The Bush administration may have broken a law requiring broader congressional notification of intelligence activities when it authorized an NSA warrantless wiretapping program that snooped on American citizens after 9/11. The Hill reports today that Democrats are beginning to make noise over the White House's decision to limit its disclosure of the NSA program to the "gang of eight" -- the leaders of both parties from the House and the Senate and the chairs and ranking members of the intelligence committees in both houses of Congress.
For four years, only this small group of lawmakers was aware of the NSA program, which bypassed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in spying on Americans (with the help of major telecoms). But the program may have circumvented a 1991 law that allows the administration to limit disclosure of its snooping only in highly sensitive cases involving covert activity overseas, not in instances of foreign or domestic intelligence gathering. Under the law, passed after the Iran-Contra scandal to give Congress better oversight of the executive branch, intelligence gathering must be reported to the full intelligence committees of the House and the Senate.
A Congressional Research Service report (.pdf) last year reaffirmed the conditions under which the president can withhold information from Congress and said that "the NSA surveillance program would appear to fall more closely under the definition of an intelligence collection program, rather than qualify as a covert action program as defined by statute."
