Eavesdropping

WASHINGTON -- In a sign of growing partisan division over domestic eavesdropping, the Republican chairman of the House Intelligence Committee defended yesterday the Bush administration's limited briefings for Congress on the secret program and accused the committee's top Democrat of changing her position on the issue. Also yesterday, 27 House Democrats sent a letter to President Bush asking for information about the National Security Agency program, including whether communications from or to members of Congress and journalists were intercepted.

WASHINGTON -- President Bush is exerting an unprecedented, but perhaps legally defensible, use of executive power in authorizing domestic spying without a court-approved warrant, several national security analysts said yesterday. Yet, given recent trends in which the White House has been forced, politically, to soften its hard line on fighting terrorism, some national security lawyers predicted that Bush might ultimately find it necessary to pare back that authority. "It's not out of the question," said Suzanne Spaulding, a former assistant counsel at the CIA who has worked as a national security adviser for both Democrats and Republicans on Capitol Hill.

When the midnight urge for corned beef or Black Forest cake strikes, there are two men on Charles Street ready with menus, forks and napkins.Henry Pertman, 39, and Jeff Pressman, 38, are the owners of Henry & Jeff's Restaurant & Deli, a place that has established itself as a thriving seven-day-a-week haunt for food, talk and people-watching."

WASHINGTON -- Considering his track record, I am not too shocked to hear that President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to eavesdrop without warrants on people inside the United States. I am only disturbed by his reluctance to tell us about it. Months after 9/11, the president ordered the agency to monitor international telephone calls and e-mails of perhaps thousands of people inside the United States without warrants in order to track possible "dirty numbers" linked to al-Qaida, The New York Times reported.

A Maryland Transit Administration decision to record the conversations of bus drivers and passengers to investigate crimes, accidents and poor customer service has come under attack from privacy advocates and state lawmakers who say it may go too far. The first 10 buses - marked with signs to alert passengers to the open microphones - began service this week in Baltimore, and officials expect to expand that to 340 buses, about half the fleet, by...

When the National Security Agency trains its agents in the highly technical art of eavesdropping, they naturally need to practice.And the law gives them the right to practice on you.NSA agents can hone their listening skills and test their equipment on the most intimate telephone calls of ordinary U.S. citizens, as long as notes and tapes are destroyed "as soon as reasonably possible.""We listened to all the calls in and out of Washington," says one former NSA linguist, recalling a class at the Warrenton Training Center, a CIA communications school on a Virginia hilltop.

WASHINGTON -- The Senate rejected Democratic attempts yesterday to scale back expansion of the government's powers to monitor phone calls and e-mail as part of its efforts to fight terrorism. Senators also voted to immunize telecommunications companies from lawsuits for their role in aiding the government's warrantless eavesdropping program. The bill, comprising amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, now goes to the House for a potential showdown. The House version offers no protection for the telecom industry and more restrictions on government power.

WHEN SECRETARY of State Henry L. Stimson learned in 1929 that the United States was reading secret Japanese diplomatic cables, he bristled."Gentlemen," declared the gruff patrician, "do not read each other's mail."The man who passed those captured cables to the secretary was Herbert O. Yardley, an Indiana-born mathematical genius who dreamed of becoming a criminal lawyer but found he had a knack for cryptography. During World War I, he rose to head the American code-cracking unit that became known as the Black Chamber.

WASHINGTON -- Congress is expanding a probe triggered by the State Department's search of Bill Clinton's passport file to find out if there was a more pervasive and systemic violation of privacy than has already been uncovered.The General Accounting Office, the congressional investigative arm, was asked this week to broaden a probe into secret monitoring of phone calls made by State Department employees.While the department insists that steps have been taken to correct the abuses, Rep. Howard Berman, D-Calif.

I LIKE THE cell phone thing at the racetrack. In the old days, you might have been arrested for taking bets over the phone. Now a guy like Dave Miller, the auto mechanic ("I'm a technician," he says), can lean over the hot dog counter in the grandstand, cell phone to his ear, taking bets on the 130th Preakness from his father-in-law, Lawrence, and his brother, Teddy. He can include the whole family in Baltimore's great day at the track. Nice. Anyone with any track sense would recognize Miller as a hard-core horse player and slide up next to the guy. For me, it was almost unavoidable.