To keep them from testifying, of course!
President Bush denies that. "We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," he said. "Our efforts are focused on links to al Qaeda and their known affiliates. The privacy of ordinary Americans is fiercely protected in all our activities."
Only one of those men can be telling the truth. That the White House is frantically lobbying weak links in the Senate to pass a revised Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) granting immunity for AT&T and other telecom companies suggests who fears exposure.
A lawsuit also would force courts to settle the question of whether the spying was legal - which even Bush seems to question. If he is certain that it was legal to enlist telecom companies to conduct domestic surveillance, then why is he so adamant about demanding immunity for them? Bush has said he will veto a FISA bill that doesn't include such a provision, which is difficult to construe as anything other than a way to bury the truth.
Source: "Somebody Is Lying About FISA" By Melanie Scarborough - The San Francisco Examiner - 03 December 2007
To detect narcotics trafficking, for example, the government has been collecting the phone records of thousands of Americans and others inside the United States who call people in Latin America, according to several government officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the program remains classified.
Officials say the government has ... used phone numbers and e-mail addresses to analyze links between people in the United States and overseas.
[T]he operation ... has not been previously disclosed.
The government’s dependence on the phone industry, driven by the changes in technology and the Bush administration’s desire to expand surveillance capabilities inside the United States, has grown significantly since the Sept. 11 attacks. The N.S.A., though, wanted to extend its reach even earlier. In December 2000, agency officials wrote a transition report to the incoming Bush administration, saying the agency must become a “powerful, permanent presence” on the commercial communications network, a goal that they acknowledged would raise legal and privacy issues.
Other N.S.A. initiatives have stirred concerns among phone company workers. A lawsuit was filed in federal court in New Jersey challenging the agency’s wiretapping operations. It claims that in February 2001, just days before agency officials met with Qwest officials, the N.S.A. met with AT&T officials to discuss replicating a network center in Bedminster, N.J., to give the agency access to all the global phone and e-mail traffic that ran through it.
The accusations rely in large part on the assertions of a former engineer on the project. The engineer, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said in an interview that he participated in numerous discussions with N.S.A. officials about the proposal. The officials, he said, discussed ways to duplicate the Bedminster system in Maryland so the agency “could listen in” with unfettered access to communications that it believed had intelligence value and store them for later review. There was no discussion of limiting the monitoring to international communications, he said.
“At some point,” he said, “I started feeling something isn’t right.”
“What he saw,” said Bruce Afran, a New Jersey lawyer representing the plaintiffs along with Carl Mayer, “was decisive evidence that within two weeks of taking office, the Bush administration was planning a comprehensive effort of spying on Americans’ phone usage.”
Source: "Wider Spying Fuels Aid Plan for Telecom Industry" By ERIC LICHTBLAU, JAMES RISEN and SCOTT SHANE - NY Times - December 16, 2007
Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence
Who has this man been spying on???
Source: Andrew Councill for The New York Times - 12/16/07