Congress To Be Briefed On NSA

The Bush administration will brief the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees in Congress on the National Security Agency's controversial surveillance activities, reversing course after five months.

The sessions scheduled for Wednesday afternoon on Capitol Hill were to be led by the NSA's director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, and were sure to focus on the ultra-secret agency's efforts to monitor domestic calls when one party is overseas and suspected of terrorism, as well as the agency's efforts to collect records on ordinary Americans' calls.

The briefings were coming less than 24 hours ahead of the opening of confirmation hearings for Gen. Michael Hayden, nominated to head the CIA. He was set to appear Thursday before the Senate Intelligence Committee.

It seems the White House is hoping to alleviate tensions surrounding Hayden's nomination. As CBS News correspondent Gloria Borger reports, if you ask questions in a private classified briefing, you cannot ask them again in an open hearing.

Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kan., the Intelligence Committee chairman, said it became apparent that his entire committee needed to understand the NSA program in advance of having a full hearing on Hayden, who headed the NSA from 1999 until 2005.

"There was no way we could fulfill our collective constitutional responsibilities without that knowledge," Roberts said.

Roberts tells Borger that the NSA was looking at the phone calls collected during the surveillance, but he said not at the content, just at the pattern of phone calls.

Previously, only select members of the House and Senate intelligence committees were briefed in detail on the program. Democrats have been pressing the White House to provide the information to the full committees since December, saying that to do otherwise was a violation of the 1947 National Security Act.

"The White House, for the first time, is showing signs that they are serious about oversight of this program," said West Virginia Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the intelligence committee's top Democrat.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., Rockefeller's House counterpart, said: "It's a shame that it took an endangered nomination to make this happen."

Also on Wednesday, a federal judge ruled that secret documents that allegedly detail the surveillance of AT&T phone lines under the Bush administration's domestic spying program can be used in a lawsuit against the telephone giant, but the records will remain sealed.

Meanwhile, Verizon Communications Inc. says it did not give the government records of millions of phone calls, joining fellow phone company BellSouth in disputing key assertions in a USA Today article.

The denials leave open the possibility that the NSA requested customer calling data from long-distance companies like AT&T, Sprint and MCI in 2001, but not from companies that were mainly local phone companies, such as Verizon.

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Read Verizon's Statement
Read BellSouth's statement

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"This government will continue to guard the privacy of the American people," Mr. Bush said at the White House. "But if al Qaeda is calling into the United States, we want to know. And we want to know why."

Mr. Bush declined to specifically discuss the compiling of phone records, or whether that would amount to an invasion of privacy.

Verizon has not provided customer call data to the NSA, nor had it been asked to do so, the company said in an e-mailed statement Tuesday.

The statement came a day after BellSouth Corp. issued a similar denial.

"One of the most glaring and repeated falsehoods in the media reporting is the assertion that, in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Verizon was approached by NSA and entered into an arrangement to provide the NSA with data from its customers' domestic calls," the statement read.

Verizon's denial did not apply to MCI, which Verizon acquired in January this year. In an earlier statement, Verizon said it is in the process of ensuring that its policies are put in place in the former MCI business.

A story in USA Today last Thursday said Verizon, AT&T Inc. and BellSouth had complied with an NSA request for tens of millions of customer phone records after the 2001 terror attacks. The report sparked a national debate on federal surveillance tactics.

White House press secretary Tony Snow was asked about the phone record issue on CBS News' The Early Show Wednesday.

"You're assuming that program exists, and we neither confirm nor deny it," Snow said.

"There seems to be some controversy with the phone companies, all of whom have now said they don't do this sort of thing. ... Now USA Today is having some difficulty with the story itself."

The USA Today story cited anonymous sources "with direct knowledge of the arrangement."

"We're confident in our coverage of the phone database story," USA Today spokesman Steve Anderson said.

Verizon's statement suggested that USA Today may have erred in not drawing a distinction between long-distance and local telephone calls.

"Phone companies do not even make records of local calls in most cases because the vast majority of customers are not billed per call for local calls," Verizon said.

Intelligence analysts suggest that it's the long-distance calls and the international calls that the government has the most interest in,Stewart reports. But what's not clear is whether the NSA relies on the phone companies to provide them with that kind of information, or whether it has the ability to just tap into it itself.

The denials by Verizon and BellSouth leave AT&T as the sole company named in the USA Today article that hasn't denied involvement. On Thursday, San Antonio-based AT&T said it had "an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare," but said it would assist only as allowed within the law.

AT&T spokesman Michael Coe said Tuesday the company had no further comment.

The other major long-distance company, Sprint Nextel Corp., has issued a statement similar to AT&T's.