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Bush Ordered Spying Without Court Order
Posted by Kevin

This Times article is very long, but worth reading in its entirety:

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 represents 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

Bush has argued against banning torture. He has argued for holding US citizens for an unlimited time without charge or access to a court. The pentagon has kept a database of its surveillance of peaceful protestors. And now we know that he secretly ordered the NSA to spy on people in the US without oversight, permission, or any standard of just cause. Bush took and oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America. He has broken that oath time and time again. He is a disgrace to the office.

This is how people lose their freedoms; a little bit at a time, in the dark, when men who have no respect for laws or decency shape policy in secret.

December 16th, 2005 Politics, Legal Issues, Privacy, Terrorism | 9 comments