[Infowarrior] - Opinion: NSA Defines "Above the Law"

[Richard Forno]

NSA Defines "Above the Law"

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/benchconference/2006/05/nsa_defines_above_the
_law.html

One day after the Justice Department's Office of Professional Responsiblity
gave up trying to investigate the National Security Agency's domestic spying
program, USA Today fronted a story about how the government is amassing
billions of phone call records made by tens of millions of Americans.

If there are appopriate checks and balances in place to ensure that the
program and its cousins are being run legally, they are not nearly as
apparent as they need to be.

The feds believe that creating and maintaining the massive data base --
without warrants issued to telephone customers or to the companies
themselves -- will help them track patterns in calling behavior by
terrorists within the United States. And they maintain that only the phone
records, and not the substance of the calls, are being monitored. The
sources in the USA Today story also note that there is some sort of
oversight -- by whom or what we do not know.

All we know is that last year, the White House denied that any such
warrantless intra-U.S. spying was going on at all. We know that this week,
the NSA basically told the Justice Department to buzz off when it tried to
undertake an investigation into the legality of the program (other
investigations still are ongoing). We know that means that even within the
executive branch of government, there is precious little oversight. And we
know that the Senate Judiciary Committee is still hemming and hawing about
pushing the Administration to better explain and justify these programs. If
this week's news doesn't jolt Congress into swifter action, what will?

Meanwhile, how about those telephone companies -- AT&T, BellSouth and
Verizon were the ones mentioned by USA Today -- that cooperate with the NSA
in its domestic spying? Think they have some explaining to do as to why they
have entered into contracts to provide the information? Think it's
interesting that Qwest has reportedly refused to go along with the program?
That tells me that there is no law that requires companies to provide such
material to the government without even the formality of a warrant. So, why
would those other companies so willingly give up their customers' privacy
rights?

The USA Today story merely confirms what most of us thought anyway. That the
domestic spy program is far more comprehensive and significant than we were
led to believe. Now, that doesn't mean it is necessarily wrong, or
undeniably illegal, it just means that an Administration that keeps telling
us to trust it keeps coming up with new way to foster distrust.