May 13, 2006
Questions Raised for Phone Giants in Spy Data Furor
By JOHN MARKOFF, New York Times

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The former chief executive of Qwest, the nation's fourth-largest phone company, rebuffed government requests for the company's calling records after 9/11 because of "a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," his lawyer said yesterday.

The statement on behalf of the former Qwest executive, Joseph P. Nacchio, followed a report that the other big phone companies  AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon  had complied with an effort by the National Security Agency to build a vast database of calling records, without warrants, to increase its surveillance capabilities after the Sept. 11 attacks.

Those companies insisted yesterday that they were vigilant about their customers' privacy, but did not directly address their cooperation with the government effort, which was reported on Thursday by USA Today. Verizon said that it provided customer information to a government agency "only where authorized by law for appropriately defined and focused purposes," but that it could not comment on any relationship with a national security program that was "highly classified."

Legal experts said the companies faced the prospect of lawsuits seeking billions of dollars in damages over cooperation in the program, citing communications privacy legislation stretching back to the 1930's. A federal lawsuit was filed in Manhattan yesterday seeking as much as $50 billion in civil damages against Verizon on behalf of its subscribers.

For a second day, there was political fallout on Capitol Hill, where Senate Democrats intend to use next week's confirmation hearings for a new C.I.A. director to press the Bush administration on its broad surveillance programs.

As senior lawmakers in Washington vowed to examine the phone database operation and possibly issue subpoenas to the telephone companies, executives at some of the companies said they would comply with requests to appear on Capitol Hill but stopped short of describing how much would be disclosed, at least in public sessions.

"If Congress asks us to appear, we will appear," said Selim Bingol, a spokesman at AT&T. "We will act within the laws and rules that apply."

Qwest was apparently alone among the four major telephone companies to have resisted the requests to cooperate with the government effort. A statement issued on behalf of Mr. Nacchio yesterday by his lawyer, Herbert J. Stern, said that after the government's first approach in the fall of 2001, "Mr. Nacchio made inquiry as to whether a warrant or other legal process had been secured in support of that request."

"When he learned that no such authority had been granted, and that there was a disinclination on the part of the authorities to use any legal process," Mr. Nacchio concluded that the requests violated federal privacy requirements "and issued instructions to refuse to comply."

The statement said the requests continued until Mr. Nacchio left in June 2002. His departure came amid accusations of fraud at the company, and he now faces federal charges of insider trading.

The database reportedly assembled by the security agency from calling records has dozens of fields of information, including called and calling numbers and the duration of calls, but nothing related to the substance of the calls. But it could permit what intelligence analysts and commercial data miners refer to as "link analysis," a statistical technique for investigators to identify calling patterns in a seemingly impenetrable mountain of digital data.

The law governing the release of phone company data has been modified repeatedly to grapple with changing computer and communications technologies that have increasingly bedeviled law enforcement agencies. The laws include the Communications Act, first passed in 1934, and a variety of provisions of the Electronic Communications and Privacy Act, including the Stored Communications Act, passed in 1986.

Wiretapping  actually listening to phone calls  has been tightly regulated by these laws. But in general, the laws have set a lower legal standard required by the government to obtain what has traditionally been called pen register or trap-and-trace information  calling records obtained when intelligence and police agencies attached a specialized device to subscribers' telephone lines.

Those restrictions still hold, said a range of legal scholars, in the face of new computer databases with decades' worth of calling records. AT&T created such technology during the 1990's for use in fraud detection and has previously made such information available to law enforcement with proper warrants.

Orin Kerr, a former federal prosecutor and assistant professor at George Washington University, said his reading of the relevant statutes put the phone companies at risk for at least $1,000 per person whose records they disclosed without a court order.

"This is not a happy day for the general counsels" of the phone companies, he said. "If you have a class action involving 10 million Americans, that's 10 million times $1,000  that's 10 billion."

The New Jersey lawyers who filed the federal suit against Verizon in Manhattan yesterday, Bruce Afran and Carl Mayer, said they would consider filing suits against BellSouth and AT&T in other jurisdictions.

"This is almost certainly the largest single intrusion into American civil liberties ever committed by any U.S. administration," Mr. Afran said. "Americans expect their phone records to be private. That's our bedrock governing principle of our phone system." In addition to damages, the suit seeks an injunction against the security agency to stop the collection of phone numbers.

