Sorry, but your wrong Laz.
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It's Not "Domestic Spying"; It's Foreign Intelligence Collection
Andy McCarthy
The Corner
According to Dan Eggen's Washington Post story this morning (misleadingly entitled "Negroponte Had Denied Domestic Call Monitoring"), given that U.S. National Intelligence Director John Negroponte recently said that "the government was 'absolutely not' monitoring domestic calls without warrants," the USA Today report last week about data-mining (which simply rehashed something the New York Times reported five months ago), seemed
<<< "[t]o many lawmakers and civil liberties advocates ... to fly in the face of months of public statements and assurances from President Bush and his aides, who repeatedly sought to characterize the NSA's effort as a narrowly tailored 'terrorist surveillance program' that had little impact on regular Americans." >>>
This can only be true if "many lawmakers and civil liberties advocates" are imbeciles. By "monitoring" calls, administration officials have obviously been talking about LISTENING IN ON conversations. That has nothing to do with what the USA Today story sensationalized: namely, the collection of non-content information about phone usage in a data-base. The drastic difference between the two things is clear, and it has long been widely known that the government collects phone-record information (not phone call content) for investigative purposes.
Much of the debate over the Patriot Act, for instance, concerned the protocols for retaining and accessing phone record (and other business record) data. That was precisely because everyone knows such record-collection is routine. Indeed, that debate assumed that the government would be collecting personal identifying information. As it turns out, the NSA has not been doing that, even though there are no constitutional restrictions against it. Thus, the program is actually far more solicitous of civil liberties than it needs to be, and that we might otherwise have assumed.
Eggen also continues the mainstream media's propagandistic use of the term "domestic surveillance [or 'spying'] program." In actuality, the electronic surveillance that the NSA is doing — i.e., eavesdropping on content of conversations — is not "domestic." A call is not considered "domestic" just because one party to it happens to be inside the U.S., just as an investigation is not "domestic" just because some of the subjects of interest happen to reside inside our country. Mohammed Atta was an agent of a foreign power, al Qaeda. Surveilling him — had we done it — would not have been "domestic spying."
The calls NSA eavesdrops on are "international," not "domestic." If that were not plain enough on its face, the Supreme Court made it explicit in the Keith case (1972). There, even though it held that judicial warrants were required for wiretapping purely domestic terror organizations, the Court excluded investigations of threats posed by foreign organizations and their agents operating both within and without the U.S.
That is, the Court understood what most Americans understand but what the media, civil libertarians and many members of Congress refuse to acknowledge: if we are investigating the activities of agents of foreign powers inside the United States, that is not DOMESTIC surveillance. It is FOREIGN counter-intelligence.
That, in part, is why the statute regulating wiretaps on foreign powers operating within the U.S. — the one the media has suddenly decided it loves after bad-mouthing it for years as a rubber-stamp — is called the FOREIGN Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). The United States has never needed court permission to conduct wiretapping outside U.S. territory; the wiretapping it does inside U.S. territory for national security purposes is FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE COLLECTION, not "domestic surveillance."
corner.nationalreview.com
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