Word: nsa
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...Bush's aggressive stance came on the same day that Gen. Michael Hayden, deputy director of the new national intelligence agency and former head of the NSA, defended the controversial electronic monitoring as a perfectly legal tool in the war on terror-and one that he even suggested might have helped avert the attacks of 9/11 if it had been in place then. Both speeches come on the heels of a speech Friday by White House deputy chief of staff Karl Rove, who signaled that Republicans will use the war on terror in the midterm elections...
...Bush put it, because ?the most solemn duty of government, is to protect our people from harm.? Protecting at all costs against the next attack is what leads to the Patriot Act, and debates over what counts as torture, and over the proper bounds of domestic spying by the NSA, and all the other constraints on civil liberties that have people itching about the costs of this fight...
...burn marks, he suggests, from an earlier excess of scruple. ?At one point in time the government got accused of not connecting the dots.? He recalled the debates over intelligence failures after 9/11. ?And all of a sudden, we start connecting the dots through the Patriot Act and the NSA decision, and we're being criticized...
...Bush Administration seems apoplectic over the revelations in November about the CIA's secret network of terrorist-interrogation prisons and the disclosure in the New York Times last month that the President authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on the phone calls of some Americans without a warrant. The latter report was also in State of War, a book by Times reporter James Risen, who drew scathing condemnation from CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck last week. She charged that Risen "demonstrates an unfathomable and sad disregard for U.S. national security and those who take life-threatening risks...
Meanwhile, there are efforts within the government to identify leakers. The Justice Department is investigating who gave away the NSA secrets. While such probes rarely succeed, the department's new willingness to subpoen a reporters and their records could change that. And the CIA has a group of mostly retired officers on contract to read news stories that contain classified material and try to uncover their sources. This may be the toughest spook work. Over the years, the unit, nicknamed "the leak chasers" by some agency hands, has been able to finger only a few talkers...