US intelligence eavesdrops on thousands of foreign telephone calls on lines that cross through US territory but monitors the calls of fewer than a hundred people in the United States, intelligence chief Mike McConnell has disclosed.
McConnell’s comments followed passage by the US Congress this month of a law allowing the intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless intercepts of calls between two foreign points. McConnell stressed in an interview with the El Paso Times that intelligence agencies must still obtain court warrants to monitor calls in which at least one of the parties is in the United States. “And so if a terrorist calls in and it’s another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that US person in this case,” he said. “So we would just get a warrant and do that. It’s a manageable thing. On the US persons side it’s 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it’s in the thousands.”
The Texas newspaper, which interviewed McConnell last week, posted a transcript on its website on Wednesday. McConnell led the administration’s campaign for passage of the new law, which encountered fierce resistance in Congress. He said he acted after a judge on a special court that oversees intelligence surveillance activities ruled that the intelligence agencies had to get warrants to intercept calls between foreign points if they were carried on a US wire. “The issue is volume and time,” McConnell said. He argued that it takes 200 man-hours to put together a request for a warrant on a single phone number, making it impractical to do for thousands of calls. |