 | al Guardian called it the 'Domestic Spying' program. They're forgetting something. See photo, right. |
Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Friday he will testify publicly at a Senate hearing on the Bush administration's domestic spying program, in the face of questions from lawmakers and legal analysts about whether it is lawful.
| Take some tylenol, Al, you're gonna need it. |
Gonzales said he reached an agreement with Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, to answer questions about the legal basis for the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping on telephone conversations between suspected terrorists and people in the United States. ``We believe the legal authorities are there,'' Gonzales said at a news conference at the Justice Department. ``The president acted consistent with his legal authority in a manner that he thought was necessary and appropriate to protect the country against this new kind of threat.''
 The attorney general said he will not discuss operational aspects of the program at the hearing, which is expected to occur next month. Specter said Sunday that he had asked Gonzales to testify publicly. The attorney general was White House counsel when Bush initiated the program, but he refused to say Friday what role he played in developing the legal case to support it. Gonzales previously has defended the program, saying last month that the NSA did not seek warrants from the secretive Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act court because ``we don't have the speed and the agility that we need in all circumstances to deal with this new kind of enemy.''
Without going into detail on the workings of it all, FISA is simply irrelevant to the mechanics of the data collection. The collection goes into a giant intelligence Hoover — bad guys, good guys, Aunt Harriet and Uncle Joe and Tiffany on her cell making a date with Brad. What comes out is specifically the stuff they're looking for — say a specific phone number. Nobody's interested in the rest; it's boring. If that number references another one, they can go back in and pull that one, too.
A "wiretap" brings to mind a guy sitting in a basement with headphones on, listening in on a specific line. This is more like collecting thousands of lines, maybe millions now, certainly more than even NSA could listen in on. |
|