U.S. citizens among targets of secret spying
Bush approved eavesdropping without usual court warrants
James Risen, Eric Lichtblau, New York Times

Friday, December 16, 2005


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Washington -- 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 U.S.
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 NSA 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 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 Sen. John Rockefeller, D-W.Va.,
who is the vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, and a
judge presiding over a secret court that oversees intelligence matters.
Some of the questions about the agency's new powers led the
administration to temporarily suspend the operation last year and
impose more restrictions, the officials said.

The Bush administration views the operation as necessary so the agency
can move quickly to monitor communications that may disclose threats to
this country, the officials said. Defenders of the program say it has
been a critical tool in helping disrupt terrorist plots and prevent
attacks inside the United States.

Administration officials are confident that existing safeguards are
sufficient to protect the privacy and civil liberties of Americans, the
officials say. In some cases, they said, the Justice Department
eventually seeks warrants if it wants to expand the eavesdropping to
include communications confined within the United States.

The officials said the administration had briefed congressional leaders
about the program and notified the judge in charge of the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Court, the secret Washington court that deals
with national security issues.

What the agency calls a "special collection program" began soon after
the Sept. 11 attacks, as it looked for new tools to attack terrorism.
The program accelerated in early 2002 after the CIA started capturing
top al Qaeda operatives overseas, including Abu Zubaydah, who was
arrested in Pakistan in March 2002. The CIA seized the terrorists'
computers, cell phones and personal phone directories, said the
officials familiar with the program. The NSA surveillance was intended
to exploit those numbers and addresses as quickly as possible, the
officials said.

In addition to eavesdropping on those numbers and reading e-mail
messages to and from the al Qaeda figures, the NSA began monitoring
others linked to them, creating an expanding chain. While most of the
numbers and addresses were overseas, hundreds were in the United
States, the officials said.

Under the agency's long-standing rules, the NSA can target for
interception phone calls or e-mail messages on foreign soil, even if
the recipients of those communications are in the United States.
Usually, though, the government can only target phones and e-mail
messages in this country by first obtaining a court order from the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which holds its closed
sessions at the Justice Department.

Since 2002, the agency has been conducting some warrantless
eavesdropping on people in the United States who are linked, even if
indirectly, to suspected terrorists through the chain of phone numbers
and e-mail addresses, according to several officials who know of the
operation. Under the special program, the agency monitors their
international communications, the officials said. The agency, for
example, can single out phone calls from someone in New York to someone
in Afghanistan.

Warrants are still required for eavesdropping on entirely
domestic-to-domestic communications, those officials say, meaning that
calls from that New Yorker to someone in California could not be
monitored without first going to the Federal Intelligence Surveillance
Court.

Several national security officials say the powers granted the NSA by
Bush go far beyond the expanded counterterrorism powers granted by
Congress under the Patriot Act, which is up for renewal. The House gave
approval Wednesday to a plan to reauthorize crucial parts of the law.
But final passage has been delayed under the threat of a Senate
filibuster because of concerns from both parties over possible
intrusions on Americans' civil liberties and privacy.