upon were not Al Qaeda -- but maybe ordinary citizens, perhaps, checking them out to see if they <u>might</u> have some dubious connection. If it turns out that is the case, this may not (and should not) disappear so easily.

QueEx

People are sleeping on this. regarding the FISA court, it actually allows for the NSA to spy on people and then they can apply for a court order after the fact. the problem is this then congress would be notified for oversight. Bush is lying when is says the court is too slow. he's actually trying to avoid congressional oversight. but then again the pussies in congres cut off their nuts 6 years ago when he was GW was elected.

I know this shit happpens all the time, but the fact that GW thinks he can scrap with the constitution and then brag about concerns me. He is acting like he's come kind of monarch or something.

 

[Makkonnen]

On Dec. 6 Bush Asked New York Times to Not Run Story
President Bush went to great lengths to block the publication of the story. The New York Times had uncovered the secret program a year ago but withheld publication at the request of the White House. Newsweek is now reporting Bush then personally summoned the paper's publisher Arthur Sulzberger and executive editor Bill Keller to the Oval Office two weeks ago in an attempt to talk them out of running the story.

democracynow.org

 

[Fuckallyall]

I think there is something many of us are overlooking: you cannot ignore the 4th Amendment. Not the Prez, Not congress, Not the FISA court. If there is no warrant, there should be no seizure !!!

 

[Greed]

Roberts 'puzzled' by Rockefeller's concerns

Roberts 'puzzled' by Rockefeller's concerns
By Charles Hurt
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
December 21, 2005

The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence yesterday scathingly disputed claims by Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV that he harbored deep concerns about the Bush administration's warrantless domestic surveillance program when he was briefed on the matter.

Sen. Pat Roberts, Kansas Republican and chairman of the normally apolitical committee, said he was "puzzled" by a letter that Mr. Rockefeller, West Virginia Democrat and vice chairman of the committee, said he sent to Vice President Dick Cheney in 2003 after one such briefing.

"In his letter ... Senator Rockefeller asserts that he had lingering concerns about the program designed to protect the American people from another attack, but was prohibited from doing anything about it," Mr. Roberts said in a statement yesterday. "A United States Senator has significant tools with which to wield power and influence over the executive branch. Feigning helplessness is not one of those tools."

In his 2003 letter to Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rockefeller said the program raised "profound oversight issues" and he regretted that high security of the program prevented him from seeking advice on the matter. Mr. Rockefeller also told Mr. Cheney that he had made a handwritten copy of the letter, which he distributed to the press Monday.

If Mr. Rockefeller had these concerns, Mr. Roberts said, he could have raised them with him or other members of Congress who had been briefed on the program.

"I have no recollection of Senator Rockefeller objecting to the program at the many briefings he and I attended together," Mr. Roberts said. "In fact, it is my recollection that on many occasions Senator Rockefeller expressed to the vice president his vocal support for the program," most recently, "two weeks ago."

"The real question is whether the Administration lived up to its statutory requirement to fully inform Congress and allow for adequate oversight and debate," Mr. Rockefeller said. "The simple answer is no."

Mr. Roberts accused Mr. Rockefeller of political opportunism.

"Now, when it appears to be politically advantageous, Senator Rockefeller has chosen to release his two and a half year old letter," he said. "Forgive me if I find this to be ... a bit disingenuous."

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, announced that she wrote a letter, too, but couldn't provide it because, she said, it was classified.

"When I learned that the National Security Agency had been authorized to conduct the activities that President Bush referred to in his December 17 radio address, I expressed my strong concerns in a classified letter to the administration and later verbally," she said in a statement issued yesterday.

Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill agreed that hearings should be conducted into the matter, but disagreed over whether those hearings should be public or sealed to protect classified information.

http://washingtontimes.com/national/20051220-104540-2897r.htm

 

[QueEx]

Re: Roberts 'puzzled' by Rockefeller's concerns

<font size="6"><center>Spy Court Judge Quits In Protest</font size>
<font size="4">Jurist Concerned Bush Order Tainted Work of Secret Panel</font size></center>

By Carol D. Leonnig and Dafna Linzer
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, December 21, 2005; Page A01

A federal judge has resigned from the court that oversees government surveillance in intelligence cases in protest of President Bush's secret authorization of a domestic spying program, according to two sources.

U.S. District Judge James Robertson, one of 11 members of the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, sent a letter to Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. late Monday notifying him of his resignation without providing an explanation.

Two associates familiar with his decision said yesterday that Robertson privately expressed deep concern that the warrantless surveillance program authorized by the president in 2001 was legally questionable and may have tainted the FISA court's work.