Several legal experts cited ambiguities in the laws that may be used by the government and the phone companies to defend the National Security Agency program.

"There's a loophole," said Mark Rasch, the former head of computer-crime investigations for the Justice Department and now the senior vice president of Solutionary, a computer security company. "Records of phones that have called each other without identifying information are not covered by any of these laws."

Civil liberties lawyers were quick to dispute that claim.

"This is an incredible red herring," said Kevin Bankston, a lawyer for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy rights group that has sued AT&T over its cooperation with the government, including access to calling records. "There is no legal process that contemplates getting entire databases of data."

The group sued AT&T in late January, contending that the company was violating the law by giving the government access to its customer call record data and permitting the agency to tap its Internet network. The suit followed reports in The New York Times in December that telecommunications companies had cooperated with such government requests without warrants.

A number of industry executives pointed to the national climate in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks to explain why phone companies might have risked legal entanglement in cooperating with the requests for data without warrants.

An AT&T spokesman said yesterday that the company had gotten some calls and e-mail messages about the news reports, but characterized the volume as "not heavy" and said there were responses on both sides of the issue.

Reaction around the country also appeared to be divided.

Cathy Reed, 45, a wealth manager from Austin, Tex., who was visiting Boston, said she did not see a problem with the government's reviewing call logs. "I really don't think it matters," she said. "I bet every credit card company already has them."

Others responded critically. Pat Randall, 63, a receptionist at an Atlanta high-rise, said, "Our phone conversations are just personal, and to me, the phone companies that cooperated, I think we should move our phone services to the company that did not cooperate."

While the telephone companies have both business contracts and regulatory issues before the federal government, executives in the industry yesterday dismissed the notion that they felt pressure to take part in any surveillance programs. The small group of executives with the security clearance necessary to deal with the government on such matters, they said, are separate from the regulatory and government contracting divisions of the companies.

Reporting for this article was contributed by Ken Belson, Brenda Goodman, Stephen Labaton, Matt Richteland Katie Zezima.

May 12, 2006
Bush Is Pressed Over New Report on Surveillance
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and SCOTT SHANE, NY Times

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WASHINGTON, May 11  Congressional Republicans and Democrats alike demanded answers from the Bush administration on Thursday about a report that the National Security Agency had collected records of millions of domestic phone calls, even as President Bush assured Americans that their privacy is "fiercely protected."

"We're not mining or trolling through the personal lives of millions of innocent Americans," Mr. Bush said before leaving for a commencement address in Mississippi. "Our efforts are focused on links to Al Qaeda and their known affiliates."

The president sought to defuse a tempest on Capitol Hill over an article in USA Today reporting that AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth had turned over tens of millions of customer phone records to the N.S.A. since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. But Mr. Bush's remarks appeared to do little to mollify members of Congress, as several leading lawmakers said they wanted to hear directly from administration officials and telecommunication executives.

The report rekindled the controversy about domestic spying.

Several lawmakers predicted the new disclosures would complicate confirmation hearings next week for Gen. Michael V. Hayden, formerly the head of the N.S.A., as the president's nominee to lead the Central Intelligence Agency.

One senior government official, who was granted anonymity to speak publicly about the classified program, confirmed that the N.S.A. had access to records of most telephone calls in the United States. But the official said the call records were used for the limited purpose of tracing regular contacts of "known bad guys."

"To perform such traces," the official said, "you'd have to have all the calls or most of them. But you wouldn't be interested in the vast majority of them."

The New York Times first reported in December that the president had authorized the N.S.A. to conduct eavesdropping without warrants.

The Times also reported in December that the agency had gained the cooperation of American telecommunications companies to get access to records of vast amounts of domestic and international phone calls and e-mail messages.

The agency analyzes communications patterns, the report said, and looks for evidence of terrorist activity at home and abroad.

The USA Today article on Thursday went further, saying that the N.S.A. had created an enormous database of all calls made by customers of the three phone companies in an effort to compile a log of "every call ever made" within this country. The report said one large phone company, Qwest, had refused to cooperate with the N.S.A. because it was uneasy about the legal implications of handing over customer information to the government without warrants.

Some Republicans, including Representative Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, defended the N.S.A.'s activities and denounced the disclosure. Mr. Hoekstra said the report "threatens to undermine our nation's safety."

"Rather than allow our intelligence professionals to maintain a laser focus on the terrorists, we are once again mired in a debate about what our intelligence community may or may not be doing," he said.

