Starting right after the attacks on September 11th 2001, the Bush Administration ordered the NSA to secretly conduct surveillance on communications between Americans and folks in Afghanistan.
After the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration and senior American intelligence officials quickly decided that existing laws and regulations restricting the government's ability to monitor American communications were too rigid to permit quick and flexible access to international calls and e-mail traffic involving terrorism suspects. Bush administration officials also believed that the intelligence community, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the N.S.A., had been too risk-averse before the attacks and had missed opportunities to prevent them.
And what's the problem with that? None as far as I can tell. Seems prudent to me given that the President is charged with protecting the American people and all. And in the aftermath of these attacks, who precisely would US citizens be calling in Afghanistan, hmmmm? Few if any outside the Taliban and al Qaida had access to phones. I know I didn't call anyone in Afghanistan, did you?
But, it seems, it didn't stop there.
...after the United States-led invasion of Afghanistan succeeded in overthrowing the Taliban government in late 2001, Al Qaeda lost its sanctuary, and Osama bin Laden and other Qaeda leaders scattered to Pakistan, Iran and other countries. As counterterrorism operations grew, the Bush administration wanted the security agency secretly to expand its surveillance as well.
Good call there too.
I'm sorry, but I do not feel violated as an American citizen that I may have been spied on had I called someone in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Yemen, or Syria. I also don't know of any constitutional protection that has been violated. As professor Reynolds points out
It's also worth noting that there are two distinct issues here: Whether the wiretapping (or other interception) was legal, and whether the leak was legal. The leak almost certainly violated the law. The wiretapping is not so clear: Most people fail to appreciate how limited their protection against government surveillance is, both under statutes and under constitutional law. And that's doubly so where international communications are concerned. (And, except for the small possibility of a constitutional-tort action, the main remedy for unconstitutional surveillance can be found in the exclusionary rule, which only comes into play if someone is prosecuted and the government tries to introduce the surveillance into evidence -- meaning that, as with the exclusionary rule in general, the remedy is worthless if you're never charged with anything, say because you're innocent.) Nor is this a phenomenon that can be blamed on the Patriot Act or the Bush Administration, particularly -- the protections are just quite limited indeed, and prone to technical parsing on such questions as whether the communications were "stored," even momentarily, en route.
Some may find this offensive, but I look at it like this; the Supreme Court has ruled in the past that in order to violate the 4th Amendment one must have an expectation of privacy. Now if you're in a public place, for instance, and you have a conversation with someone, and someone else eavesdrops on that conversation, this is not a violation of the 4th Amendment. You were talking in a public place for gods sake, you can be overheard. Similarly, the Internet is not a private place. As most employers will instruct you, your emails can be intercepted so be careful what you write. I myself never consider the Internet a secure and private communications medium. With regards to phone calls, they are all transmitted in the air via microwaves and as such can be intercepted by anyone. As a result, I never consider talking on the telephone secure. Now it is true that law enforcement needs to get a warrant to tap people's phones in the US. But this is not true of international calls. And if the government is monitoring the international phones calls of a terrorist and there's someone from the US on the line, are they going to overlook that information?
I sure as hell hope not.
Yet
Democrats saw the issue differently. "Our government must follow the laws and respect the Constitution while it protects Americans' security and liberty," said Senator Patrick Leahy of Vermont, the ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee and the Senate's leading critic of the Patriot Act.
Well I personally would like Senator Leahy to simply cite for us the law that was violated.
And, given that the oversight functions of Congress were not abridged, I have to believe that at the very least Republican and Democrat members of the Intelligence Committees all were informed of what was going on.
In a statement, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, said she was advised of the president's decision shortly after he made it and had "been provided with updates on several occasions."
And then there are questions about the timing of the release of this information
Times reporter James Risen, who wrote the [initial] story [about the NSA operations], has a book, "State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration," coming out in the next few weeks, Cornyn said.
"I think it's a crying shame ... that we find that America's safety is endangered by the potential expiration of the Patriot Act in part because a newspaper has seen fit to release on the night before the vote on the floor on the reauthorization of the Patriot Act as part of a marketing campaign for selling a book," [Sen. John] Cornyn said.
Combine this with the leak about the CIAs "prisons" and it sure seems that the CIA and/or the Congressional delegation privy to such secrets are leaking like a sieve.
And in his radio address yesterday, the President was clearly pissed
"our enemies have learned information they should not have, and the unauthorized disclosure of this effort damages our national security and puts our citizens at risk."
"Revealing classified information is illegal, alerts our enemies, and endangers our country,"
Only vigorous prosecutions will stop this leaking of information. And given the zeal with which the press pursued the Plame affair, would expect them to doggedly pursue the leakers in these cases.
Oh yeah, they already know who they are....
