Wednesday 21 December 2005

Jurist concerned Bush order tainted work of secret panel.

    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."

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

    Go to Original

    Spying Program Snared US Calls
    By James Risen and Eric Lichtblau
    The New York Times

    Wednesday 21 December 2005

    Washington - A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.

    The officials say the National Security Agency's interception of a small number of communications between people within the United States was apparently accidental, and was caused by technical glitches at the National Security Agency in determining whether a communication was in fact "international."

    Telecommunications experts say the issue points up troubling logistical questions about the program. At a time when communications networks are increasingly globalized, it is sometimes difficult even for the N.S.A. to determine whether someone is inside or outside the United States when making a cellphone call or sending an e-mail message. As a result, people that the security agency may think are outside the United States are actually on American soil.

    Vice President Dick Cheney entered the debate over the legality of the program on Tuesday, casting the program as part of the administration's efforts to assert broader presidential powers.

    Eavesdropping on communications between two people who are both inside the United States is prohibited under Mr. Bush's order allowing some domestic surveillance.

    But in at least one instance, someone using an international cellphone was thought to be outside the United States when in fact both people in the conversation were in the country. Officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified, would not discuss the number of accidental intercepts, but the total is thought to represent a very small fraction of the total number of wiretaps that Mr. Bush has authorized without getting warrants. In all, officials say the program has been used to eavesdrop on as many as 500 people at any one time, with the total number of people reaching perhaps into the thousands in the last three years.

    Mr. Bush and his senior aides have emphasized since the disclosure of the program's existence last week that the president's executive order applied only to cases where one party on a call or e-mail message was outside the United States.

    Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former N.S.A. director who is now the second-ranking intelligence official in the country, was asked at a White House briefing this week whether there had been any "purely domestic" intercepts under the program.

    "The authorization given to N.S.A. by the president requires that one end of these communications has to be outside the United States," General Hayden answered. "I can assure you, by the physics of the intercept, by how we actually conduct our activities, that one end of these communications are always outside the United States."

    Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales also emphasized that the order only applied to international communications. "People are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors," he said. "Very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States."

    A spokeswoman for the office of national intelligence declined comment on whether the N.S.A. had intercepted any purely domestic communications. "We'll stand by what General Hayden said in his statement," said the spokeswoman, Judy Emmel.

    The Bush administration has not released the guidelines that the N.S.A. uses in determining who is suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and may be a target under the program. General Hayden said the determination was made by operational people at the agency and "must be signed off by a shift supervisor," with the process closely scrutinized by officials at the agency, the Justice Department and elsewhere.

    But questions about the legal and operational oversight of the program last year prompted the administration to suspend aspects of it temporarily and put in place tighter restrictions on the procedures used to focus on suspects, said people with knowledge of the program. The judge who oversees the secret court that authorizes intelligence warrants - and which has been largely bypassed by the program - also raised concerns about aspects of the program.

    The concerns led to a secret audit, which did not reveal any abuses in focusing on suspects or instances in which purely domestic communications were monitored, said officials familiar with the classified findings.

    General Hayden, at this week's briefing, would not discuss many technical aspects of the program and did not answer directly when asked whether the program was used to eavesdrop on people who should not have been. But he indicated that N.S.A. operational personnel sometimes decide to stop surveillance of a suspect when the eavesdropping has not produced relevant leads on terror cases.

    "We can't waste resources on targets that simply don't provide valuable information, and when we decide that is the case," the decision on whether a target is "worthwhile" is usually made in days or weeks, he said.

    National security and telecommunications experts said that even if the N.S.A. seeks to adhere closely to the rules that Mr. Bush has set, the logistics of the program may make it difficult to ensure that the rules are being followed.

    With roaming cellphones, internationally routed e-mail, and voice-over Internet technology, "it's often tough to find out where a call started and ended," said Robert Morris, a former senior scientist at the N.S.A. who is retired. "The N.S.A. is good at it, but it's difficult even for them. Where a call actually came from is often a mystery."

