Posted on 12/15/2005 5:27:25 PM PST by West Coast Conservative
Months after the Sept. 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the United States to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency has monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the United States without warrants over the past three years in an effort to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to Al Qaeda, the officials said. The agency, they said, still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications.
The previously undisclosed decision to permit some eavesdropping inside the country without court approval represents a major shift in American intelligence-gathering practices, particularly for the National Security Agency, whose mission is to spy on communications abroad. As a result, some officials familiar with the continuing operation have questioned whether the surveillance has stretched, if not crossed, constitutional limits on legal searches.
"This is really a sea change," said a former senior official who specializes in national security law. "It's almost a mainstay of this country that the N.S.A. only does foreign searches."
Nearly a dozen current and former officials, who were granted anonymity because of the classified nature of the program, discussed it with reporters for The New York Times because of their concerns about the operation's legality and oversight.
According to those officials and others, reservations about aspects of the program have also been expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
When I enlisted in the Air Force in the late seventies with
a "Top Secret Clearance", we were told that the NSA could
be watching us in the United States. If they were watching
me and my mates in the US they would have to be watching
who we might be interacting with.
"You say we ought not be afraid of Islamist totalitarianism? "
That's correct. I'm not saying to ignore it. I'm saying don't be afraid of it.
I always understood that the NSA spied on communications
that may affect National Security.
It seems to me that if Bush signed this Executive Order, there should be a record of it.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/orders/
I haven't found it yet, but I am still looking.
Treason by any other name....
You are on double secret probation.
"http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/orders/
I haven't found it yet, but I am still looking."
In the meanwhile, know that I find your handle hilarious!
ping
Well, did he break the law? A guy who identified himself as a former NSA person said that the NSA hahd had that authority since 1946. All Bush did was to allow them to exercise their legal authority.
I guess if it is a secret order, I won't find it there. Maybe they are watching as I type this....good thing I got dressed today.
One AF Vet to another, you have it a little off.
They don't want us to throw our freedom away. They want
us to change into them. They want us to shout "Allah Akbar"
while facing Mecca with our behinds in the air.
At that point the only freedom I'll still need is the Second
Amendment and my own individual life to use as I see fit.
"You'd just trash the whole Constitution if a Republican hack told you to wouldn't you?"
No, I wouldn't, but if there were valid reasons for some
actions, not usually acceptable in peacetime, if it meant
the survival of our nation, I would.
The democrats are prepared to hand us to our enemies and
it's quite evident by their actions, that a return to power is more important than any other concern.
Perhaps you hadn't noticed that there is a war on?
Perhaps you would have prefered, "They should be hung, after a fair and impartial trial of their peers."?
That's ok, I'm down with that, but no sniveling and no
appeal after appeal till 20 years goes by.
Perhaps you think all this is somehow magically going away?
I'm not going for that,"It's all one party, they are all the same" nonsense, if you can't tell the difference you
have no business voting.
"You're telling me that terrorists can decide to do away with the Constitution, and with our freedoms?"
Your post is so wrong, so misguided on so many points, that I won't spend too much time with you other than to say that yes, terrorists and other enemies both inside and outside our country do influence the freedom we enjoy here. If we allow them to use our liberties against us, if we allow them to hide behind technicalities, then our freedoms will never last. Our enemies will have the last word.
In fact, I'm quite suspicious about your level of education. Mine is pretty good. Good enough to have been taught that in every war we fought up through WWII we have had to temporarily suspend a small portion of our liberty in exchange for our own national survival. After each of those wars we came back freer than before.
I'm quite sure I understand and appreciate our system of government far better than you do. I know that if we don't act to protect it from totalitarian threats, one day I'll see a lot of people like you *really* screaming about your loss of freedom; not in the paranoic fashion you are now, but with real screams of fear.
I guess you don't know how to read or think about what you read. "Temporary liberty" is what you'll have if you keep working to prevent our society from protecting itself from those who seek to remove all traces of freedom.
It's the paranoic "libertarians" who are working to ensure that our freedoms are temporary.
"The only way we could be defeated by Islamic totalitarianism (and btw, I'm glad to see that you understand that Islamic radicals fear us because of our freedoms, because freedom and Islamic governments seem to be mutually exclusive), is if we elect them to power. They have no power otherwise."
That sentence contains some of the most naive pablum I've ever read on FR. You think like a liberal. How about if a terrorist group sets off a nuke or two in a couple of our major cities? What if portions of Europe or even Canada fall to the facists?
Replace "Islamists" with "Nazis" in your ill-though sentence above and see how much sense it makes. You know we had some limits on our freedoms during WWII--censorship, intercepted mail, etc.-- sacrifices that were needed to win the war. We need the same protections now so that your daughters' daughters won't be forced to live as slaves in blacked out basements.
"That's correct. I'm not saying to ignore it. I'm saying don't be afraid of it."
I wouldn't fear it either if I didn't see so much surrender and capitulation among my own countrymen. If we had allowed our hands to be tied in WWII the way you'd have them tied now, there might have been a very different outcome.
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