America... Spying on Americans

I like it when opponents of my position resort to ad-hominems. It indicates they have run out of substantive arguments.

12/15/05 | Roxana Tiron


Posted on 12/15/2005 9:28:34 AM PST by JeanS


Rep. Curt Weldon's (R-Pa.) months-long crusade is starting to pay off.

The Pentagon, after weeks of silence, will allow participants in an intelligence cell that a year before the Sept. 11 attacks may have identified some of the ringleaders to testify before Congress. Their testimony could shed light on information that the Sept. 11 commission did not include in its report.

The Pentagon's decision came in response to a letter Weldon sent to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld requesting that the Pentagon allow the participants in the cell, known as Able Danger, to testify in open congressional hearings.

More than half of the House members signed Weldon's letter, among them members of the GOP leadership such as Majority Leader Roy Blunt (R-Mo.); Peter King (R-N.Y.), who chairs the Homeland Security Committee; Tom Davis (R-Va.), chairman of the Government Reform Committee; and Don Young (R-Alaska), chairman of the Transportation and Infrastructure Committee.

In a Dec. 13 letter to Weldon, Gordon England, the acting deputy secretary of defense, said that the Department of Defense has been "consistent in its position to cooperate fully with appropriate committees of the Congress on the issue of Able Danger."

In the letter obtained by The Hill, Gordon said that it is the department's understanding that the Armed Services and Judiciary committees are satisfied with the Pentagon's previous briefings on the topic and that the leadership of those committees "declined to have hearings."

Nevertheless Gordon, replying at the behest of Rumsfeld, said that the Pentagon remains committed to supporting a further review of the Able Danger issue and "will accordingly be pleased to participate in any resultant hearings requested."

Even though Weldon asked for open hearings on Able Danger, Pentagon officials are reluctant to agree to that suggestion.

"In our judgment, a closed hearing is preferable to better assure that classified information will not be inadvertently released, but we will work with the committees to arrive at an approach that is acceptable," Gordon wrote.

So far, the officers involved in the intelligence cell have not been allowed to testify in the only hearing on the topic, which the Senate Judiciary Committee held in early fall.

Weldon has accused the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a unit of the Pentagon, of trying to keep the information that the intelligence unit discovered under wraps.

The military revoked the security clearance of one of the officers, Army Reserve Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer, who was scheduled to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

The Pentagon said his clearance was revoked for a series of alleged violations of military rules, none of them related to whistle-blowing.

Pentagon officials also have refused to allow Navy Capt. Scott Phillpott, another officer with knowledge of the Able Danger findings, to testify.

"It is a great win," said Weldon about the Pentagon's Dec.13 response. "Gordon England played a great role. Now we will let the facts fall where they may."

Weldon had been waging a war against the DIA almost single-handedly until last month when his colleagues started listening and decided they wanted to hear more.

Weldon blamed the "upper-level bureaucracy in the Pentagon" and not the department's leadership for blocking the flow of information on the intelligence data-mining cell.

Now, Weldon said he is preparing for hearings that he wants to set up early next year.

"We are going to do what the 9/11 Commission should have done," Weldon told The Hill. "I know all the Able Danger people and none of them were addressed by the 9/11 Commission."

He said that the Sept. 11 commission, which was appointed to investigate the attacks and the intelligence failures involved in them, disregarded information it received from Able Danger members Tony Shaffer and Scott Phillpott.

Weldon said he believes that the DIA stifled crucial information about Mohammed Atta, who became the lead Sept. 11 terrorist, and then destroyed related documents.

Weldon has said he learned that the secret program known as Able Danger was put in place in 1999 and 2000 by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and by the general in charge of the Special Forces Command. It was devoted to uncovering key cells of al Qaeda globally, giving the military the capability to destroy those cells.

Weldon told The Hill earlier this year that he believes the DIA is carrying out a smear campaign against Shaffer, who spoke the truth about the cell.

House Armed Services Chairman Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.) asked the Pentagon's inspector general this fall to investigate why the DIA revoked Shaffer's top security clearance.



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TOPICS: Front Page News; War on Terror
KEYWORDS: 109TH; ABLEDANGER; ATTA; DIA; DOD; GORELICKWALL; TOMDAVIS; WELDON
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1 posted on 12/15/2005 9:28:36 AM PST by JeanS
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BUSH:

constitutional guarantees are in place when it comes to doing what is necessary to protect our homeland, because we value the Constitution."

