And lo and behold, members of Congress complained when the NSA acted without the President's approval to expand its domestic spting operations (emphasis mine):
The National Security Agency acted on its own authority, without a formal directive from President Bush, to expand its domestic surveillance operations in the weeks after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to declassified documents released Tuesday.
The N.S.A. operation prompted questions from a leading Democrat, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, who said in an Oct. 11, 2001, letter to a top intelligence official that she was concerned about the agency's legal authority to expand its domestic operations, the documents showed.
Ms. Pelosi's letter, which was declassified at her request, showed much earlier concerns among lawmakers about the agency's domestic surveillance operations than had been previously known. Similar objections were expressed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, Democrat of West Virginia, in a secret letter to Vice President Dick Cheney nearly two years later.
The congresswoman wrote to Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then head of the N.S.A., to express her concerns after she and other members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees received a classified briefing from General Hayden on Oct. 1, 2001, about the agency's operations.
This has some similarities - more informing of Congress without opportunity for debate and consent - and differences - the NSA acting (evidently) without Presidential approval - with the other information coming out in recent weeks.
Yesterday, the Bush adinistration said that the NSA acted within the scope of an executive order during the Reagan administration:
Bush administration officials said on Tuesday that General Hayden, now the country's No. 2 intelligence official, had acted on the authority previously granted to the N.S.A., relying on an intelligence directive known as Executive Order 12333, issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1981. That order set guidelines for the collection of intelligence, including by the N.S.A.
That may very well be, but it still concerns me that now the president has been saying that he has been in charge, when we have de-classified (still with large portions blacked out) documents showing that the surveillance was undertaken without a formal directive until nearly a year later. The former head of the NSA is concerned as well (emphasis mine):
The way the N.S.A.'s role has expanded has prompted concern even from some of its former leaders, like Bobby R. Inman, a retired admiral who was N.S.A. director from 1977 to 1981. Admiral Inman said that while he supported the decision to step up eavesdropping against potential terrorists immediately after the 2001 attacks, the Bush administration should have tried to change the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to provide explicit legal authorization for what N.S.A. was doing.
"What I don't understand is why when you're proposing the Patriot Act, you don't set up an oversight mechanism for this?" Admiral Inman said in an interview. "I would have preferred an approach to try to gain legislation to try to operate with new technology and with an audit of how this technology was used."
"Try to gain legislation," that is, engage the democratic process.
And for all those howling that the democrats are traitors for revealing this information now, I think the surfacing of this information shows the opposite. They've been sitting on this information for years, working within the community of those with "secret" clearance. Asking for the de-classification of her letter was smart by Pelosi not only politically (because it shows how early she was on the record on this) but because by going through the formal declassification process, it clearly protects any information contained in the letter.
It is also heartening to see that even though I wish Congress has been able to do more in standing up to potential threats to civil liberties, they may not have rolled over as much as we thought. This information coming out seems to indicate that some of their inaction was because they were commited to national security in a time of crisis. That this information is coming out now is positive, and part of the inevitable balancing that many have desribed as coming after expanded war time powers.
Posted by binky at January 4, 2006 08:28 AM | TrackBack | Posted to J. Edgar Hoover | The Ever Shrinking Constitution