Robertson, who was appointed to the federal bench in Washington by President Bill Clinton in 1994 and was later selected by then-Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist to serve on the FISA court, declined to comment when reached at his office late yesterday.

Word of Robertson's resignation came as two Senate Republicans joined the call for congressional investigations into the National Security Agency's warrantless interception of telephone calls and e-mails to overseas locations by U.S. citizens suspected of links to terrorist groups. They questioned the legality of the operation and the extent to which the White House kept Congress informed.

Sens. Chuck Hagel (Neb.) and Olympia J. Snowe (Maine) echoed concerns raised by Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, who has promised hearings in the new year.

Hagel and Snowe joined Democrats Dianne Feinstein (Calif.), Carl M. Levin (Mich.) and Ron Wyden (Ore.) in calling for a joint investigation by the Senate judiciary and intelligence panels into the classified program.

The hearings would occur at the start of a midterm election year during which the prosecution of the Iraq war could figure prominently in House and Senate races.

Not all Republicans agreed with the need for hearings and backed White House assertions that the program is a vital tool in the war against al Qaeda.

"I am personally comfortable with everything I know about it," Acting House Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-Mo.) said in a phone interview.

At the White House, spokesman Scott McClellan was asked to explain why Bush last year said, "Any time you hear the United States government talking about wiretap, it requires -- a wiretap requires a court order. Nothing has changed, by the way. When we're talking about chasing down terrorists, we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." McClellan said the quote referred only to the USA Patriot Act.

Revelation of the program last week by the New York Times also spurred considerable debate among federal judges, including some who serve on the secret FISA court. For more than a quarter-century, that court had been seen as the only body that could legally authorize secret surveillance of espionage and terrorism suspects, and only when the Justice Department could show probable cause that its targets were foreign governments or their agents.

Robertson indicated privately to colleagues in recent conversations that he was concerned that information gained from warrantless NSA surveillance could have then been used to obtain FISA warrants. FISA court Presiding Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who had been briefed on the spying program by the administration, raised the same concern in 2004 and insisted that the Justice Department certify in writing that it was not occurring.

"They just don't know if the product of wiretaps were used for FISA warrants -- to kind of cleanse the information," said one source, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the FISA warrants. "What I've heard some of the judges say is they feel they've participated in a Potemkin court."

Robertson is considered a liberal judge who has often ruled against the Bush administration's assertions of broad powers in the terrorism fight, most notably in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld . Robertson held in that case that the Pentagon's military commissions for prosecuting terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, were illegal and stacked against the detainees.

Some FISA judges said they were saddened by the news of Robertson's resignation and want to hear more about the president's program.

"I guess that's a decision he's made and I respect him," said Judge George P. Kazen, another FISA judge. "But it's just too quick for me to say I've got it all figured out."

Bush said Monday that the White House briefed Congress more than a dozen times. But those briefings were conducted with only a handful of lawmakers who were sworn to secrecy and prevented from discussing the matter with anyone or from seeking outside legal opinions.

Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) revealed Monday that he had written to Vice President Cheney the day he was first briefed on the program in July 2003, raising serious concerns about the surveillance effort. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she also expressed concerns in a letter to Cheney, which she did not make public.

The chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Pat Roberts (R-Kan.), issued a public rebuke of Rockefeller for making his letter public.

In response to a question about the letter, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) suggested that Rockefeller should have done more if he was seriously concerned. "If I thought someone was breaking the law, I don't care if it was classified or unclassified, I would stand up and say 'the law's being broken here.' "

But Rockefeller said the secrecy surrounding the briefings left him with no other choice. "I made my concerns known to the vice president and to others who were briefed," Rockefeller said. "The White House never addressed my concerns."

Staff writers Jonathan Weisman and Charles Babington and researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy...5122000685.html?referrer=email&referrer=email

 

[Greed]

President had legal authority to OK taps

President had legal authority to OK taps
By John Schmidt
Published December 21, 2005

President Bush's post- Sept. 11, 2001, authorization to the National Security Agency to carry out electronic surveillance into private phone calls and e-mails is consistent with court decisions and with the positions of the Justice Department under prior presidents.

The president authorized the NSA program in response to the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America. An identifiable group, Al Qaeda, was responsible and believed to be planning future attacks in the United States. Electronic surveillance of communications to or from those who might plausibly be members of or in contact with Al Qaeda was probably the only means of obtaining information about what its members were planning next. No one except the president and the few officials with access to the NSA program can know how valuable such surveillance has been in protecting the nation.

