Word: warrant
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...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...
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...
...that's so, the program's critics ask, then why not just apply to the FISA court first for a warrant, especially when the court has rarely stood in the way of any warrant request? According to the Justice Department, from 1979 to 2004 the court approved 18,724 wiretaps and denied only three, all in 2003. (Despite the 2002 presidential order allowing the NSA to work without a warrant when it chooses to, the agency has continued in many cases to apply for them. Last year it sought 1,754.) But the court has been subjecting the applications...
...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 to cover a situation in which a known terrorist calls a number in the U.S. not already covered by a FISA warrant...
More broadly, the White House says Congress implicitly gave Bush the power to approve the no-warrant wiretaps in a resolution it passed on Sept. 14, 2001. That measure authorized the President to use "all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons" involved in the 9/11 attacks. Tom Daschle, then the Senate Democratic majority leader, says the Administration knows it did not have that implicit authority because White House officials had sought unsuccessfully to get congressional leaders to include explicit language approving no-warrant wiretaps in the resolution. Attorney General Gonzales says the Administration decided...