The Continuing Saga of Wiretapping

Tuesday, Micheal McConnell gave his some what annual address to Congress the BBC reported. Who is he? A little known member of the current administration, he is Director of National Intelligence, a position whose point it is to collect the information from America's sixteen different Intelligence agencies and collate it for the executive branch, reporting directly to the National Security Adviser. According to his White House bio, at one point he was head of the NSA, director of naval intelligence during the fall of the Soviet Union, and a private intelligence contractor.

Appearing in this case in support of a new bill to be passed, The Protect America Act, an act that would give the intelligence community more leeway when wiretapping "foreign" sources inside the U.S. Specifically, e-mails and phone calls being sent to or received from sources outside the country without a proper warrant. In order to protect this draconian new bill, McConnell dusted off an excuse that you might have thought died in the late 1990's with the fall of Communism, asserting that Russia and China were spying in America at levels close to Cold War levels. Admittedly, this is disturbing, but new legislation is not the answer. If it has indeed returned to Cold War levels, though it's much more likely that this is an artifact of his days in Naval Intelligence, there are already programs in place all over this country to deal with that. In fact, if there is anything this country is prepared to deal with, it is Cold War type counter-intelligence. There are, as previously stated, 16 different intelligence agencies whose sole purpose is this kind of work, not to mention the major ones like the CIA, FBI, and NSA.

This move towards the legalization of illegal wiretapping is disturbing on various levels, the most important being that it is illegal for a reason and oversight from both the judiciary and legislative branches of our government is necessary to make it anywhere near acceptable. For instance, in 1978, at the height of Cold War hysteria, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, was passed and a shadow court was set up to review wiretapping cases involving American citizens or taking place on American soil. According to the act, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) does not have to publish anything accept for a report at the end of the year stating how many cases were accepted and how many were denied. This court came into the news lately with the reveal that the Bush administration was wiretapping American citizens, illegally, without the approval of the FISC. This becomes even more ridiculous when it is realized that the FISC rarely denies a case put before them. Well, they didn't until, according to journalist Joshua Micah Marshall, about 2003 when the numbers on the denied-side of the report suddenly jumped from 2 in 2002 up to 79 in 2003. In a surprise move, the FISC published an opinion on May 17, 2002, that was open to all and given to the public, rebuffing Attorney General John Ashcroft claiming that he had allowed officials to "suppl[y] erroneous information to the court in more than 75 applications for search warrants and wiretaps, including one signed by then-FBI Director Louis J. Freeh". This becomes even more ironic considering that the FISC was put in place largely to check the excesses of another FBI Director, J. Edgar Hoover, who effectively ran the FBI like a tiny fiefdom and wiretapped whomever he damn well pleased. He also liked to dress in woman's clothes, so there's that to.

So, it becomes obvious, in this administration at least, that what is need is not less oversight, but more. When you start denying the power of the shadowy intelligence court that rarely denies the requests that you put before it, you've probably gone too far and are obviously abusing some of the powers given to you. Despite how important, in the words of McConnell, "Foreign intelligence information concerning the plans, activities and intentions of foreign powers and their agents is ... to protect the nation and preserve our security", more power in the hands of an already corrupt intelligence community that has proven it's ineptitude over and over again is not the answer. Work within the power you already have. Members of America's Intelligence community need to study a little bit of their own history and realize that America does not want or need to return to Hoover's reign of fear, that it is possible with the tools at hand to accomplish all the goals set before it. All it takes is a little practice with them.