Battle Lines Drawn Over NSA Program

The debate over the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance activities heated up on Sunday as senior administration officials insisted the program is within the law and congressional leaders continued to question the president's authority.

Reports also surfaced that Vice President Dick Cheney pushed for even more warrentless eavesdropping by the NSA at the program's inception.

"The president has been very clear that we are to pursue our intelligence programs within the law," White House National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley said on CBS' Face The Nation, re-enforcing President Bush's promise that the government is not "trolling through the personal lives" of Americans.

"As you know, domestic to domestic require a court order. He has directed that that, of course, will be complied with," Hadley said.

But, that assurance was not good enough for Republican Arlen Specter, the chairman of Senate Judiciary Committee, who insisted that Congress have more oversight on the program. Later on Face The Nation, Specter said, "There really has to be, in our system of government, checks and balances, separation of powers, and congressional oversight. There has been no meaningful congressional oversight on these programs."

Congresswoman Jane Harman, who is the ranking Democrat on the House Select Committee on Intelligence, went even further. She told Bob Schieffer, "I think the administration is breaking the law. Its legal rationale that it offers I think is extremely shaky. To this White House, the Constitution starts with Article II, which is the power of the executive. They skip over Article I totally; that's the legislature. And Article III is the courts."

"But of course the Congress does know," Hadley said. "The House Intelligence – these are intelligence programs – they have been briefed to appropriate members of the House Intelligence Committee, the Senate Intelligence Committee. These were the committees established by the Congress to deal with these matters."

Congressional leaders will have another chance to examine the NSA's activities soon, as the agency's former top official – General Michael V. Hayden – seeks to be confirmed as the director of the Central Intelligence Agency. (Read what Congressional leaders had to say on Sunday about General Hayden's prospects here.)

Hayden was the chief architect of the NSA's domestic surveillance program and one of its chief defenders when the New York Times originally disclosed the Bush administration's warantless eavesdropping activities in December.

But, a report in this Sunday's edition of the Times, revealed that Vice President Cheney played a far greater role in developing the spying program. Two senior intelligence officials told the Times that shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Cheney pressed the NSA to intercept domestic phone calls and e-mails without warrants.

The officials, speaking to the paper on the condition of anonymity, said that the NSA's lawyers and Hayden stopped the plan from going through, but did not know what compromises had been made in the final program.

The vice president and his legal advisor David S. Addington "believed that the Constitution permitted spy agencies to take sweeping measures to defend the country," according to the Times.

President Bush defended the government's domestic surveillance programs himself on Saturday in his weekly radio address.

"The privacy of all Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities," Mr. Bush said in his weekly radio address Saturday. "The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval. We are not trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

Mr. Bush's radio broadcast echoed a similar statement in an impromptu appearance on Thursday.

The phone surveillance program, as CBS News Pentagon correspondent David Martin explains, works like this:

An alleged terrorist with ties to al Qaeda is arrested overseas. Any American phone numbers he has on him or stored in his cell phone or laptop are turned over to the NSA. Under wartime powers approved by the president, the NSA immediately begins listening in on any international calls made to or from that number, without going through the standard legal procedure of first obtaining a court order to establish a probable cause that the person using the phone is part of the al Qaeda network, Martin explains.

The NSA also runs that same captured phone number through its database of phone records to determine all the calls made to and from that number inside the United States, again without having to obtain a court order. However, even under wartime powers, the NSA is still prohibited from actually listening to calls made within the United States; if a suspicious pattern emerges, it would have to get a court order before eavesdropping, reports Martin.

USA Today reported Thursday that the NSA was building a database with the help of three major U.S. telephone companies a revelation that highlights the problem of balancing American civil liberties with efforts to protect citizens from terrorist attacks.

Without specifically confirming the database effort, Mr. Bush defended the intelligence activities he has authorized, saying they are focused on al Qaeda terrorists and their affiliates. He reiterated that they are lawful and that appropriate members of Congress, both Republican and Democrat, have been briefed on the surveillance activities.

"Americans expect their government to do everything in its power under our laws and Constitution to protect them and their civil liberties," Mr. Bush said. "That is exactly what we are doing. And so far, we have been successful in preventing another attack on our soil."

The NSA is using the data to analyze calling patterns in order to detect and track suspected terrorist activity, according to information the White House provided to Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo. "Telephone customers' names, addresses and other personal information have not been handed over to NSA as part of this program," Allard said.

Two New Jersey public interest lawyers, however, sued Verizon Communications Inc. on Friday for $5 billion, claiming the phone carrier violated privacy laws by turning over customers' records. The lawsuit asks the court to stop Verizon from supplying the information without a warrant or consent of the subscriber.

"This is the largest and most vast intrusion of civil liberties we've ever seen in the United States," attorney Bruce Afran said.

NSA has been working with three major U.S. telephone companies — Verizon, AT&T Corp. and BellSouth Corp. The three complied with the request to turn over phone records shortly after the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, according to the USA Today report.

Telecommunications giant Qwest refused to provide the government with access to telephone records of its 15 million customers after deciding the request violated privacy law, a lawyer for a former company executive said Friday.

In a written statement, the attorney for Joseph Nacchio, the former Qwest chief executive officer, said the government approached the company in the fall of 2001 seeking access to the phone records of Qwest customers, with neither a warrant nor approval from a special court established to handle surveillance matters.

"Mr. Nacchio concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act," attorney Herbert J. Stern said from his Newark, N.J., office.

Nacchio told Qwest officials to refuse the NSA requests, which kept coming until Nacchio left the company in June 2002, his lawyer said.