Word: nsa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...although there have been protests from civil libertarians and some criticism on Capitol Hill, early indications suggest the revelation could actually give a political boost to a President who hasn't had many of those lately. The day after USA Today broke the story that the National Security Agency (NSA) aimed to "create a database of every call ever made" within the U.S., as one of the paper's sources put it, a Washington Post--ABC News poll found that 63% of those asked said they found the NSA program to be an acceptable way to fight terrorism...
...recent slide in the public's confidence in Bush, asking the public to trust him to balance the values of privacy and security could turn out to be a dicier proposition than it was in December, when the New York Times revealed that the President had authorized the supersecret NSA to conduct no-warrant wiretaps of hundreds and perhaps thousands of phone calls and e-mail messages between people inside the U.S. and parties overseas...
...Will the new revelations about the NSA tip the balance? Perhaps. According to the story, the NSA is not actually listening in on the phone calls but monitoring the patterns of calls in a kind of giant Google search, with the hope that their algorithm will detect something untoward and worth investigating. But even if your call to Aunt Sally isn't being listened to by some NSA officer, the program sounds creepy enough that no shortage of senators jumped all over it. The Republican Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, said he'd subpoena...
...anger of a conservative's conservative like Luttig wasn't enough, another development out of the Justice Department was nearly as stunning. On Wednesday, the Justice Department's point man on government accountability, H. Marshall Jarrett, wrote to Congress saying that he was shutting down his review of the NSA spying probe because his staff was denied access to the agency's files and personnel...
...review the bidding: Bush's Justice Department is blocked from investigating its own controversial spy program; a leading conservative jurist resigns, reportedly in part over the government's handling of civil liberties; and a big NSA program of eavesdropping on Americans' phone-calling patterns is revealed. Will this be enough to turn public opinion against Bush on civil liberties and terrorism? Given the collapse in public support for the President on so many issues, it wouldn't be surprising...