You are implying they had arguments to begin with Thomas. A questionable implication perhaps.

York Clinging To Gorelick Myth
Yesterday we wrote:

Neither Gorelick or the Clinton administration ever argued that president's inherent "authority" allowed him to ignore FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act].

This morning, The National Review's Byron York responded:

The Center's position appears contradicted not only by Gorelick's testimony but by a statement she made to Legal Times in November 1994, several months after her testimony, in which she said, "Our seeking legislation in no way should suggest that we do not believe we have inherent authority."

Actually, our argument is perfectly consistent with Gorelick's statements. Both her testimony and in the Legal Times quote, were about physical searches. In 1994, the FISA did not cover physical searches. She was explaining what the President's authority was in the absence of any congressional statute. She wasn't arguing that the President had the authority to ignore FISA.

In 1995, with President Clinton's signature, FISA was amended to include physical searches. That law prohibited warrantless domestic physical searches. No one in the Clinton administration, including Gorelick, ever argued that the administration could ignore the law, before or after it was amended.

NSA Denies Snooping on News MediaAn NSA spokesman simply said, "Does anyone still read The New York Times?"

All these allegations should be settled in a court or by congress, not just Bush or NSA denials or cute little catch phrases. This is a serious issue and should be treated as such.

Yes, but that wasn't a serious article.


You knew that, .... right?

No, I'm not. The FISCR opinion I've been citing didn't find it unconstitutional, and in dicta it upheld the rulings of those prior cases IN LIGHT OF THE PASSAGE OF FISA. So again, your argument is in conflict with the FISCR opinion.

No. My remark was in response to Debra_Law's claim that "Bush should have known better." (paraphasing)

But it is worth pointing out that historical fact to everyone who is clamoring that Bush has violated the law, which would include many of their heros. (Carter/Clinton)

Your article title and the quoted passage do not say the same thing.

Senators Battle Over 'Spy Leak' Investigation
Senators Battle Over 'Spy Leak' Investigation
Published: January 01, 2006 12:10 PM ET
WASHINGTON

The investigation into leaks about a domestic spying program should determine whether the motivation was damaging security or revealing a potentially illegal activity, a Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee said Sunday.

``There are differences between felons and whistleblowers, and we ought to wait 'til the investigation occurs to decide what happened,'' said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y.

On Friday, the Justice Department opened an investigation into who divulged the existence of President Bush's secret domestic spying program. The New York Times reported last month about warrantless surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, a Kentucky Republican who appeared with Schumer on ``Fox News Sunday,'' urged the Justice Department to ``go after those who breached our national security and endangered Americans in the war on terror.''

Bush has acknowledged the existence of the spying program and defended it as essential to securing the nation. He has cited his constitutional powers as well as a congressional resolution issued after the Sept. 11 attacks as legal justifications for the program.

The Times reported Sunday that a top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the NSA program and would not sign off on its continued use as required by the administration.

James B. Comey, a top deputy to then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, was concerned with the program's legality and oversight, the Times reported. Administration officials then went to Ashcroft, who had been hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, to gain his approval, according to the newspaper, but it was unclear whether Ashcroft gave his approval.

Neither Comey nor Ashcroft would comment on the meeting, according to the Times. White House spokesman Trent Duffy, with Bush at his Texas ranch, declined Sunday to answer questions about any of the administration's internal discussions.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, has called for hearings into the program. McConnell said he would prefer that any hearings be held by the Intelligence Committee, which likely would be in secret.

``We're already talking about this entirely too much out in public as a result of these leaks ... and it's endangering our efforts to make Americans more secure,'' McConnell said.

Schumer, while supporting a leak investigation, questioned shifting the focus from the administration policy to the person who revealed the information to the press.

``To simply divert this whole thing to just looking at the leaker and saying everything else is just fine is typical of this administration,'' he said.

Schumer sent a letter Sunday to Specter asking that he call to testify current and former administration officials, including Comey, Ashcroft, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and White House chief of state Andrew Card. He asked that Specter join him in requesting the administration to waive

Has Bush Gone Too Far?
Has Bush Gone Too Far?
The President's secret directive to let the NSA snoop without warrants sets off a furor
By RICHARD LACAYO
TIME Magazine
Posted Sunday, Jan. 01, 2006

In the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks, White House officials were haunted by two questions. Were there other terrorists lying in wait within the U.S.? And, given how freely the 19 hijackers had been able to 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 the law. The other was to ignore it.

