Word: nsa
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...NSA intercepts are just one instance of the Bush Administration's effort to pursue the war on terrorism unhindered by some long-established legal norms. Most Americans agree that the government has to go after terrorists aggressively and with all appropriate means. Where they part company is on the question of what means are appropriate, at least if the goal is not only to deter another attack but also to protect both the freedom of Americans and the reputation of their country as one that takes ideas like decency and justice seriously. In the White House version of how that...
...George Bush tried the first. When that failed, he opted for the second. In 2002 he issued a secret Executive Order to allow the NSA to eavesdrop without a warrant on phone conversations, e-mail and other electronic communications, even when at least one party to the exchange was in the U.S.--the circumstance that would ordinarily trigger the warrant requirement. For four years, Bush's decision remained a closely guarded secret. Because the NSA program was so sensitive, Administration officials tell TIME, the "lawyers' group," an organization of fewer than half a dozen government attorneys the National Security Council...
This much you can count on: the fallout from exposure of the NSA surveillance program will be with us for months to come. Republican Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already announced his intention to start hearings this month to find out just what the NSA is up to and whether acting without warrants was really necessary. In addition, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are almost certain to make deeper inquiries. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is launching an investigation of its own, into how word of the secret program was leaked to the Times. Justice officials...
Because they required the President to plainly bypass an act of Congress, the no-warrant wiretaps may be the sharpest expression yet of the Administration's willingness to expand the scope of Executive power. When the NSA was established, in 1952, there were few legal limits on its power to spy within the U.S. Then came the intelligence-gathering abuses of the Nixon years, when the NSA as well as the FBI were used by the White House to spy on civil rights and anti-Vietnam War activists. In 1978 Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which required...
...White House insists that the NSA is looking into only the communications of people who have known links to al-Qaeda. A former senior intelligence official told TIME the program was used to develop a "spiderweb" of links between any person connected to al-Qaeda who communicated from abroad and someone in the U.S. That in turn would lead investigators to whomever the U.S.-based person might communicate with later. The people under surveillance, he says, "always had an established link to al-Qaeda people." Or, as Cheney said recently, "if you're calling Aunt Sadie in Paris...