Word: eavesdrop
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TIME reported on the controversy�over President George W. Bush's secret directive to allow the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on phone conversations in the U.S. without a court-ordered warrant [Jan. 9]. Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. Those who are up in arms about the secret spying on people with known links to al-Qaeda would be the first to blame the President for not preventing another attack. I am not an apologist for Bush, but he did get this one right. Terrorists need to know they can't use our eavesdropping laws against us. The President...
...Bush Administration seems apoplectic over the revelations in November about the CIA's secret network of terrorist-interrogation prisons and the disclosure in the New York Times last month that the President authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on the phone calls of some Americans without a warrant. The latter report was also in State of War, a book by Times reporter James Risen, who drew scathing condemnation from CIA spokeswoman Jennifer Millerwise Dyck last week. She charged that Risen "demonstrates an unfathomable and sad disregard for U.S. national security and those who take life-threatening risks...
...operate before they acted, how would we know where to find them? It didn't take long before an aggressive idea emerged from the circle of Administration hawks. Liberalize the rules for domestic spying, they urged. Free the National Security Agency (NSA) to use its powerful listening technology to eavesdrop on terrorist suspects on U.S. soil without having to seek a warrant for every phone number it tracked. But because of a 1978 law that forbids the NSA to conduct no-warrant surveillance inside the U.S., the new policy would require one of two steps. The first was to revise...
...George Bush tried the first. When that failed, he opted for the second. In 2002 he issued a secret Executive Order to allow the NSA to eavesdrop without a warrant on phone conversations, e-mail and other electronic communications, even when at least one party to the exchange was in the U.S.--the circumstance that would ordinarily trigger the warrant requirement. For four years, Bush's decision remained a closely guarded secret. Because the NSA program was so sensitive, Administration officials tell TIME, the "lawyers' group," an organization of fewer than half a dozen government attorneys the National Security Council...
...created the FISA court, an 11-member secret panel whose job it is to hear the NSA requests and issue--or deny--the warrants. In the event that the NSA comes upon a situation that seems to require immediate action, the law permits the agency to eavesdrop without a warrant so long as it applies for one within 72 hours...