Word: nsa
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Many politicians and legal scholars have questioned the legality of the warrantless domestic spying program run by the National Security Agency (NSA), asserting that it may violate the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which places strict limits on domestic eavesdropping without a warrant...
...NSA had been intercepting telephone calls and e-mails between Americans and al Qaeda operatives under a 2002 executive order, The New York Times reported...
...Times quoted officials as saying that “the NSA eavesdrops without warrants on up to 500 people in the United States at any given time,” compared to 5,000 to 7,000 overseas...
...Ironically, even as the NSA was launching its warrantless wiretap program in 2002, the Justice Department was rejecting a Republican senator's efforts to make it easier for the NSA to spy legally on persons in the U.S. In the summer of 2002, Ohio Republican Sen. Mike DeWine introduced a bill to lower the level of proof the Justice Department and spy agencies would need to get a FISA warrant to wiretap foreigners, or non-U.S. citizens, who were in the United States. For these "non-U.S. persons" only, the threshold would drop from "probable cause" to "reasonable...
...case, Justice officials claim that the secret NSA program has always used the "probable cause" standard even when a FISA warrant hadn't been obtained. But that explanation doesn't hold water with some legal experts. Last week, General Hayden himself admitted that in cases where the NSA does not first go to the courts, "the trigger is quicker and a bit softer than it is for a FISA warrant." Putting it more bluntly, Philip B. Heymann, a former Clinton Administration deputy attorney general, says, "The only reason they are doing warrantless searches is because they want to do them...