In the Supreme Court's 1972 Keith decision holding that the president does not have inherent authority to order wiretapping without warrants to combat domestic threats, the court said explicitly that it was not questioning the president's authority to take such action in response to threats from abroad.

Four federal courts of appeal subsequently faced the issue squarely and held that the president has inherent authority to authorize wiretapping for foreign intelligence purposes without judicial warrant.

In the most recent judicial statement on the issue, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, composed of three federal appellate court judges, said in 2002 that "All the ... courts to have decided the issue held that the president did have inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches to obtain foreign intelligence ... We take for granted that the president does have that authority."

The passage of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in 1978 did not alter the constitutional situation. That law created the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that can authorize surveillance directed at an "agent of a foreign power," which includes a foreign terrorist group. Thus, Congress put its weight behind the constitutionality of such surveillance in compliance with the law's procedures.

But as the 2002 Court of Review noted, if the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches, "FISA could not encroach on the president's constitutional power."

Every president since FISA's passage has asserted that he retained inherent power to go beyond the act's terms. Under President Clinton, deputy Atty. Gen. Jamie Gorelick testified that "the Department of Justice believes, and the case law supports, that the president has inherent authority to conduct warrantless physical searches for foreign intelligence purposes."

FISA contains a provision making it illegal to "engage in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute." The term "electronic surveillance" is defined to exclude interception outside the U.S., as done by the NSA, unless there is interception of a communication "sent by or intended to be received by a particular, known United States person" (a U.S. citizen or permanent resident) and the communication is intercepted by "intentionally targeting that United States person." The cryptic descriptions of the NSA program leave unclear whether it involves targeting of identified U.S. citizens. If the surveillance is based upon other kinds of evidence, it would fall outside what a FISA court could authorize and also outside the act's prohibition on electronic surveillance.

The administration has offered the further defense that FISA's reference to surveillance "authorized by statute" is satisfied by congressional passage of the post-Sept. 11 resolution giving the president authority to "use all necessary and appropriate force" to prevent those responsible for Sept. 11 from carrying out further attacks. The administration argues that obtaining intelligence is a necessary and expected component of any military or other use of force to prevent enemy action.

But even if the NSA activity is "electronic surveillance" and the Sept. 11 resolution is not "statutory authorization" within the meaning of FISA, the act still cannot, in the words of the 2002 Court of Review decision, "encroach upon the president's constitutional power."

FISA does not anticipate a post-Sept. 11 situation. What was needed after Sept. 11, according to the president, was surveillance beyond what could be authorized under that kind of individualized case-by-case judgment. It is hard to imagine the Supreme Court second-guessing that presidential judgment.

Should we be afraid of this inherent presidential power? Of course. If surveillance is used only for the purpose of preventing another Sept. 11 type of attack or a similar threat, the harm of interfering with the privacy of people in this country is minimal and the benefit is immense. The danger is that surveillance will not be used solely for that narrow and extraordinary purpose.

But we cannot eliminate the need for extraordinary action in the kind of unforeseen circumstances presented by Sept.11. I do not believe the Constitution allows Congress to take away from the president the inherent authority to act in response to a foreign attack. That inherent power is reason to be careful about who we elect as president, but it is authority we have needed in the past and, in the light of history, could well need again.

----------

John Schmidt served under President Clinton from 1994 to 1997 as the associate attorney general of the United States. He is now a partner in the Chicago-based law firm of Mayer, Brown, Rowe & Maw.

http://www.chicagotribune.com/technology/chi-0512210142dec21,1,2062394.story?coll=chi-technology-hed

 

[Makkonnen]

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

funny how everyone is acting surprised and shocked that the president can issue secret executive orders that undermine other branches of government or federal laws etc - shit has been going on for years and any politician or journalist in DC knows it

 

[Greed]

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

thats not the point, the point is why are the dems being so blantantly disingenuous and why didnt the new york times do the obvious research on their own stories from the 90's to give its readers a proper context to take all this in.

or why did the new york times already know the proper context and make a conscience decision to not convey it to their readers.

what public good was the new york times pursuing when they wrote a story implying that the world started jan 20, 2001.

and if this is something that over the last 30 years, the executive, the legislative, and the judicial branches has all agreed is within the presidents power to detect foreign threats then what purpose was served to allow operational details to be exposed.

i know we're all supposed to hate bush but i'm tired of these national security secrets being exposed for gratuitous and purely political reasons.

