Word: nsa
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...panel's other members face than simply getting Justice to cough up documents. Exactly how should the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires the Justice Department to obtain a warrant from a special FISA court before wiretapping anyone in the U.S., be updated to give the NSA more flexibility in spying on suspected terrorists...
...reasons some lawmakers have stopped short of putting pen to paper, is that "they still don't know what Bush is actually doing with this program," says one Congressional expert in bill drafting. Only a few top members of Congress have been briefed on the highly classified NSA program, and some of them have complained that those briefings have been frustratingly short on details. Congressional staffers well versed in the ways of the NSA suspect the agency is doing more than simply listening in on foreign calls to this country; they believe there might be some broader data mining involved...
...terror, they argue, the President does not need to go to Congress for any new authority. "[This] is not a driftnet over Dearborn or Lackawanna or Freemont grabbing conversations" in a data mining exercise, says General Michael Hayden, the deputy director of national intelligence and former NSA chief. "This is targeted and focused. This is not about intercepting conversations between people in the United States. This is hot pursuit of communications entering or leaving America involving someone we believe is associated with al Qaeda." Bush also worries that if Congress steps in with legislation that gives legal cover...
...court authorization within 72 hours; that time frame could be lengthened. FISA could also be changed to give intelligence agencies the authority to quickly monitor many phone numbers at once or to allow the President, if he had reason to believe a terror attack was imminent, to order the NSA to sweep American airwaves for a short time without going to the court...
...White House officials knowledgeable about the FISA process and NSA's surveillance capability say the problem isn't simply the time it takes to obtain a warrant. If it were to be altered, FISA must be changed "for a different sort of coverage by NSA," explains one administration official. "FISA was very much focused on getting one particular guy," says this administration official. "It was very much like a wiretap in a criminal case. You go to court and you have probable cause to believe a person has committed a crime. So you go to FISA and get a wiretap...