Reply #84: White House tapping of foreigners was illegal, ruled judge [View All]

[L. Coyote]

White House tapping of foreigners was illegal, ruled judge
Carol Leonnig and Ellen Nakashima in Washington
August 4, 2007
http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/white-house-tapping-of-foreigners-was-illegal-ruled-judge/2007/08/03/1185648144037.html


A FEDERAL intelligence court judge earlier this year secretly declared a key element of the Bush Administration's wiretapping efforts illegal, ....

The decision was a political and practical blow to the Administration, which had long held that all of the National Security Agency's enhanced surveillance efforts since 2001 were legal. The Administration had for years declined to subject those efforts to the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and after it finally did so in January the court ruled that the Administration's legal judgment was at least partly wrong. The practical effect has been to block the agency's efforts to collect information from a large volume of foreign calls and emails that pass through US communications nodes clustered around New York and California.

Under the proposed revision of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the Attorney-General would have sole authority to authorise the warrantless surveillance of people "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" and to compel telecommunications carriers to turn over the information in real time or after it has been stored.