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THE PRESIDENT: After September the 11th, I vowed to the American people that our government would do everything within the law to protect them against another terrorist attack. As part of this effort, I authorized the National Security Agency to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. In other words, if al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States or out of the United States, we want to know what they're saying. Today there are new claims about other ways we are tracking down al Qaeda to...

Washington is agog today with the disclosure that appeared in USA Today that Verizon, AT&T and Bell South have been providing domestic phone call information to the National Security Agency on millions of residential and business phone calls made by Americans. It’s all part of the spy agency’s quest to create a huge database of caller information it could data mine in order to find patterns that might reveal terrorist communications. But it has raised enormous privacy concerns in the minds of many. The USA Today report, coming after last year’s disclosure in the New York Times of the NSA’s...

WASHINGTON - The agency in charge of a domestic spying program has been secretly collecting phone call records of tens of millions of Americans, including calls made within the United States, USA Today reported on Thursday. It said the National Security Agency has been building up the database using records provided by three major phone companies -- AT&T Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. -- but that the program “does not involve the NSA listening to or recording conversations.”

DOJ Will Assert Military and State Secrets Privilege and Request Dismissal of Lawsuit San Francisco - The United States government filed a "Statement of Interest" Friday in the Electronic Frontier Foundation's (EFF's) class-action lawsuit against AT&T, announcing that the government would "assert the military and state secrets privilege" and "intervene to seek dismissal" of the case. EFF's lawsuit accuses AT&T of collaborating with the National Security Agency in its massive surveillance program. EFF's evidence regarding AT&T's dragnet surveillance of its networks, currently filed under seal, includes a declaration by Mark Klein, a retired AT&T telecommunications technician, and several internal AT&T...

Yes i know this will probably be zotted within 2 minutes of posting, but freepers watch out.. The admins monitor your PM's. The absolutely most disgusting abuse of power i've ever seen.. Now i know there are 400 of you morons ready to hit me with your ZOT pictures, go for it.. it just proves how pathetic you are. Keep on blaming the Clinton administration for this president's mistakes, keep making excuses.. You are comic relief. See you on DU :)) (and watch what you say in your PM's, they are under heavy watch) later ho's.

Liberals are whipping themselves into a frenzy over "Bush's domestic spying." But the left's outrage is new. During the Clinton era, they found government surveillance just peachy. In 1999, in fact, The New York Times itself had no problem with the Clinton NSA's Echelon project, which - without warrants - monitored millions of phone calls between U.S. citizens: "Few dispute the necessity of a system like Echelon," assured The Times, "to apprehend foreign spies, drug traffickers, and terrorists." That was then. Now the antique press is too busy getting its panties in a wad about Bush Administration security measures to...

Hypocrisy, thy name is . . . Not an easy call in the first month of 2006. If you thought 2005 was a banner year for political hypocrisy — if you thought watching Democrats berate President Bush for lying about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction after they cited the same intel was one for the record books — well, get ready. Two old Democratic warhorses — OK, anti-warhorses — are in a red-hot race for this year's Golden Globe for Political Hypocrisy after this last week. First, there was Sen. Ted Kennedy's double-barreled offering in the hearings for Judge Samuel...

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said Monday that he saw no reason to appoint a special counsel to investigate President Bush's decision to authorize the National Security Agency to monitor the phone calls from suspected terrorists operating abroad. Asked about former Vice President Al Gore's demand yesterday that the Justice Department appoint a "Spygate" special counsel, Gonzales told the Fox News Channel's "Hannity & Colmes" that there was no basis to believe any laws were broken by the NSA program. "We firmly believe that this program is perfectly lawful," Gonzales explained. "The president has legal authority to authorize these kinds of...

The ACLU had announced on Tuesday, November 16, 1999 that it will create a website called "www.echelonwatch.org". This website would chronicle all uses of the Planetary Evesdropping system used by the United States to monitor Phone Calls, Cell Phones, Satellite Communications around the world. This is the "NSA Evesdropping" system that's in the news today. The ACLU had an extensive Library of documents, archives, news articles, links to congressional testimony and was the place to go for this information. That is until now. The ACLU is deleting all this information off the website. It had chronicled all this information and...

Very long article, here's a sample: The Clinton administration has repeatedly attempted to play down the significance of the warrant clause. In fact, President Clinton has asserted the power to conduct warrantless searches, warrantless drug testing of public school students, and warrantless wiretapping. Warrantless "National Security" Searches The Clinton administration claims that it can bypass the warrant clause for "national security" purposes. In July 1994 Deputy Attorney General Jamie S. Gorelick told the House Select Committee on Intelligence that the president "has inherent authority to conduct warrantless searches for foreign intelligence purposes." [51] According to Gorelick, the president (or his...

