Word: nsa
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...killers like these 9/11 hijackers will be identified and located in time." G.O.P. strategists argue that Democrats have little leeway to attack on the issue because it could make them look weak on national security and because some of their leaders were briefed about the the National Security Agency (NSA) no-warrant surveillance before it became public knowledge. Some key Democrats even defend it. Says California's Jane Harman, ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee: "I believe the program is essential to U.S. national security and that its disclosure has damaged critical intelligence capabilities...
...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...