The Director of National Intelligence urged powerful members of Congress to rush through legislation this summer that gave the NSA wide powers to install phone and internet wiretaps inside the United States, according to government sunshine documents released Friday.
The 242 pages of documents include letters to DNI Michael McConnell from members of Congress that are dated after the August 5 passage of the Protect America Act. They question whether McConnell negotiated in good faith or followed political orders from the White House.
The documents are the first to be released to the Electronic Frontier Foundation after a federal court judge on Wednesday ordered their prompt release.
In September, the EFF filed an Freedom of Information Act request about contact between the nations' top spy and telecom companies that want immunity from privacy lawsuits, as well as McConnell's contact with Congress.
The 242-page document (.pdf) includes detailed and revealing exchanges between Congress and McConnell, including one bitter letter from Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia), who clearly felt McConnell sucker punched him in the final moments of the debate over closing the government's so-called "intelligence gap."
That gap ostensibly referred to the fact that if the government wants to install surveillance equipment inside America or force companies like AT&T or Google to help it spy on people outside the United States, it had to get a court order.
After 9/11, the Bush administration believed it had the legal right to avoid that requirement and launched a secret wiretapping program. A year after the program was revealed in December 2005, Bush bowed to political pressure and allowed the secret spying court to issue 'innovative orders' allowing the program to continue. But in the spring, another judge on that court decided the program was illegal. The administration then bum-rushed Congress for powers it could have asked for long ago, telling them Al Qaeda was coming and that blood would be on Congress's hands if they didn't immediately hand over more powers to the administration.
These letters document McConnell's public and not-so-public role in the ongoing debate over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
The rest of the responsive documents must be released by December 10, according to U.S. District Court Judge Susan Illston.
The documents are very detailed, and THREAT LEVEL has only had limited time to review them. Any help FISA-geek readers can give would be much appreciated. Drop nuggets from the doc (.pdf) (with page numbers) in the comments.
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