Word: nsa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...FISA court first for a warrant, especially when the court has rarely stood in the way of any warrant request? According to the Justice Department, from 1979 to 2004 the court approved 18,724 wiretaps and denied only three, all in 2003. (Despite the 2002 presidential order allowing the NSA to work without a warrant when it chooses to, the agency has continued in many cases to apply for them. Last year it sought 1,754.) But the court has been subjecting the applications to closer examination. It made what the Justice Department calls "substantive modifications" to 94 of last...
...explanation for the NSA's reluctance to seek court approval may be that wiretaps of individual conversations are just one part of what the spy agency can do. It also has the technology to perform data mining, combing by computer through billions of phone calls and Internet messages and looking for patterns that may point to terrorist activity. That requires sifting through a mountain of individual communications to find the one that might lead to something. Under FISA, the NSA would have to obtain a warrant for each suspect phone number. Authorities argue that the FISA process is too slow...
...couple of us expressed our concerns," Daschle says. "But the information we were given was more technical and less substantive. We were told we were being informed and not consulted." Within the intelligence community, officials knew that legal justifications for the spying were subject to challenge. At the NSA, says a former senior intelligence official, "there was apprehension, uncertainty in the minds of many about whether or not the President did have that constitutional or statutory authority...
...press conference last month after the NSA program came to light, Gonzales cited last year's Supreme Court ruling in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld as another implicit sanction of the presidential power to okay wiretaps. In that decision, the Justices upheld the detention, without charges, of U.S. citizen Yaser Esam Hamdi, whose designation as an enemy combatant was challenged by his lawyers. The court ruled that his detention was lawful because the "necessary force" provisions of the Sept. 14 resolution gave the President the power to engage in all "fundamental incidents" of war. "Even though signals intelligence is not mentioned...
...squandered his credibility in the federal courts," says Eugene Fidell, a Washington lawyer who heads the National Institute of Military Justice. "The judges are in as grumpy a mood as I can remember." There will be more trouble to come. Government officials have been telling reporters that the disputed NSA wiretaps played a part in building the case that led to guilty pleas by two plotters: Iyman Faris, an Ohio truck driver who admitted checking out means of destroying the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mohammed Junaid Babar, a New York City man who acknowledged smuggling money and supplies...