domestic phone call spying to collect government phone calling data

domestic phone call spying to collect government phone calling data

WASHINGTON (AFP) - US lawmakers were set to organize hearings into revelations that a US spy agency was tracking the phone records of tens of millions of Americans in an effort to detect possible terrorist activity.

Members of
President George W. Bush' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> President George W. Bush's Republican Party, which dominates both chambers of Congress, and opposition Democrats expressed alarm at a newspaper report Thursday that the National Security Agency (NSA) was building an unprecedented database of phone records with the help of three major telephone companies.
The report follows revelations in December that Bush authorized eavesdropping on telephone calls to foreign destinations without warrants from a special court.
Federal laws forbids the NSA from spying on US citizens without court approval.
Bipartisan outrage over the report is likely to complicate the nomination of Air Force General Michael Hayden to head the
Central Intelligence Agency' name=c1> SEARCHNews News Photos Images Web' name=c3> Central Intelligence Agency, replacing departing director Porter Goss.
Hayden headed the NSA -- the secret bureaucracy that specializes in electronic surveillance -- from March 1999 to April 2005. The eavesdropping and database monitoring efforts took place under his watch.
Hayden is scheduled to be on Capitol Hill on Friday after abruptly canceling his Hill appointments on Thursday. He avoided commenting on the report, but emphasized that "everything the NSA does is lawful and very carefully done."
Bush, currently at an all-time low in the opinion polls, sought to head off further political damage with a hastily arranged White House appearance.
Bush neither confirmed nor denied the existence of the world's largest database, which USA Today said was set up after the September 11, 2001 attacks.
But he asserted that the US intelligence community is not "mining or trolling" through the private lives of Americans, simply attempting "to intercept the communications of people with known links to Al-Qaeda and related terrorist organizations."
"After September 11, I vowed to the American people that our government would do everything within the law to protect them against another terrorist attack," Bush said.
"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," he said.
Bush sought to reassure the public that "the privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected," under the anti-terrorism programs.
Top US legislators were unconvinced.
Republican Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, interrupted an unrelated hearing Thursday to announce he would hold hearings and demand testimony from the top executives of three of the country's largest telephone companies to determine if constitutional freedoms had been violated.
"The companies can't plead executive privilege, and I think we can find something more about this program, which we are entitled to know," Specter said. "Congress has not been sufficiently determined in asserting our constitutional responsibilities to find out what is going on," he added.
Opposition Democrats said the report was further proof that the Bush administration was trampling civil liberties under a veil of secrecy.
"We are on our way to a major constitutional confrontation on Fourth Amendment guarantees on unreasonable search and seizure," said Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat from California.
Top Democrats questioned the rationale and the legality of the operation and demanded the Republican leadership hold the Bush administration accountable.
"Unfortunately, the (Republican-controlled) Congress has acted like a wholly-owned subsidiary of the White House and has rubber-stamped everything that's gone on. And then we find out everything through the press, whoops, they weren't following the law," said Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy told PBS's "The Newshour" late Thursday.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said leaking sensitive information to the media "hurts our ability to defeat this enemy."
While the eavesdropping program revealed by The New York Times in December affected thousands of US citizens, the program outlined by USA Today detailed an NSA database of tens of millions of US phone customers.
The newspaper quoted sources as saying the NSA analyzed the calling patterns of records provided by the AT and T, Verizon and BellSouth companies. One telephone company, Qwest, turned down a request to hand over phone records, the paper wrote.
Names, addresses and other forms of personal identification are not part of the information, the report said, but it noted that those details can be easily obtained by cross-checking the records against other databases.
A civil liberty group filed a class-action lawsuit against AT and T in January accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and its customers' privacy by "collaborating with the NSA."

domestic phone call spying to collect government phone calling data

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