In the end, 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 convenes to review top-secret intelligence programs, was bypassed. Instead, the legal vetting was given to Alberto Gonzales, then White House counsel. In the weeks since Dec. 16, when the program was disclosed by the New York Times, it has set off a ferocious debate in Washington and around the country about how the rule of law should constrain the war on terrorism.

That development ensures that the President will start the new year preoccupied for a while with a fight over whether his responsibility to prevent another attack gave him the power to push aside an act of Congress--or, to use the terms of his harshest critics, to break the law. Bush and his supporters say that the President has the power to take extraordinary steps to protect the nation and that sometimes nothing less will do. His opponents say that the war on terrorism can be fought just as well, if not better, without novel interpretations of the law and that the White House reasoning sounds all too much like Richard Nixon's famous exercise in Oval Office solipsism: "When the President does it, that means that it is not illegal."

This much you can count on: the fallout from exposure of the NSA surveillance program will be with us for months to come. Republican Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has already announced his intention to start hearings this month to find out just what the NSA is up to and whether acting without warrants was really necessary. In addition, the House and Senate Intelligence Committees are almost certain to make deeper inquiries. Meanwhile, the Justice Department is launching an investigation of its own, into how word of the secret program was leaked to the Times. Justice officials have refused to say whether the overall legality of the NSA program will also be investigated.

CONTINUE COMPLETE ARTICLE: http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1145242,00.html

No I didn't know that. I didn't go to the source of the article.

So are saying a NSA spokesman really did not say, " "Does anyone still read The New York Times? and otherwise deny the report in the New York Times?

NSA gave other agencies surveillance data
NSA gave other agencies surveillance data
Information from wiretapping was processed, cross-checked
By Walter Pincus
The Washington Post
Updated: 7:01 a.m. ET Jan. 1, 2006

Information captured by the National Security Agency's secret eavesdropping on communications between the United States and overseas has been passed on to other government agencies, which cross-check the information with tips and information collected in other databases, current and former administration officials said.

The NSA has turned such information over to the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) and to other government entities, said three current and former senior administration officials, although it could not be determined which agencies received what types of information. Information from intercepts -- which typically includes records of telephone or e-mail communications -- would be made available by request to agencies that are allowed to have it, including the FBI, DIA, CIA and Department of Homeland Security, one former official said.

At least one of those organizations, the DIA, has used NSA information as the basis for carrying out surveillance of people in the country suspected of posing a threat, according to two sources. A DIA spokesman said the agency does not conduct such domestic surveillance but would not comment further. Spokesmen for the FBI, the CIA and the director of national intelligence, John D. Negroponte, declined to comment on the use of NSA data.

Since the revelation last month that President Bush had authorized the NSA to intercept communications inside the United States, public concern has focused primarily on the legality of the NSA eavesdropping. Less attention has been paid to, and little is known about, how the NSA's information may have been used by other government agencies to investigate American citizens or to cross-check with other databases. In the 1960s and 1970s, the military used NSA intercepts to maintain files on U.S. peace activists, revelations of which prompted Congress to restrict the NSA from intercepting communications of Americans.

Looking for patterns
Today's NSA intercepts yield two broad categories of information, said a former administration official familiar with the program: "content," which would include transcripts of a phone call or e-mail, and "non-content," which would be records showing, for example, who in the United States was called by, or was calling, a number in another country thought to have a connection to a terrorist group. At the same time, NSA tries to limit identifying the names of Americans involved.

"NSA can make either type of information available to other [intelligence] agencies where relevant, but with appropriate masking of its origin," meaning that the source of the information and method of getting it would be concealed, the former official said.

Agencies that get the information can use it to conduct "data mining," or looking for patterns or matches with other databases that they maintain, which may or may not be specifically geared toward detecting terrorism threats, he said. "They are seeking to separate the known from the unknown, relationships or associations," he added.

The NSA would sometimes monitor telephones, e-mails or fax communications in cases where individuals in the United States -- and sometimes people they contacted -- were linked to an alleged foreign terrorist group, officials have said. The NSA, officials said, limited its decisions to follow-up with more electronic surveillance on an individual to those cases where there was some apparent link to terrorist sources.

But other agencies, one former official said, have used phone numbers or other records obtained from NSA in combination with wide-ranging databases to look for links and associations. "What data sets are included is a policy decision [made by individual agencies] when they involve other than terrorist links," he said.

Physical surveillance
DIA personnel stationed inside the United States went further on occasion, conducting physical surveillance of people or vehicles identified as a result of NSA intercepts, said two sources familiar with the operations, although the DIA said it does not conduct such activities.