    Go to Original

    Can the Government Spy on Citizens without a Warrant?
    By Warren Richey
    The Christian Science Monitor

    Wednesday 21 December 2005

At issue: whether presidential power trumps a 1978 law requiring court oversight of domestic espionage.

    President Bush's decision to allow the super-secret National Security Agency to spy on Americans without court warrants has touched off stormy debate about his aggressive approach to the war on terror.

    This clash - between civil libertarians and the administration's expansive view of presidential power - is a recurring theme in the Bush White House. It lies at the center of ongoing debates over the government's use of coercive interrogation techniques and the open-ended detention of alleged enemy combatants at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and in military prisons in the United States.

    This week, the spotlight is on a recently disclosed classified operation that permits the NSA to monitor communications between suspected Al Qaeda members overseas and American citizens in the US. It is being done without first obtaining a warrant from a special intelligence court set up to police such sensitive intercepts.

    Instead of following the safeguards established by Congress under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), Bush administration lawyers concluded that the White House could sidestep the warrant requirements while conducting the espionage operation.

    Critics say the secret spying is illegal and an abuse of the president's constitutional authority. Supporters say Bush is well within his power to protect the nation from terrorists.

    Disclosure of the NSA operation by the New York Times last Friday surprised many members of Congress and is said to have complicated efforts to reauthorize the Patriot Act. Republican Sen. Arlen Specter, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, has called for hearings to look into the NSA operation. Supreme Court nominee Samuel Alito has been warned to prepare for close questioning on the matter in his upcoming confirmation hearing. And there is talk of the possible appointment of two special counsels, one to look into the legality of the NSA operation, the other to investigate the disclosure of the classified project to the Times.

    In addition, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D) of California has asked legal scholars to research whether Bush's authorization of secret spying is an impeachable offense.

    President Bush and other administration officials have sought to blunt the barrage of criticism by emphasizing the exigencies of protecting the nation from terrorists. They stress that despite the highly classified nature of the operation, the White House briefed key members of Congress about the ongoing covert effort.

    But some members of Congress say they were given few details and were unable to effectively exercise oversight responsibilities after being sworn to secrecy.

    Administration officials also notified the chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which is empowered to authorize warrants for such spying.

    One section of the foreign intelligence law, FISA, authorizes warrantless surveillance under limited circumstances - but it does not appear to apply to the NSA operation as described by administration officials. Neither President Bush nor Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is claiming the secret operation was conducted in compliance with FISA.

    Instead, they say the operation was carried out under President Bush's constitutional power as commander in chief, and under Congress's Joint Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was passed more than four years ago, shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

    The administration made the same argument before the US Supreme Court in the case of alleged enemy combatant Yaser Hamdi. The court declined to address the president's power as commander in chief. Instead, it based its June 2004 decision upholding Mr. Hamdi's military detention solely on the congressional authorization argument. But given the splintered posture of the high court in that case and the possible arrival of a second new justice, the potential outcome in any future case is less than clear.

    "It is a murky area," says Ruth Wedgwood, an international law professor at Johns Hopkins University.

    "It is an area in which Congress has legislated but, to be sure, they didn't anticipate Al Qaeda in 1978," she says. "It is also an area where obviously Americans have high expectations about their privacy."

    FISA was enacted to prevent domestic surveillance abuses that occurred during earlier administrations, including the Nixon White House.

    Should the debate make it into a courtroom, at issue will be whether FISA preempts the president from taking actions as commander in chief in the war on terror that ignore or violate the surveillance statute.

    "The president is simply off the rails," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which closely monitors surveillance issues. Mr. Rotenberg says Bush's reliance on the commander-in-chief powers "is probably overly broad and will be rejected."

    David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer and former Reagan and Bush I administration official, has a different perspective. "FISA was designed to deal with essentially peacetime counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations," he says. "We are now at war."

    He says Bush's secret NSA operation is "tantamount to trying to break Japanese military codes or intercept German communications during World War II." The FISA requirement of judicial oversight of secret intelligence operations would mandate a war-fighting role for judges that the Constitution does not authorize, Mr. Rivkin says. "Where is it written in the Constitution that the president is supposed to exercise his commander-in-chief power based upon what a judge says or doesn't say?"

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