White House Stands By CIA Nominee

The White House continued to stand by its nominee for CIA director, Gen. Michael Hayden, amid new controversy over the surveillance programs he piloted as head of the National Security Agency.

Hayden was to meet with senators on Friday, his fifth day of face-to-face sessions on Capitol Hill since a Monday morning breakfast with Senate Intelligence Chairman Pat Roberts, R-Kan.

"We're full steam ahead on his nomination," White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Thursday.

Lawmakers have been demanding information from the Bush administration about the NSA's efforts to collect records on millions of Americans' phone calls. The data includes the phone numbers at both ends, and the time and date of the connections, but the NSA does not listen to the calls or record them, and does not pick up names or addresses, CBS News senior White House correspondent Bill Plante reports.

The disclosure, reported in Thursday editions of USA Today, could complicate President Bush's bid to win Hayden's confirmation, and put the White House on the defensive, Plante reports.

Judiciary Committee member Senator Joe Biden, D-Del., told CBS News' The Early Show that he thinks the disclosure will hurt chances for Hayden to be named the new head of the CIA.

"Hayden is a first-rate guy… But I think he's caught right in the middle of this. I think it's going to make it difficult," Biden said.

It also renewed concerns about civil liberties and questions about the legal underpinnings for the government's actions.

This issue casts a much wider net than eavesdropping without warrants on suspected terrorists, which the White House calls "targeted and focused," reported CBS News chief White House correspondent Jim Axelrod. This database affects as many as 200 million Americans, Axelrod reported.

Sen. Wayne Allard, R-Colo., said the NSA was using the data to analyze calling patterns in order to detect and track suspected terrorist activity, according to information provided to him by the White House.

"Telephone customers' names, addresses and other personal information have not been handed over to NSA as part of this program," Allard said.

The president on Thursday sought to assure Americans their civil liberties were "fiercely protected."

"The government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval," said Mr. Bush, without confirming the NSA program. "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans."

"Everything that NSA does is lawful and very carefully done," Hayden said Thursday as he made the rounds on Capitol Hill. "The appropriate members of the Congress, the House and Senate, are briefed on all NSA activities."

Several lawmakers expressed incredulity about the program, with some Republicans questioning its rationale and several Democrats railing about a lack of congressional oversight.

"I'm not sure why it would be necessary to keep and have that kind of information," said House Majority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio, who wanted more details.

"If I know every single phone call you made, I'm able to determine every single person you talked to. I can get a pattern about your life that is very, very intrusive," Biden said on The Early Show. "And the real question here is, what do they do with this information that they collect, that does not have anything to do with al Qaeda?"

House Democrats called for a special counsel to investigate the NSA's activities.

The Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., told CBS News he would call the phone companies to appear before the panel in pursuit of what had transpired.

"We're really flying blind on the subject and that's not a good way to approach the Fourth Amendment and the constitutional issues involving privacy," Specter said of domestic surveillance in general.

Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., an intelligence committee member, said the reports also raise questions about Hayden's credibility. "He is the architect of the program. He comes to the intelligence committee, says how concerned he is about privacy," Wyden said. "This is not what the public thought this program was all about."

The NSA is the same spy agency that conducts the controversial domestic eavesdropping program that had been acknowledged earlier by Mr. Bush. The president said last year he authorized the NSA to listen, without warrants, to international phone calls involving Americans when terrorism is suspected.

Hayden would have overseen that program and any efforts to collect phone records of millions of Americans as NSA head from March 1999 to April 2005, when he became the top deputy to National Intelligence Director John Negroponte.

AT&T Corp., Verizon Communications Inc. and BellSouth Corp. telephone companies began turning over to the government records of tens of millions of their customers' phone calls shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said USA Today, citing anonymous sources it said had direct knowledge of the arrangement.

The companies said Thursday they were protecting customers' privacy but also had an obligation to assist government agencies in ensuring the nation's security.

CBS News correspondent Anthony Mason said that phone companies have been caught in a collision between privacy rights and national security.

"We prize the trust our customers place in us. If and when AT&T is asked to help, we do so strictly within the law and under the most stringent conditions," the company said in a statement, echoed by the others.

NSA spokesman Don Weber said he could not comment, but said the agency "operates within the law."

"This new information doesn't mean that the program is illegal," CBS News legal analyst Andrew Cohen says. "But it does, I think, make it harder for the administration to politically or legally justify it without offering more specifics about how it works and when and why. And of course the White House and the NSA have not been willing to do that."

Claims about the existence of the program emerged earlier this year. In January, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based privacy rights group, alleged in a federal lawsuit that AT&T Inc. had given the NSA direct access to the records of the more than 300 million domestic and international calls and a huge volume of Internet data traffic. The lawsuit asked a court to halt the collection.

The Justice Department told the court late last month it would seek to dismiss the case under the state secrets privilege, but said that effort "should not be construed as a confirmation or denial" of the alleged surveillance activities.