I want to emphasize that this story about domestic spying has actually been aired as long ago as the Bolton hearings, in Newsweek and other sources, and was mentioned in an
August 10, 2005 NY Times Op Ed. See
wutai's diary from yesterday that got overlooked on this one.
The second point about that is to note that John Bolton has been reviewing these intercepts and Democrats went to bat to try to get this information . And of course, Bush appointed Bolton between congressional sessions to avoid having to deal with this question.
Please note the following from
August 2005
In April, Bolton told Congress that when he was an undersecretary at the State Department, he repeatedly circumvented the privacy protections that govern federal eavesdropping on American citizens without a warrant. In Bolton's defense, it emerged that his actions were in keeping with a widespread - though unacknowledged - practice.
[...]
But even as enshrined in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, the prohibition on domestic spying without a warrant has always been something of a legal fiction: The standard practice is to go ahead and eavesdrop on the conversations of foreigners, even if the party on the other end of the line is an American citizen.
Summaries of these conversations are then distributed throughout government agencies. The privacy of the American citizens involved is putatively preserved by replacing their names with the phrase "U.S. person" in the summary.
During the Bolton hearings, however, it emerged that when he was at the State Department, Bolton on several occasions received summaries of intercepts between foreigners and "U.S. persons" and requested that the spy agency tell him who those Americans were. The agency complied.
Following this revelation, Newsweek discovered that from January 2004 to May 2005, the National Security Agency had supplied names of 10,000 American citizens in this informal fashion to policy makers, intelligence services and law enforcement agencies.
Democrats took advantage of Bolton's transgression in the nomination battle, playing up his reputation as a sharp-elbowed brute and implying that he might have used the intercepts to intimidate Washington adversaries. Bolton, for his part, told Congress that he asked the spy agency for the names in order "to better understand" summaries of intercepted conversations: "It's important to find out who is saying what to whom."
All of this makes me wonder if the NSA has ALWAYS been doing this under some manipulation of the law, and that it has been difficult to have any oversight on this for various political reason, as well as manipulations such as those employed by this Administration around top secret classifications.
However, note here that the NSA didn't necessarily think there was any information being requested at the time that would endanger sources or methods.
Biden has repeatedly made it clear that he and the other Senators requesting access to the NSA material and the Syria documentation are aware of the sensitivity about the materials, even though the NSAS has made clear that there are no "sources and methods" issues involved.
On that note I want to direct people to is this interview with
Sen Rockefeller on CNN when the prison story broke that makes mention of secret briefings being used to manipulate Congress.
M. O'BRIEN: Well, let me ask you this, when you heard about them, what did you do about it?
ROCKEFELLER: Heard about?
M. O'BRIEN: When you heard about these prisons and you became aware of them in a classified forum, what did you do?
ROCKEFELLER: I'm -- Miles, I'm -- I'm sorry, this makes me a terrible interview, but I'm in a position where I cannot answer your question by saying -- when you say when you heard about these prisons, if I said anything I would either be confirming them or not, and it's embarrassing. I apologize.
M. O'BRIEN: Yes. No, I understand. I'm putting you on the spot. I apologize. I guess the question...
ROCKEFELLER: Can I say something more, though?
M. O'BRIEN: Yes, feel free.
ROCKEFELLER: I think that -- that these so-called secret briefings, or whatever, on whatever subject are used too much by the Bush administration as a way of suppressing information, because they know that if I'm told something about any subject by a high official in certain types of locations, that I can never say anything about it for the rest of my life. And the same with Pat Roberts. He has that same problem.
So it's a very difficult situation.