The military personnel -- some of whose findings were reported to the Northern Command in Colorado -- were employed as part of the Pentagon's growing post-Sept. 11, 2001, domestic intelligence activity based on the need to protect Defense Department facilities and personnel from terrorist attacks, the sources said.

Northcom was set up in October 2002 to conduct operations to deter, prevent and defeat terrorist threats in the United States and its territories. The command runs two fusion centers that receive and analyze intelligence gathered by other government agencies.

Those Northcom centers conduct data mining, where information received from the NSA, the CIA, the FBI, state and local police, and the Pentagon's Talon system are cross-checked to see if patterns develop that could indicate terrorist activities.

Talon is a system that civilian and military personnel use to report suspicious activities around military installations. Information from these reports is fed into a database known as the Joint Protection Enterprise Network, which is managed, as is the Talon system, by the Counterintelligence Field Activity, the newest Defense Department intelligence agency to focus primarily on counterterrorism. The database is shared with intelligence and law enforcement agencies and was found last month to have contained information about peace activists and others protesting the Iraq war that appeared to have no bearing on terrorism.

Military officials acknowledged that such information should have been purged after 90 days and that the Talon system was being reviewed.

Identities hidden
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, deputy director for national intelligence and former head of NSA, told reporters last month that the interception of communications to the United States allegedly connected to terrorists was, in almost every case, of short duration. He also said that when the NSA creates intelligence reports based on information it collects, it minimizes the number of Americans whose identities are disclosed, doing so only when necessary.

"The same minimalizationist standards apply across the board, including for this program," he said of the domestic eavesdropping effort. "To make this very clear -- U.S. identities are minimized in all of NSA's activities, unless, of course, the U.S. identity is essential to understand the inherent intelligence value of the intelligence report." Hayden did not address the question of how long government agencies would archive or handle information from the NSA.


Today's controversy over the domestic NSA intercepts echoes events of more than three decades ago. Beginning in the late 1960s, the NSA was asked initially by the Johnson White House and later by the Army, the Secret Service, and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs to intercept messages to or from the United States. Members of Congress were not informed of the program, code-named Minaret in one phase.

The initial purpose was to "help determine the existence of foreign influence" on "civil disturbances occurring throughout the nation," threats to the president and other issues, Gen. Lew Allen Jr., then director of NSA, told a Select Senate Committee headed by then-Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) in 1975.

Allen, in comments similar to recent Bush administration statements, said collecting communications involving American citizens was approved legally, by two attorneys general. He also said that the Minaret intercepts discovered "a major foreign terrorist act planned in a large city" and prevented "an assassination attempt on a prominent U.S. figure abroad."

Overall, Allen said that 1,200 Americans citizens' calls were intercepted over six years, and that about 1,900 reports were issued in three areas of terrorism. As the Church hearings later showed, the Army expanded the NSA collection and had units around the country gather names and license plates of those attending antiwar rallies and demonstrations. That, in turn, led to creation of files on these individuals within Army intelligence units. At one point a Senate Judiciary subcommittee showed the Army had amassed about 18,000 names. In response, Congress in 1978 passed the Foreign Intelligence Security Act, which limited NSA interception of calls from overseas to U.S. citizens or those involving American citizens traveling abroad.

Justice Deputy Resisted Parts of Spy Program
January 1, 2006
Justice Deputy Resisted Parts of Spy Program
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and JAMES RISEN
WASHINGTON, Dec. 31

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

The concerns prompted two of President Bush's most senior aides - Andrew H. Card Jr., his chief of staff, and Alberto R. Gonzales, then White House counsel and now attorney general - to make an emergency visit to a Washington hospital in March 2004 to discuss the program's future and try to win the needed approval from Attorney General John Ashcroft, who was hospitalized for gallbladder surgery, the officials said.

The unusual meeting was prompted because Mr. Ashcroft's top deputy, James B. Comey, who was acting as attorney general in his absence, had indicated he was unwilling to give his approval to certifying central aspects of the program, as required under the White House procedures set up to oversee it.

With Mr. Comey unwilling to sign off on the program, the White House went to Mr. Ashcroft - who had been in the intensive care unit at George Washington University Hospital with pancreatitis and was housed under unusually tight security - because "they needed him for certification," according to an official briefed on the episode. The official, like others who discussed the issue, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the classified nature of the program.

