Wiretapping preoccupied Hayden at NSA

[struggle4progress]

.. Hayden, a cerebral leader whose specialty is setting broad visions for sprawling government bureaucracies, faced a number of difficult challenges after Sept. 11. Among the obstacles was a legal one: NSA employees had long been technically capable of tracking phone calls that either originated or ended in the United States but they were frustrated at being legally required to stop tracking calls as soon as potential suspects dialed someone in the States, and they could not listen to purely domestic calls.

After Sept. 11, Hayden took a no-excuses attitude, said one former NSA official, and came up with a solution for the legal problem: President Bush could sign a secret authorization.

Hayden presented the plan for a warrantless program to a meeting of his senior managers in October 2001 .. According to former officials familiar with the meeting, legal concerns dominated the discussion, but Hayden was confident that with Bush's authorization under the president's wartime powers, the program would be legal. Such presidential "findings," as the documents are called, are often used for covert activity ..

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/nationworld/bal-te.hayden14may14,0,7602442.story?coll=bal-nationworld-headlines

[rumpel]

1. The NSA Transition Plan published in December 2000

http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB24/nsa25.pdf

and

snip from: Of Bugs, The President, And The NSA: National Security Agency Intercepts Within The United States
By Douglas C. McNabb; Matthew R. McNabb

Though, as a recently declassified briefing book on the NSA provided the Bush transition team in 2000 noted, “he Information Age will…cause us to rethink and reapply the procedures, policies and authorities born in an earlier electronic surveillance environment,”37 coupled with a prodigious expansion in post-9/11 wartime authority, the purview of such power is not unlimited. Vice President Cheney has insisted upon a “strong and robust”38 conception of Presidential authorities,39 and they indeed may be needed. But a formal allowance of NSA activities domestically by the Congress, and perhaps too by the courts, may push the acceptability of otherwise external CinC authority into unchecked precedent of its internal exertion.

http://www.nacdl.org/public.nsf/0/95615ed1b9813b3a8525714000565047?OpenDocument

[Neal Tapio]

2. Americans United bust up Bush on leaks....

AU is launchin' this ad before the Hayden hearings tomorrow -- Awsome ad:

www.americansunitedforchange.org/News/2006_ads.htm/Father/Father_Knows_Best.wmv