Several years ago, I watched some 60 Minutes (or equivalent) story about the NSA. The people listening in on calls sat in little rooms listening to various shady characters in foreign lands all day. According to the story, if the target called a US number or an American voice came on the line, the listener turned off the machine and stopped listening / recording.
The least believable part of the 60 Minutes piece was the ease of keeping a call private from US signals intelligence. The KGB or Al Qaeda can’t just put an American on the giant conference call of victory planning and force the NSA to stop listening. There must have been something else possible. Maybe it was FISA warrants?
From the recent news story this seems to have changed. Now they continue listening. Is the objection that they listen to a call between their target and an American? That doesn’t make sense to me. If the FBI is wiretapping a mafia boss they don’t turn it off when he calls me just because they have no warrant for listening to me. They must listen to us both in order to listen to him.
Is the NSA now moving on to the American the shady guy called? If shady guy in Jordan calls banker in Wichita, do the NSA guys now listen on the Wichita banker’s overseas calls? Is that what the critics think calls for a FISA warrant?
If the Shady guy in Jordan calls a US citizen living in Berlin and the NSA begins listening into the US citizen in Berlin, could this call for a FISA warrant? Can a US warrant apply to a call from one foreign phone to another all taking place outside of the US?
The news stories are more pointed towards what laws could be broken with the wiretaps and leaks than with what actually happens with the wiretaps. Can someone explain what is happening with the taps?
You have quite a few questions, dealing with some disputed issues and a large range of history over which the practices and in some cases the laws have been different.
Narrow the question down a bit and you’ll be more likely to get an answer…
Several questions in there, and I’m sure other Dopers know the answers better than I, but I’ll try to pass on my limited understanding of the subject.
Right. The law allows intelligence agencies to begin wiretapping for 72 hours before they get a warrant, so just having one party in the U.S. doesn’t protect them from being monitored.
But they need a warrant. At least one of the people on the call must be subject to an investigation with enough suspicion to convince a judge to issue a warrant. Then the entire conversation can be monitored. The objection in the current situation is that the President is asserting that his agents may listen to any call without a warrant. Mere suspicion by the Executive Branch of the government is sufficient for the search, not enough suspicion to also convince the Judiciary.
I don’t know to the first two questions (and I don’t think the NSA will tell us), but critics say that to listen in on a call where one party is in America and subject to the protections of the U.S. Bill of Rights and U.S. law, the NSA will need to follow FISA procedures unless Congress changes the law.
I don’t see why. The Bill of Rights and U.S. law only apply in the U.S. In a foreign country, U.S. agents are presumably breaking foreign laws, but that’s not a bad thing from our perspective.
There’s no need for a warrant in this case, and I don’t think a U.S. court would have any jurisdiction anyway. If the NSA is cooperating with a foreign intelligence agency (let’s pretend Canada), the Canadians might need to get a warrant from their own courts.
I think I may have a partial answer. In today’s WSJ, there is an OpEd by Ronald Kessler. He defends the administration and pimps his books on the FBI and CIA. In the piece, he makes an odd statement.
“Even under the law’s emergency provisions, once the FBI learns about the need to intercept a phone conversation or email communication, it takes at least a day - often longer - to obtain all the necessary approvals, including the signature of the attorney general.”
I’m taking this to mean the agent can only listen to the potential FISA calls if he has satisfied some administrative compliance. If the call is going on currently, there is no way to listen. Assuming the rule applies to the NSA, this would mean the old 60 Minutes story is true (or at least proper). The NSA guys turn off the machine when an American enters the call. There is no reason to request signatures from various levels of superior to listen to a call that will be over before the signatures are collected.
The signatures cannot be collected so the call is not monitored. If the call is not monitored, the warrant is not requested.
I then infer, if the signatures are not collected but the NSA still listens, there is no reason to request a warrant. They have violated the procedure to request the warrant by not getting the signatures of superiors in advance of the call.
Bush has changed this based on his authority as Commander in Chief. I leave that discussion to some GD thread.
I ask you - Could it really be that an administrative burden, collecting signatures, is the reason the emergency (after the fact) FISA warrants aren’t requested?
After Nixon ordered spying on people in the US who were on his personal enemies list, congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (I think that’s what it stands for.) It says that, for the president to order surveillance on people in the US, he has to get warrants from the FISA court. In a pinch, he can bypass the court for 15 days, but then he has to go to the FISA court for a renewal. Mr. Bush has done over 30 such re-authorizations without once checking in with the FISA court.
It’s not that tough a deal. The FISA court routinely gives anything the president wants, and there has never been a leak from the FISA court.
Today, NPR reported that Mr. Bush had ordered surveillance of environmental activist groups, PETA, and a Catholic workers group.
I’m not so sure about that. It seems like it’s based a lot on the movie perception of signals intelligence rather than reality. Yesterday on NPR an ex-NSA person was interviewed and mentioned that a single listening station in the UK intercepts 2 million communications per hour. There is no way the NSA has sufficient staff to listen to these calls in real-time.
I bet there’s no one listening in real-time and the calls are recorded, then investigated and reviewed later. There’s no one to “turn off the machine” so to speak.
Ok. If they intercept and record two million messages per hour, how can they possibly get all the necessary authorizations and warrants? The NSA is a big organization, they must have process. In order to satisfy the rule to not tap American calls, they either have some way to filter out any call involving an American (or American line) or they must violate the prohibition.
If the NSA is listening to calls between Americans in America, that is probably a change. If the NSA is recording calls involving Americans overseas, I don’t see how they could have filtered that out before the change.