James Bamford on the NSA Boondoggle...

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NSA Expert Jim Bamford on Domestic Wiretapping: The Bush Administration Has "Decided Simply to Violate the Law"

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JAMES BAMFORD: Well, it was very interesting yesterday. It was a site I thought I’d never see. The Director of the N.S.A., actually the former director of N.S.A., standing in front of a roomful of journalists in the National Press Club, taking questions, and actually discussing to some degree these very, very secret operation, an operation that the government considered the most secret operation in the entire U.S. federal government. So it was very interesting.

Most of the time, General Hayden was up there defending the program, explaining that this is being done to protect the American citizens. And he went on to explain that they had a lot of legal authorities behind them. The Attorney General had signed off on it. His own lawyers had signed off on it. The White House had signed off on it. So he was fairly confident that he had the legal right to do what he did, which was turn N.S.A.’s big ear inward on the American public without getting any warrants from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, as is required by the FISA Act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

AMY GOODMAN: Jim, you are suing -- the ACLU is suing, on your behalf, the government, around the issue of spying. Why you?

JAMES BAMFORD: I'm one of a number of plaintiffs. There’s other plaintiffs also, and they stretch across the political spectrum. Christopher Hitchens is also on there. I was against the war in Iraq. Christopher Hitchens was for the war in Iraq. Larry Diamond’s a conservative with a think tank out in California, the Hoover Institute. So it's a variety of people. And we all have dealt a great deal with people in Iraq, news organizations, sources, government officials, and so there's a good chance, since Iraq and Afghanistan were two of the key targets of N.S.A., that we might have been swept up in this vacuum cleaner of eavesdropping.

But, again, we're sort of representative. It's not really us. We're trying to be representative of the rest of the public. There's nearly 300 million people out there who are potential targets. Some of those people out there may be having their conversations now in some vault in N.S.A. So the problem you have right now is that there was no buffer, no firewall between N.S.A.'s domestic spying and the American public. So that's one of the reasons the suit was brought, to try to, number one, stop the operation, because it's still going on, and number two, try to find out who it was that they were eavesdropping on.

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