Eavesdropping

WASHINGTON -- The Bush administration persuaded a federal judge yesterday that the controversial warrantless wiretapping program played no role in the prosecution of a Virginia Arab-American student on charges that he plotted with al-Qaida to assassinate President Bush, according to a defense attorney. Federal prosecutors filed a declaration under seal in the Virginia courtroom of Judge Gerald Green where the student, Ahmed Omar Abu Ali, was convicted on several charges, including the plot to assassinate the president.

WASHINGTON --A House Republican whose subcommittee oversees the National Security Agency broke ranks with the White House yesterday and called for a full congressional inquiry into the Bush administration's domestic eavesdropping program. The lawmaker, Rep. Heather Wilson of New Mexico, chairwoman of the House Intelligence Subcommittee on Technical and Tactical Intelligence, said in an interview that she had "serious concerns" about the surveillance program. By withholding information about its operations from many lawmakers, she said, the administration has deepened her apprehension about whom the agency is monitoring and why. Wilson, who was a National Security Council aide in the administration of the elder George Bush, is the first Republican on either the House's Intelligence Committee or the Senate's to call for a full congressional investigation into the program, in which the NSA has been eavesdropping without warrants on the international communications of people inside the United States believed to have links with terrorists.

PAINESVILLE, Ohio -- Among the family photos and to-do lists cluttering the bulletin board in Edith Rodriguez's office, the item she's most aware of each day is an image of the World Trade Center towers that she tacked up to evoke memories of Sept. 11. She glanced at it as she explained why she was not bothered by the National Security Agency program of eavesdropping without warrants inside the United States. "If that's going to help them not let 9/11 repeat itself, then I say, 100 percent, go for it, because that was awful," said Rodriguez.

Last month, the National Security Agency was revealed as the eavesdropper on America, the all-knowing organization by which the Bush administration pursued its warrantless domestic wiretaps. This month, though, The Sun's Siobhan Gorman reminds readers of another long-running complaint against the NSA, that of an agency in serious disarray that can sometimes barely get its act together. On Sunday, Ms. Gorman told the story of the Trailblazer program, which is supposed to come up with a computer system that can sort through the oceans of information pouring into Fort Meade and separate the wheat from the chaff - and which, after six years and the expenditure of perhaps $1.2 billion, is nowhere near realization.

WASHINGTON -- When President Bush addresses employees at the National Security Agency today, he will also be aiming his message at millions of independent voters who have not made up their minds about the agency's warrantless eavesdropping program, pollsters and strategists say. Opinion surveys have found that the public is split along partisan lines over whether Bush should have secretly authorized the NSA surveillance operation on people inside the...

WASHINGTON -- The nation's second-highest-ranking intelligence official said yesterday that the National Security Agency's program of warrantless eavesdropping in the United States would have uncovered the Sept. 11 plot had it been in effect before the 2001 attacks. The remarks by Gen. Michael V. Hayden, part of a Bush administration campaign to defend the NSA program, offered new details about the eavesdropping, which President Bush authorized after the Sept. 11 attacks. "Had this program been in effect prior to 9/11, it is my professional judgment that we would have detected some of the 9/11 al-Qaida operatives in the United States, and we would have identified them as such," said Hayden, who led the NSA when the program began.

WASHINGTON -- Lawmakers of both parties called yesterday for Congress to consider whether new restrictions are needed on government surveillance of communications involving people in the United States. Congress is deeply divided over whether the Bush administration acted illegally in carrying out warrantless domestic eavesdropping in hopes of detecting terrorist plots. Several influential lawmakers said Congress should begin playing a larger role in determining how the surveillance should be run. "I know of no member in Congress, frankly, who if the administration came and said, `Here's why we need this capability,' that they wouldn't get it," Sen. John McCain, who has questioned the legality of the eavesdropping, told Fox News Sunday.

WASHINGTON -- In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the FBI in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month. But virtually all of them, according to current and former officials, led to dead ends or innocent Americans. FBI officials repeatedly complained to the spy agency - which was collecting much of the data by eavesdropping on some Americans' international communications and conducting computer searches of foreign-related phone and Internet traffic - that the unfiltered information was swamping investigators.

WASHINGTON --Two leading civil rights groups say they plan to file lawsuits today against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program to determine whether the operation was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with ties to the Middle East. The two lawsuits, which are being filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union in U.S. District Court in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in U.S. District Court in Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping program.

War doesn't justify unlimited authority Gregory Kane's column "Bush order to spy must be seen in perspective" (Jan. 7) shows once more that his partisanship knows no bounds. I haven't heard any critic of President Bush's eavesdropping program suggest that we should "walk off" the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, or ignore the possibility of future attacks. But the fact is that there is a legal avenue for this type of eavesdropping. The Bush administration just does not want to submit to the required judicial oversight.