NSA, not the Times, greatly harms our constitutional privacy

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Village Voice
http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0603,hentoff,71743,6.html

No Place to Hide
National Security Agency, not the Times, greatly harms our constitutional privacy

by Nat Hentoff
January 13th, 2006 2:57 PM

I don't want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capacity that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see to it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return. Senator Frank Church (D-Idaho), investigating the National Security Agency, 1975.


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On January 1, the president—enraged at The New York Times' unruly exercise of the First Amendment to disclose his no-longer-secret authorization of warrant-less surveillance and data mining by the National Security Agency—accused the Times of causing "great harm" to national security.

In the same speech, to wounded troops at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio, Bush again insisted that "this is a limited program to prevent attacks on the United States of America, and I repeat— limited. . . . The NSA program is one that listens to a few numbers called from outside the United States of known Al Qaeda or affiliated people."

There is no way that Bush doesn't know that this is wholly untrue, because he insists that he himself repeatedly reviews what the NSA is accomplishing. Nonetheless, in the January 2 Times—which may soon be hauled into a Justice Department criminal investigation of the dread leak—there is this question for the president:

"Officials say that the NSA has conducted . . . data-mining operations on vast volumes of communications within the United States to identify terror suspects. To accomplish this, the agency had reached agreements with major American telecommunications companies to gain access to some of the country's biggest 'switches' carrying phone and e-mail traffic in and out of the country." (Emphasis added.)