Violating the Constitution .....

Violating the Constitution
By Karen Kwiatkowski
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Sunday 18 December 2005

The New York Times reports that the National Security Agency may have violated constitutional protections against unwarranted government intrusion into citizens' lives and confiscation of private property. In early 2002, President Bush signed an executive order that allegedly allowed the collection and operational intelligence use of international telephone or electronic mail conversations, even if one or more participants were American. This revelation is disturbing, coming in advance of a related book by Times national security reporter James Risen entitled State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration.

In 1996 and 1997, I was stationed at NSA Headquarters, Fort Meade, Maryland, assigned to a unit of the Air Force Air Intelligence Agency, headquartered in San Antonio, Texas. Our commander at the time was Air Force Major General Michael Hayden. From my perspective, his reputation was sterling. I remember a visit he made to our detachment and to NSA. We listened to General Hayden eloquently share his theories about leadership and integrity. I remember it to this day because it was a breath of fresh air, in light of the Clinton administration appearances of national security incompetence and widely reported investigations by Special Prosecutor Ken Starr. Hayden told us that his family and his Catholic upbringing had instilled in him a strong sense of right and wrong. I came away from that briefing with my faith restored in Air Force flag officers, and a firm belief that here was a man with the innate courage to do the right thing.

A few years later, Lt. General Hayden was appointed NSA Director, in March 1999. I remember thinking that this could only be a good thing, given the pressures that NSA was under during my years there. In 1997 and early 1998, the NSA bureaucracy faced new demands, both technological and political. Technologically, commercially available software encryption had advanced significantly, and continued to advance at a rate that NSA, under constraints of budget and government personnel management systems, had been unable to match. The preferred approach, and something NSA had done for years, was to work hard to develop agreements with commercial hardware and software manufacturers for information sharing arrangements. These arrangements were designed so that, if necessary for national security, the NSA could efficiently get what it needed from the massive sea of commercial communications.

Politically, the problem was far more difficult. Certain members of Congress were demanding access to NSA telephone conversation records between certain identified overseas residents and their American co-conversationalists. NSA was happy as always to provide the part of the intercept that related to overseas targets; but the domestic material, material on American citizens, was not legal to collect or use. When this material was inadvertently collected on known American citizens, often on the US territorial side of the conversation, it was not made available to anyone, and was presumably destroyed.

Certain members of Congress were particularly interested in campaign donations from Chinese individuals, and in determining possible national security breaches or lapses that may have resulted from these financial relationships. Specifically, the concerns among some Republicans and some Democrats were that Clinton had given away, or sold, the technology farm to China. Had trade policy generosity to China been due to legal or illegal campaign contributions and deals made between agents of the PRC and associates of the Clinton administration? Inquiring minds wanted to know, and congressional representatives wanted NSA to provide the US side of the intercepts.

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2005/printer_121805X.shtml