 

[Makkonnen]

Re: President had legal authority to OK taps

how could they not know the proper context? they gave him a pass last year and now after the judith miller bullshit and when bush is at a weak point with the patriot act they hit him in the nuts with publishing this old shit

it seems like they are just trying to distance themselves from being the non-objective assholes they really are

the dems are faggots with no backbones even still - they havent done shit without a repub coming out and cosigning their stance on an issue before they even give their stance

some repub -"that's wrong"
all the dems - "yeah that's wrong. Do you like us better now? see we are fighting back!"

 

[Greed]

Courts unlikely to hear wiretap cases, legal scholars say

Courts unlikely to hear wiretap cases, legal scholars say
By Richard Willing, USA TODAY
Thu Dec 22, 7:22 AM ET

Are warrantless wiretaps of domestic targets suspected of terrorist activity legal if the surveillance is approved by the president?

That question, raised by the disclosure of a secret National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of terrorism suspects in the USA, is unlikely to be answered in a court of law, according to lawyers, legal scholars and security specialists.

The reason: The surveillance is so secret that its targets are unlikely to know they were wiretapped and thus are unlikely to raise a court challenge. That leaves the legal underpinnings of the program to be debated in Senate hearings expected to begin in early 2006.

Program circumvents 1978 law

"It looks like most of the accountability is going to have to come in the court of public opinion," says Carl Tobias, constitutional law specialist at the University of Richmond law school in Virginia.

On Friday, The New York Times reported that President Bush had signed an executive order authorizing the NSA to monitor phone calls and e-mails of citizens, legal residents and foreigners for signs of terrorist activity. The order, signed months after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, requires one party to the communication to be outside the USA.

The program, which the Times said targeted "hundreds, perhaps thousands" of people in the USA, circumvented a 1978 law that permits anti-terrorist surveillance in the USA with permission from a special federal court.

The NSA has satellites and other equipment able to tap and store vast amounts of information from telephone calls, e-mails and satellite transmissions around the globe. Bush and other administration officials later confirmed the existence of the surveillance operation.

On Monday, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said the Constitution and a Sept. 14, 2001, congressional resolution allowed Bush to authorize the surveillance. In some cases, Gonzales said, seeking warrants would take too much time and would allow suspects to elude eavesdroppers.

Barry Steinhardt, privacy law specialist with the American Civil Liberties Union in New York City, says he and his colleagues have been "trying to work through" a way to challenge what he called a "policy that makes no sense."

"So far, nothing has come to mind," Steinhardt says.

Any criminal charges based on the warrantless searches could prompt a legal challenge. But Richard Sauber, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who defended an American convicted in 1999 of conspiring to spy for East Germany, says such charges are "highly unlikely."

The federal government, Sauber says, would be reluctant to reveal details of the program by making warrantless surveillance the basis for charges.

Senator to make issue 'high priority'

No criminal cases are known to have resulted from the warrantless wiretaps. Iyman Faris, an Ohio trucker and naturalized citizen who pleaded guilty in 2003 to supporting al-Qaeda, was said in the Times story to have been caught with the aid of warrantless surveillance. But Faris' lawyer, David Smith, says federal prosecutors have not acknowledged that.

An eavesdropping target could file a civil suit seeking damages — if he knew he was a target. But finding someone who qualifies, says Fordham University law professor Thomas Lee, is a "shot in the dark."

Which makes the Senate Judiciary Committee the venue in which the legal underpinnings of the policy are likely to be thrashed out. Sen. Arlen Specter (news, bio, voting record), R-Pa., the committee's chairman, has promised to make the issues the program raises a "very, very high priority" when hearings are held.

Some specialists in surveillance law think the administration's defense of its program rests on a shaky foundation.

Steinhardt notes that that law permits authorities to tap without a warrant if seeking one would take too much time. In that case, the warrant can be sought up to 72 hours later.

"There's a naked assertion here that the president can do anything he wants, including violating U.S. law domestically," Steinhardt says. "That's an argument not even a second-year law student would make up on an exam."

Douglas Kmiec, an attorney in the Justice Department under Presidents Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and now a law professor at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif., notes that the Supreme Court has not ruled out warrantless searches in anti-terrorist cases.

The 1978 law creating a secret warrant process for tapping calls in spying cases within the USA contains an exception in special circumstances.

"To say the president is acting legally or illegally oversimplifies matters," Kmiec says..

President Bush, Kmiec says, appears to be making " a good faith argument ... to comply with the law as written but not disregarding his obligation to protect American citizens."

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/courtsunlikelytohearwiretapcaseslegalscholarssay