If you are New York's police commissioner, what does it take to figure out when your city's anti-terrorism squad has gone rogue?
Well, if building files on political protesters with high-tech bicycles didn't clue you in, having the Bush administration reject the units' wiretapping plans as too sweeping ought to.
I mean, when the Justice Department that put the warrantless back into wiretapping says your team's proposed spying plans are illegal, it's clearly time to place a call to internal affairs.
But not for NYPD police commissioner Raymond Kelly, who instead decided that the Bush administration was soft on wiretapping.
At issue, according to a story in the New York Times, are requests from the NYPD's Intelligence squad – the largest U.S. anti-terrorism group outside the federal government – to wiretap widely, including public phones in train and bus stations. Those requests need to go to the nation's secret spying court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court and are submitted to the court by the FBI, which scrutinizes them first.
But earlier this year, the Times reports, the FBI pushed back on the NYPD, saying their requests lacked the requirements to get a FISA wiretap, leading the NYPD to accuse the FBI of playing it safe.
“Not only would your approach violate the law, it would also in short order make New York City and the rest of the country less safe,” Mukasey wrote in a letter to police commissioner Kelly, according to the Times.
Kelly countered in his own letter that the Justice Department lawyers were being ninnies.
"Intelligence collection operations against potential terrorist threats to the homeland often involve considerable uncertainty," Kelly wrote. "D.O.J. should not hesitate to present judges with close cases. Some requests for warrants will inevitably be denied."
Mukaskey said that the NYPD's aggressiveness would backfire and put the country in danger.
"The less the FISA court comes to trust the validity of the applications, the more inclined the judges will be to impose on all applications the kind of scrutiny that doubtful applications merit, which of course takes more time and causes more delay because the court’s resources are limited," he said. "The greater the delay, the fewer the applications can be processed and granted within a given time. The fewer successful FISA applications, the less intelligence can be gathered. The less intelligence gathered, the greater the danger to all Americans, including New Yorkers. That is not a complex formula."
I wonder what President Bush and Vice President Cheney would have made of Mukaskey's inclination to not to piss off the court if they'd been given that advice in 2001 when they unilaterally decided to bypass the court and let the NSA listen in on Americans without getting court permission.
See Also:
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- Judge to Examine Warrantless Spying Docs in Chambers
- Rights Group Suing AT&T for Spying Sues NSA and Cheney, Too ...
- If NSA Spying Not A 'Dragnet,' What Were They Doing?
