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Bush calls for easier wiretap rules US President George W. Bush on Saturday called for Congress to revise a US security law in order to ease restrictions on the government's secret communications surveillance of terror suspects. Amid furor over Attorney General Alberto Gonzales's handling of the government's secret warrantless wiretap program, Bush urged legislators to pass the update of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) proposed in April. The changes would ease intelligence collection aimed at people plotting attacks on the United States, Bush said in his weekly radio address. Bushed urged lawmakers to work in a bipartisan manner to pass the legislation before leaving for August recess, saying: "Our national security depends on it." The FISA reform proposed by the White House in April would loosen restrictions on tapping into emails, phone calls and other communications inside the country and possibly allow the US to freely tap into international communications routed through the United States. It will also protect telecommunications companies who cooperate in the effort. Several major companies have been sued for helping with the wiretaps....
Mining of Data Prompted Fight Over Spying A 2004 dispute over the National Security Agency’s secret surveillance program that led top Justice Department officials to threaten resignation involved computer searches through massive electronic databases, according to current and former officials briefed on the program. It is not known precisely why searching the databases, or data mining, raised such a furious legal debate. But such databases contain records of the phone calls and e-mail messages of millions of Americans, and their examination by the government would raise privacy issues. The N.S.A.’s data mining has previously been reported. But the disclosure that concerns about it figured in the March 2004 debate helps to clarify the clash this week between Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales and senators who accused him of misleading Congress and called for a perjury investigation. A half-dozen officials and former officials interviewed for this article would speak only on the condition of anonymity, in part because unauthorized disclosures about the classified program are already the subject of a criminal investigation. Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used. Nor would they explain what modifications to the surveillance program President Bush authorized to head off the threatened resignations by Justice Department officials. Government examination of the records, which allows intelligence analysts to trace relationships between callers and identify possible terrorist cells, is considered less intrusive than actual eavesdropping. But the N.S.A.’s eavesdropping targeted international calls and e-mail messages of people inside the United States, while the databases contain primarily domestic records. The conflict in 2004 appears to have turned on differing interpretations of the president’s power to bypass the FISA law and obtain access to the records....
CIA blunders outlined in new book The CIA thought it had an intelligence coup on its hands in 1994. Its friends in the Guatemalan military were bugging the bedroom of Marilyn McAfee, the American ambassador in that country, whom they regarded as suspect because she was fighting human rights abuses by the regime. Eavesdroppers heard her whispering sweet nothings to someone whom they took to be her secretary, another female diplomat - and the CIA set out to undermine Mrs McAfee by spreading rumours in Washington that she was a lesbian. There was just one problem. The ambassador, who was happily married, was not having an affair with her secretary. The secret microphones had instead recorded her "cooing endearments" to Murphy, her poodle. The mistake is just one example of bungling by the CIA chronicled in a new history of the agency by the Pulitzer prize-winning author, Tim Weiner, who has covered intelligence matters for The New York Times for two decades. His book draws on 50,000 documents in the CIA's archives, dating back to 1947, the year it was founded, and more than 300 interviews with staff, past and present, including 10 former directors. Weiner concludes that "the most powerful nation in the history of Western civilisation has failed to create a first-rate spy service" - a failure, he argues, that is a danger to American security....Also see A different sort of exposé: The CIA as rarely competent