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View Full Version : US Domestic Spying Led to Nothing: Report



sonz
01-17-2006, 02:07 PM
CAIRO, January 17, 2006 (IslamOnline.net) – The warrantless spying on US citizens by the National Security Agency (NSA), which sent a torrent of names, phone numbers and e-mail addresses to the FBI, has led to dead ends or innocent Americans, a leading US newspaper reported on Tuesday, January 17.

"After you get a thousand numbers and not one is turning up anything, you get some frustration," one former FBI official told The New York Times.

"We'd chase a number, find it's a schoolteacher with no indication they've ever been involved in international terrorism - case closed."

Law enforcement and counterterrorism officials said the domestic spying program had uncovered no active Al-Qaeda networks inside the US planning attacks.

"There were no imminent plots - not inside the United States," the former FBI official said.

Some FBI officials and prosecutors also thought the checks, which sometimes involved interviews by agents, were pointless intrusions on the privacy of law-abiding Americans.

President George W. Bush admitted in December that he had authorized the NSA to carry out domestic spying without the necessary court warrants.

He defended a 2002 executive order allowing eavesdropping without warrants, saying it was limited only to monitoring international phone calls and e-mails linked to people with connections to Al-Qaeda.

But The New York Times has revealed that the NSA has "directly" tapped the country’s main communications to implement the program.

Dry Lead


FBI agents, who were not told of the domestic surveillance programs, complained that they often were given no information about why names or numbers had come under suspicion.

In response to the FBI complaints, the NSA eventually began ranking its tips on a three-point scale, with three being the highest priority and one the lowest, law enforcement officials told the Times.

Some tips were considered so hot that they were carried by hand to top FBI officials.

But in bureau field offices, the NSA material continued to be viewed as unproductive, prompting agents to joke that a new bunch of tips meant more "calls to Pizza Hut," one official, who supervised field agents, said.

"It affected the FBI in the sense that they had to devote so many resources to tracking every single one of these leads, and, in my experience, they were all dry leads," a former senior prosecutor said.

"A trained investigator never would have devoted the resources to take those leads to the next level, but after 9/11, you had to."

Legality

The Times further said the FBI's then-director, Robert Mueller, raised concerns about the legal basis for the eavesdropping program.

He asked senior administration officials "whether the program had a proper legal foundation," but ultimately deferred to the Justice Department legal opinions, according to a government official.

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes it illegal to spy on US citizens in the United States without the approval of a special, secret court.

A report by the Congress’s research arm, the first nonpartisan findings on the program to date, said in December that Bush violated existing laws by authorizing warrantless spying on Americans with a weak legal argument.

It said the broad presidential powers granted to the US president in the wake of the 9/11 attacks did not authorize him to order the secret monitoring of calls made by US citizens, but to use military force when necessary to protect homeland security.

Top Republican Senator Arlen Specter said Monday, January 16, that Bush could face impeachment and criminal prosecution if found to have violated the law by authorizing the controversial program.
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