The hydra that is the Bush administration’s collection of domestic surveillance programs has apparently sprouted another illegal and horrific head. According to Scott Shane and Eric Lichtblau’s report in this morning’s New York Times, two unidentified senior intelligence officials assert Vice President Cheney and his top legal assistant, David Addington, argued that the National Security Agency (NSA) should “intercept purely domestic telephone calls and email messages without warrants.” Marginally cooler heads at the NSA legal department—probably with clear memories of the domestic intelligence scandals of the 1970s—argued that there were laws against doing that and that warrantless eavesdropping should take place only on communications that traversed the national boundary.
The Times account indicates:
“The NSA’s position ultimately prevailed. But just how Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the director of the agency at the time, designed the program, persuaded wary NSA officers to accept it, and sold the White House on its limits is not yet clear.”
Cheney, when asked for comment, told the Times through a spokeswoman, “As the administration, including the vice president, has said, this is terrorist surveillance, not domestic surveillance. The vice president has explained this wartime measure is limited in scope and conducted in a lawful way that safeguards our civil liberties.”
Both the scope and the legality of this program remain to be determined. As Shane and Lichtblau rightly point out, “For the first time since 1978, when the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was passed and began requiring court approval for all eavesdropping on United States soil, the NSA is intentionally listening in on Americans’ calls without warrants.”
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