Mr. Comey declined to comment, and Mr. Gonzales could not be reached.

Accounts differed as to exactly what was said at the hospital meeting between Mr. Ashcroft and the White House advisers. But some officials said that Mr. Ashcroft, like his deputy, appeared reluctant to give Mr. Card and Mr. Gonzales his authorization to continue with aspects of the program in light of concerns among some senior government officials about whether the proper oversight was in place at the security agency and whether the president had the legal and constitutional authority to conduct such an operation.

It is unclear whether the White House ultimately persuaded Mr. Ashcroft to give his approval to the program after the meeting or moved ahead without it.

The White House and Mr. Ashcroft, through a spokeswoman, declined to comment Saturday on the hospital meeting. A White House spokeswoman, Jeannie Mamo, said she could not discuss any aspect of the meeting or the internal debate surrounding it, but said: "As the president has stated, the intelligence activities that have been under way to prevent future terrorist attacks have been approved at the highest levels of the Justice Department."

The domestic eavesdropping program was publicly disclosed in mid-December by The New York Times. President Bush, in acknowledging the existence of the program in a televised appearance two weeks ago, said that tight controls had been imposed over the surveillance operation and that the program was reviewed every 45 days by top government officials, including at the Justice Department.

"The review includes approval by our nation's top legal officials, including the attorney general and the counsel to the president," Mr. Bush said, adding that he had personally reauthorized the program's use more than 30 times since it began. He gave no indication of any internal dissent over the reauthorization.

Questions about the surveillance operation are likely to be central to a Congressional hearing planned by Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the Judiciary Committee. Mr. Specter, like some other Republicans and many Democrats in Congress, has voiced deep concerns about the program and Mr. Bush's legal authority to bypass the courts to order domestic wiretaps without warrants.

What is known is that in early 2004, about the time of the hospital visit, the White House suspended parts of the program for several months and moved ahead with more stringent requirements on the security agency on how the program was used, in part to guard against abuses.

The concerns within the Justice Department appear to have led, at least in part, to the decision to suspend and revamp the program, officials said. The Justice Department then oversaw a secret audit of the surveillance program.

The audit examined a selection of cases to see how the security agency was running the program. Among other things, it looked at how agency officials went about determining that they had probable cause to believe that people in the United States, including American citizens, had sufficient ties to Al Qaeda to justify eavesdropping on their phone calls and e-mail messages without a court warrant. That review is not known to have found any instances of abuses.

The warrantless domestic eavesdropping program was first authorized by President Bush in the months after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, officials said. Initially, it was focused on communications into and out of Afghanistan, including calls between Afghanistan and the United States, people familiar with the operation said. But the program quickly expanded.

Several senior government officials have said that when the special operation first began, there were few controls on it. Some agency officials wanted nothing to do with it, apparently fearful of participating in an illegal operation, officials have said.

At its outset in 2002, the surveillance operation was so highly classified that even Larry Thompson, the deputy attorney general to Mr. Ashcroft, who was active in most of the government's most classified counterterrorism operations, was not given access to the program.

That led to uncertainties about the chain of command in overseeing law enforcement activities connected to the program, officials said, and it appears to have spurred concerns within the Justice Department over its use. Mr. Thompson's successor, Mr. Comey, was eventually authorized to take part in the program and to review intelligence material that grew out of it, and officials said he played a part in overseeing the reforms that were put in place in 2004.

But even after the imposition of the new restrictions last year, the agency maintained the authority to choose its eavesdropping targets and did not have to get specific approval from the Justice Department or other Bush officials before it began surveillance on phone calls or e-mail messages. The decision on whether someone is believed to be linked to Al Qaeda and should be monitored is left to a shift supervisor at the agency, the White House has said.

The White House has vigorously defended the legality and value of the domestic surveillance program, saying it has saved many American lives by allowing the government to respond more quickly and flexibly to threats. The Justice Department, meanwhile, said Friday that it had opened a criminal investigation into the unauthorized disclosure of the existence of the program.

Bolton Testimony Revealed Domestic Spying
Fascinating. Now we know why John Bolton refused to provide copies of the reports he received during his nomination hearings. They were illegally obtained under Bush's unconstitutional and federal law spy program.---BBB

Bolton Testimony Revealed Domestic Spying
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Investigative Report
Monday 02 January 2006

This past spring, an explosive nugget of information slipped out during the confirmation hearings of John Bolton - nominated by President Bush to be the United States Ambassador to the United Nations - that in hindsight should have blown the lid off Bush's four-year-old clandestine spy program involving the National Security Agency.

