Category Archive

Reuters: In the months following the September 11 attacks, the National Security Agency sent a torrent of names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses to the FBI that swamped the agency but led in virtually every case to dead ends or innocent Americans, The New York Times reported on Monday. FBI officials complained repeatedly to the secretive spy agency, which was … Read More

There’s an unwritten rule that ex-Presidents don’t criticize sitting Presidents.  Comity, or something like that. That doesn’t apply to Vice-Presidents (apparently). called on Congress and the public to resist what he called "a gross and excessive power grab" by the Bush administration amid the war on terrorism, declaring that "our Constitution is at risk." Gore said the use of the … Read More

Bloomberg News: Former President Clinton said Thursday that he never ordered wiretaps of American citizens without obtaining a court order, as President Bush has acknowledged he has done. Clinton, in an interview broadcast Thursday on the ABC News program ”Nightline,” said his administration either received court approval before authorizing a wiretap or went to court within three days after to … Read More

"The technical legal term for that, I believe, is poppycock." — Harvard law professor Laurence Tribe, in a letter to Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), on the Bush administration’s claim that the U.S. Constitution authorizes the domestic eavesdropping program.

The NSA wiretapping whistleblower (and presumptive subject of the DOJ investigation about the leak) has come forward.  Russell Tice has worked within the bowels of the NSA, and he has a lot to say: "I specialized in what’s called special access programs," Tice said of his job. "We called them ‘black world’ programs and operations." But now, Tice tells ABC … Read More

John Hindrocket of Powerline is a stanch defender of the Administration’s use of warrantless NSA wiretaps.  In this post, he writes an update: OK, JUST ONE MORE THING: We’ve been getting emails from liberals who seem to think that the 72-hour provision of FISA makes the problem of speed disappear. I did a separate post on that issue above, titled … Read More

A little more than a week ago, the right-wingers heralded the results of a poll that they claimed showed a majority of Americans supporting Bush’s illegal warrantless wiretapping policy. Here’s what that poll found: Sixty-four percent (64%) of Americans believe the National Security Agency (NSA) should be allowed to intercept telephone conversations between terrorism suspects in other countries and people … Read More

A Congressional Research Service report "concludes that the administration’s justification for warrantless eavesdropping authorized by President Bush conflicts with existing law and hinges on weak legal arguments," the Washington Post reports. The 44-page report said that Bush probably cannot claim the broad presidential powers he has relied upon as authority to order the secret monitoring of calls made by U.S. … Read More

Apparently, the controversy has forced the NSA to respond.  According to what the agency told CNN, nothing happened. A senior U.S. intelligence official told CNN on Thursday that the National Security Agency did not target CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour or any other CNN journalist for surveillance. The senior official said that from time to time NSA surveillance overseas … Read More

The Left Coaster has a handy compendium of the right-wing talking points regarding the illegal NSA wiretapping, and demonstrates why each is false.

Atrios asked a question several days ago, and Bush apologists still can’t answer it: No one has yet managed to explain how revealing that the administration illegally spies on American citizens without obtaining warrants, instead of legally spying on people after obtaining such warrants, damages national security. The only plausible answer is that the revelation clues in suspected terrorists that … Read More

Re: my posts here and here It looks like NBC is looking into whether or not there was eavvesdropping on the CNN journalist,  Yestreday, NBC released the following statement: "Unfortunately this transcript was released prematurely. It was a topic on which we had not completed our reporting, and it was not broadcast on ‘NBC Nightly News’ nor on any other … Read More

Early today, I posted about Andrea Mitchell’s interview with James Risen.  In that interview, Andrea Mitchell pointedly asked Risen if he knew anything about government wiretapping of CNN journalist Christiane Amanpour.  Risen said "no", but it caused me (among others) to wonder what prompted the question in the first place.  Was Andrea Mitchell aware of something that nobody else is? … Read More

UPDATE:  The story has gotten weirder since I first posted it. NBC’s Andrea Mitchell interviewed James Risen, the NYT writer who broke the NSA wiretapping story.  Here’s the key segment of their interview: Mitchell: Do you have any information about reporters being swept up in this net? Risen: No, I don’t. It’s not clear to me. That’s one of the … Read More