NSA wiretapping trial begins

The federal appeals court in San Francisco holds a hearing Wednesday about a case involving NSA call logs, which were inadvertently provided to lawyers for a Saudi charity.

from the August 14, 2007 edition

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"The public has a right to firsthand information about what the court permitted and what it disallowed," says Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's national security project. (Over the years, the secretive FISC has rarely denied wiretap requests.)

Just before they scattered for their August break, members of Congress made it easier for government agencies to eavesdrop on Americans in the name of fighting terrorism, raising once again the issue of domestic surveillance without a court warrant.

The administration characterized the just-passed change to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) as a way of keeping up with modern technology that didn't exist when the act was passed nearly 30 years ago: e-mail, the Internet, cellphones, and fiber-optic cables. Without the new law, President Bush said in signing it last week, US intelligence agencies would be "missing a significant amount of foreign intelligence that we should be collecting to protect our country."

The law is meant to allow the interception of suspicious foreign communications routed through the US. But it also allows intelligence agencies to intercept and record – without a court order – electronic communications involving Americans so long as the intelligence gathering is "directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside the United States." And it gives the US attorney general and the director of national intelligence, rather than the special intelligence court, power to approve the international surveillance.

That's raised concerns among civil libertarians, who view it as a weakening of judicial oversight of wiretapping. They see it as echoing the Central Intelligence Agency abuses of the 1970s, which prompted Congress to pass FISA.

Since the new law has a six-month sunset provision, civil liberties advocates will be pushing Congress to enact greater safeguards – including judicial oversight – when lawmakers return to Washington next month.

In a letter to House Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers (D) of Michigan, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D) wrote: "Many provisions of this legislation are unacceptable, and, although the bill has a six-month sunset clause, I do not believe the American people will want to wait that long before corrective action is taken."

Meanwhile, the Oregon wiretapping case to be heard before the Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals this week may well reveal details directly related to the legality of domestic surveillance.

The government alleges that the Oregon-based chapter of the Saudi charity laundered $150,000 in donations to help Islamic fighters in Chechnya with ties to Al Qaeda. Attorneys for the group vigorously deny that charge. And they claim they were illegally spied upon, saying they've seen the government's own proof of that in the form of NSA phone logs.

Treasury and Justice Department officials refuse to comment on the case. But in court documents urging dismissal, administration officials wrote: "Whether plaintiffs were subjected to surveillance is a state secret, and information tending to confirm or deny that fact is privileged."

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