At the hearing in late April, Bolton, a former Under Secretary of State for Arms Control, told Congress that since 2001 he had asked the NSA on 10 different occasions to reveal to him the identities of American citizens who were caught in the NSA's raw intelligence reports in what appears to be a routine circumventing of the rules governing eavesdropping on the American public.

It turned out that Bolton was just one of many government officials who learned the identities of Americans caught in the NSA intercepts. The State Department asked the NSA to unmask the identities of American citizens 500 times since May 2001.

Newsweek revealed earlier this year that the NSA disclosed to senior White House officials and other policymakers at federal agencies the names of as many as 10,000 American citizens the agency obtained while eavesdropping on foreigners. The Americans weren't involved in any sort of terrorist activity, nor did they pose any sort of threat to national security, but had simply been named while the NSA was conducting wiretaps.

The "NSA received - and fulfilled - between 3,000 and 3,500 requests from other agencies to supply the names of U.S. citizens and officials (and citizens of other countries that help NSA eavesdrop around the world, including Britain, Canada and Australia) that initially were deleted from raw intercept reports," Newsweek said in its May 2 issue. "Sources say the number of names disclosed by NSA to other agencies during this period is more than 10,000. About one third of such disclosures were made to officials at the policymaking level; most of the rest were disclosed to other intel agencies and, perhaps surprisingly, only a small proportion to law-enforcement agencies."

The NSA has always blacked out the names of American citizens when it distributes reports about its activities to various governmental agencies because the NSA, by law, is not supposed to spy on Americans. If the NSA intercepts the names of Americans in the course of a wiretap, the agency is supposed to black out the names prior to distributing its reports to other agencies. The names of American citizens that are blacked out can be revealed to government officials if they ask for them in writing and only if they're needed to help the official better understand the context of the intelligence information they were included in.

But that didn't appear to be the case with Bolton.

During one routine wiretap, the NSA obtained the name of a state department official whose name had been blacked out when the agency submitted its report to various federal agencies. Bolton's chief of staff, Frederick Fleitz, a former CIA official, revealed during the confirmation hearings that Bolton had requested that the NSA unmask the unidentified official. Fleitz said that when Bolton found out his identity, he congratulated the official, and by doing so he had violated the NSA's rules by discussing classified information contained in the wiretap.

In a letter to Gen. Michael Hayden, then the NSA's outgoing director, Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Intelligence Committee's vice chairman said, "the NSA memorandum forwarding the requested identity to State (Intelligence and Research) included the following restriction: 'Request no further action be taken on this information without prior approval of NSA.' I have confirmed with the NSA that the phrase 'no further action' includes sharing the requested identity of U.S. persons with any individual not authorized by the NSA to receive the identity."

"In addition to being troubled that Mr. Bolton may have shared U.S. person identity information without required NSA approval," Rockefeller wrote, "I am concerned that the reason for sharing the information was not in keeping with Mr. Bolton's requested justification for the identity in the first place. The identity information was provided to Mr. Bolton based on the stated reason that he needed to know the identity in order to better under the foreign intelligence contained in the NSA report."

Patrick Radden Keefe, author of Chatter: Dispatches From the Secret World of Global Eavesdropping, said at the time that he was troubled that, other than the questions raised by Rockefeller, Congress and the Senate showed little concern over the NSA's practices "beyond the specifics involving Bolton."

"If the National Security Agency provides officials with the identities of Americans on its tapes, what is the use of making secret those names in the first place?" Keefe wrote in an August 11 op-ed in the New York Times. "We now know that this hasn't been the case - the agency has been listening to Americans' phone calls, just not reporting any names. And Bolton's experience makes clear that keeping those names confidential was a formality that high-ranking officials could overcome by picking up the phone."
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Jason Leopold spent two years covering California's electricity crisis as Los Angeles bureau chief of Dow Jones Newswires. Jason has spent the last year cultivating sources close to the CIA leak investigation, and is a regular contributer to t r u t h o u t.

BBB, The first paragraph should also be highlighted in one of your above posts which reads:

A top Justice Department official objected in 2004 to aspects of the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program and refused to sign on to its continued use amid concerns about its legality and oversight, according to officials with knowledge of the tense internal debate. The concerns appear to have played a part in the temporary suspension of the secret program.

The reason is because Bush keeps claiming he had the authority from the Justice Department that approved it many times on what he was doing. Another Bush lie.