[Infowarrior] - Officials Urge Law to Allow Eavesdropping

[Richard Forno]

Officials Urge Law to Allow Eavesdropping
Foreign Calls Routed Through U.S. at Issue
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/25/AR2006072500
992_pf.html

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, July 27, 2006; A02

Senior Justice Department and intelligence officials urged Congress
yesterday to approve new laws to accommodate the government's controversial
warrantless eavesdropping program.

Arguing that the 1978 law governing surveillance of terrorists is out of
step with current technology, the officials, appearing before the Senate
Judiciary Committee, said they previously had not sought new legislation to
avoid disclosing a key part of the operation. That is the ability to
intercept foreign phone calls and e-mails no matter what their destination
as they pass through telecommunications facilities inside the United States,
said Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, director of the National Security Agency.

But in the wake of media disclosures about the spying, that is no longer the
case. "What's happened in the last seven months is that much of this program
has already been put out into the public domain," said CIA Director Michael
V. Hayden. "That inoculates some of the discussion we're having today
against some of the downside."

President Bush launched the program shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001,
attacks, allowing eavesdropping without court warrants on phone calls and
e-mails between the United States and locations overseas if one party was
suspected of links to terrorists. As part of a proposed deal with Bush to
submit the program to court review, the Senate Judiciary Committee is
considering changes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act
(FISA), which governs surveillance of suspected terrorists and spies.

What Alexander and Hayden described to the senators are vast facilities that
route foreign-to-foreign communications through the United States, where
they are readily accessible to the NSA. Alexander testified that because no
U.S. court order is needed to acquire communications of foreign intelligence
targets overseas, even when they call to the United States, "it ought not to
matter whether we do so from the United States or elsewhere."

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), a member of the Judiciary Committee and
the Select Committee on Intelligence who has been briefed on the NSA
program, said Alexander had "for the first time" told the Judiciary panel
about "foreign-to-foreign switching." She said based on what she had learned
in secret briefings about the number of U.S. citizens subject to wiretaps,
the surveillance program "is easily accommodatable to an individual warrant
for U.S. persons."

Alexander disagreed. "If you were in hot pursuit, with the number of
applications that you would have to make" for court warrants "and the times
to make those, you could never catch up to the target," he said.

Another witness at yesterday's hearing, Steven G. Bradbury, an acting
assistant attorney general, made it clear that legislation introduced by
Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter (R-Pa.) after negotiations with
the White House would "encourage" -- but not require -- Bush or a future
president to present any future surveillance program to the secret FISA
court for approval.

"It would be a very substantial change in FISA today by adding a new title
that would give the court jurisdiction to review such a program on a
program-wide basis," Bradbury said. "It is an important new tool that any
president would have going forward."

But Bradbury stressed that the president retained authority to institute
such a program on his own and that Bush's pledge to submit the program for
judicial review was only "if the chairman's legislation were enacted in its
current form or with the further amendments sought by the administration."

Bradbury also said Specter's proposal that civil litigation involving
companies cooperating in the surveillance program be transferred to the FISA
court was done "to ensure protection of sensitive national security
information and promote uniformity in the law."
© 2006 The Washington Post Company