For eight years, Bill Clinton saturated the news media with his exploits in the White House. And now that he's no longer president -- and unlike most former presidents -- he's still getting major press coverage on a daily basis. It's understandable since without the adulation and love poured on the man known as Slick Willie, he'd be left alone with himself. And the reality would set in that beneath all the bluster and verbal gymnastics lay a man who's basically an empty suit. But for now, that is a non-problem for Clinton. For example, Thursday night Bill appeared on...

Friday, Jan. 6, 2006 11:10 a.m. EST Clinton NSA Wiretapped Top Republican During the 1990's under President Bill Clinton, the National Security Agency conducted random telecommunications surveillance of millions of phone calls daily under a top secret program known as Echelon. But according to at least two people familiar with the spy operation at the time, some of the surveillance was far from indiscriminate. In a February 2000 interview with CBS's "60 Minutes," NSA operator Margaret Newsham revealed that the agency's listening post in Great Britain was involved in monitoring the phone calls of at least one top Republican on...

National Security: Charles Schumer thinks that whoever disclosed that we were eavesdropping on al-Qaida is a whistle-blower who deserves praise. And maybe he'd like to see Benedict Arnold's face on Mount Rushmore.Time was in American history when revealing classified information to the enemy would have meant the firing squad. Today, it garners praise from a U.S. senator. Speaking on Fox News Sunday, Schumer said the investigation into who leaked the fact that the National Security Agency was eavesdropping on calls between overseas terrorists and U.S. residents should focus on the leaker's motivation. "There are differences," he explained, "between felons and...

In fact, has Bush ever listened to one of your phone conversations? Unless you have spoken to a terrorist, the answer is no. Do you speak to terrorists? If you do, the answer is yes. Here is how it works. Every president for decades has had the ability to do it. The technology has changed with the advent of cell phones and the advances in computers, but the point is the same. It used to be done with people doing the listening. Then, a clever geek came up with voice recognition software. After that, a computer could do the listening....

The White House Social Office needs to note right now, before anybody has a chance to forget, that it really must send flowers, chocolates and wall-sized Christmas cards (um, holiday cards) next year to James Risen and Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times. The intrepid duo saved the Bush presidency recently by breaking news that the National Security Agency has been conducting surveillance of al-Qaida operatives abroad and their minions in the United States. The reporters noted that the agency monitored phone calls, e-mails and other electronic communications by means of sophisticated eavesdropping devices and even more sophisticated computers...

Ever since The New York Times broke the story that President Bush had directed the National Security Agency to bypass the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for certain domestic monitoring duties, commentators and members of Congress have been batting the word "wiretap" around in a way that fundamentally muddies the waters. If we're going to rationally debate FISA limits, we need to clarify the distinction between law enforcement wiretapping and broadband signals intelligence. A wiretap is a specific monitoring program placed on a circuit-switched line of an individual person, or on a trunk group that may be part of a central...

WASHINGTON, Dec. 23 - The National Security Agency has traced and analyzed large volumes of telephone and Internet communications flowing into and out of the United States as part of the eavesdropping program that President Bush approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks to hunt for evidence of terrorist activity, according to current and former government officials. The volume of information harvested from telecommunication data and voice networks, without court-approved warrants, is much larger than the White House has acknowledged, the officials said. It was collected by tapping directly into some of the American telecommunication system's main arteries, they said....

NEW YORK - The National Security Agency has conducted much broader surveillance of e-mails and phone calls — without court orders — than the Bush administration has acknowledged, The New York Times reported on its Web site. The NSA, with help from American telecommunications companies, obtained access to streams of domestic and international communications, said the Times in the report late Friday, citing unidentified current and former government officials.

WASHINGTON -- The National Security Agency, in carrying out President Bush's order to intercept the international phone calls and e-mails of Americans suspected of links to Al Qaeda, has probably been using computers to monitor all other Americans' international communications as well, according to specialists familiar with the workings of the NSA. The Bush administration and the NSA have declined to provide details about the program the president authorized in 2001, but specialists said the agency serves as a vast data collection and sorting operation. It captures reams of data from satellites, fiberoptic lines, and Internet switching stations, and then...

The late Ron Brown was not particularly paranoid. In fact, for most of his career, he conducted his business dealings cavalierly, smug in the knowledge that as a splendidly well-connected, black Democrat he was all but immune to criticism from either the media or the law. That began to change when he assumed his job as Bill Clinton's secretary of commerce in early 1993, and it changed absolutely when he ran afoul of the Clintons nearly three years later. As Brown learned upon taking office, the Department of Commerce was home to the Office of Intelligence Liaison. This sub-department received...