Wiretapping » Feds overreached in intercepting Americans' calls and e-mails, The New York Times reports.
By Thomas Burr
The Salt Lake Tribune
Updated: 04/17/2009 07:57:31 AM MDT
Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah
Washington » During last year's debate over the Bush administration's wiretapping program, Sen. Orrin Hatch derided critics worried about domestic spying as feeding into the fear of people who "wear tinfoil hats around the house and think that 9/11 was an inside job."
Now, it turns out, the conspiracy theorists may have been right.
The New York Times reported Thursday that the National Security Agency overreached in its so-called terrorist surveillance program by intercepting private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans beyond what was approved of by Congress.
Congressional Democrats plan hearings on the revelation.
Hatch -- a senior member of the Senate Intelligence Committee who was a leading voice for legislation giving immunity to telecommunications companies who had engaged in the wiretapping for the government --- slammed accusations that the government might tap Americans' phones or email.
"Painting this type of picture only feeds the delusions of those who wear tin foil hats around their house and think that 9/11 was an inside job," Hatch said in a Senate debate, according to the Congressional Record. "Do we think so little of the fine men and women of our intelligence community that we assume they would rather target college kids in Europe than foreign terrorists bent on nihilistic violence?"
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