Missed by most other major media, Congressional Quarterly flags an actual example of warrantless wiretapping gone awry, picking it up from a New Yorker story unavailable online:
U.S. intelligence tapped the telephone calls of Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, starting in 2002.
This may well be news to many people, even though Wright revealed the taps himself in a sprawling, 15,000-word article on electronic surveillance in the Jan. 21 edition of The New Yorker magazine.
Perhaps because the article was not available online it lacked the link-juice to propel it into a frenzy over the "domestic spying" on the Web, the cable news shows and leading American newspapers.
As far as I can tell, only Pam Hess of the Associated Press picked up on Wright’s confrontation with spy chief Michael McConnell over the phone taps, and no major paper ran it.
More below the fold:
In an interview with Michael McConnell, who at first denied warrantless wiretapping targeted Americans:
...Wright...told McConnell he had a more-than-professional interest in electronic surveillance.
"Let me make a disclosure," he told the spy boss. "I have been monitored."
One of his intelligence sources had revealed to him that he had "read a summary of a telephone conversation that I had from my home with a source in Egypt."
McConnell said the eavesdropping must have been triggered by getting a call "from some telephone number that’s associated with some known outfit."
The journalist, however, had originated the call.
Not only that, the FBI started investigating Wright's daughter:
In 2002 Wright was visited by two FBI agents after placing calls in the course of researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the rise of al Qaeda and U.S. responses to it, as well as an article on al Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.
"They were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force," he recounted. "They wanted to know about phone calls made to a solicitor in England" who was upset that I was talking to some of her clients, who were jihadis, former members of Zawahiri’s terror organization in Egypt, and they wanted to know what we were talking about."
What startled him, however, was that the visiting gumshoes thought that his daughter, Caroline, had made the calls.
"Our understanding is that these calls were placed by Caroline Wright," they said.
But Wright’s daughter was off at college at the time.
So in his interview with McConnell,
...Wright confronted McConnell with the FBI visit.
"Her name is not on any of our phones,’ he said, "so how did her name arise?"
"I don’t know," the spy boss said.
"That troubles me," Wright responded.
"It may be troublesome," McConnell said. "It may not be. You don’t know."
May be troublesome, may be not? Uh huh.
The author of the CQ piece, Jedd Stein, sees the problem as primarily one of homeland-security incompetence, which can and does ensnarl the innocent in difficuties not of their own making.
U.S. intelligence officials insist they are not idly "spying" on innocent Americans. And I tend to agree.
What would be the point?
I agree totally that the demonstrated incompetencies of the spy agencies are a huge concern. But one could also mention the potential, indeed probability, of corruption.
Spying on administration critics, news sources and/or political rivals. Getting the inside information they share with doctors, spouses, lovers, financial advisers, lawyers, friends. Inside information can be used to blackmail, or less directly, to disrupt lives.
Corruption on a lower level can mean the the use of wiretap information to forward personal agendas of corrupt spy agency personnel or their connections, e.g., to use against a spouse in a divorce case, to obtain inside business information, or in personal blackmail.
A certain incidence of coruption seems to be inseparable from human nature. This is one reason why warrants--showing some cause for the spying--have traditionally been required and why the practice of warrantless wiretapping needs to be closely circumscribed. Certainly there should be no amnesty for those involved involved in tapping the private conversations of innocent Americans such as the case above.
On a personal note: in the 1970's, when I was a teenager, my best friend and I used to hear odd clicks on the phone line a lot, and we used to joke about them: "Hello out there, you buggers," we would say. Years later, we learned the truth: her family's phones actually were tapped by Nixon's people in the heyday of the Watergate paranoia. The buggers, I guess, got to hear a lot of teenage conversation about boyfriends and such. My friends's father was, incidentally, a true Nixon loyalist. He died before the truth came out, and I wonder what he would have said.
First diary ever, pardon me if duplicative or otherwise inappropriate. Peace!
UPDATE: The New Yorker article is here, though it may not have been on line when the CQ piece was authored. The incidents discussed above are on pages 11-12 of the 16-page article. In the first incident discussed above, McConnell said Wright's name should have been sanitized from a record, but was not; in the second incident he speculated that Wright's daughter may have appeared on the FBI's screen if Wright "mentioned her name." Very well worth reading the whole piece.