But many Democrats and civil liberties advocates said they were disturbed by the report, invoking images of Big Brother and announcing legislation aimed at reining in the N.S.A.'s domestic operations. Fifty-two members of Congress asked the president to name a special counsel to investigate the N.S.A.'s domestic surveillance programs.

Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who heads the Judiciary Committee, said the reported data-mining activities raised serious constitutional questions. He said he planned to seek the testimony of telephone company executives.

The House majority leader, John A. Boehner of Ohio, said he wanted more information on the program because "I am not sure why it would be necessary to keep and have that kind of information."

Mr. Bush did not directly confirm or deny the existence of the N.S.A. operation but said that "as a general matter every time sensitive intelligence is leaked it hurts our ability to defeat this enemy."

Seeking to distinguish call-tracing operations from eavesdropping, the president said that "the government does not listen to domestic phone calls without court approval."

The phone records include numbers called, time, date and direction of calls and other details but not the words spoken, telecommunications experts said. Customers' names and addresses are not included in the companies' call records, though they could be cross-referenced to obtain personal data.

General Hayden, making rounds at the Capitol to seek support for his confirmation as C.I.A. director, did not discuss the report but defended his former agency. "Everything that N.S.A. does is lawful and very carefully done," General Hayden said.

The law on data-mining activities is murky, and legal analysts were divided Thursday on the question of whether the N.S.A.'s tracing and analysis of huge streams of American communications data would require the agency to use subpoenas or court warrants.

Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies, said, "If they don't get a court order, it's a crime." She said that while the F.B.I. might be able to get access to phone collection databases by using an administrative subpoena, her reading of federal law was that the N.S.A. would be banned from doing so without court approval.

But another expert on the law of electronic surveillance, Kenneth C. Bass III, said that if access to the call database was granted in response to a national security letter issued by the government, "it would probably not be illegal, but it would be very troubling."

"The concept of the N.S.A. having near-real-time access to information about every call made in the country is chilling," said Mr. Bass, former counsel for intelligence policy at the Justice Department. He said the phone records program resembled Total Information Awareness, a Pentagon data-mining program shut down by Congress in 2003 after a public outcry.

The N.S.A. refused to discuss the report, but said in a statement that it "takes its legal responsibilities seriously and operates within the law."

AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth all issued statements saying they had followed the law in protecting customers' privacy but would not discuss details of the report.

"AT&T has a long history of vigorously protecting customer privacy," said Selim Bingol, a company spokesman. "We also have an obligation to assist law enforcement and other government agencies responsible for protecting the public welfare."

Mr. Specter said in an interview that he would press for information on the operations of the N.S.A. program to determine its legality.

"I don't think we can really make a judgment on whether warrants would be necessary until we know a lot more about the program," he said.

One central question is whether the N.S.A. uses its analysis of phone call patterns to select people in the United States whose phone calls and e-mail messages are monitored without warrants. The Times has reported that the agency is believed to have eavesdropped on the international communications of about 400 to 500 people at a time within the United States and of thousands of people since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Democrats said they would use the new disclosures to push for more answers from General Hayden at his confirmation hearing, set for May 18.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, Democrat of California, predicted "a major Constitutional confrontation on Fourth Amendment guarantees of unreasonable search and seizure" and said the new disclosures presented "a growing impediment to the confirmation of General Hayden." Some members of Congress also reacted angrily to the news that the ethics office at the Justice Department had been refused the security clearances necessary to conduct a planned investigation of department lawyers who approved N.S.A.'s eavesdropping.

Mr. Specter called the denial of clearances to the department's own investigators "incomprehensible" and said he and other senators would ask that the clearances be granted to employees of the department's Office of Professional Responsibility.

Ken Belson contributed reporting from New York for this article.

SPYING PROGRAM SNARED U.S. CALLS
By JAMES RISEN AND ERIC LICHTBLAU (NYT) 1008 words
Published: December 21, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 20 - A surveillance program approved by President Bush to conduct eavesdropping without warrants has captured what are purely domestic communications in some cases, despite a requirement by the White House that one end of the intercepted conversations take place on foreign soil, officials say.
The officials say the National Security Agency's interception of a small number of communications between people within the United States was apparently accidental, and was caused by technical glitches at the National Security Agency in determining whether a communication was in fact 'international.'

Telecommunications experts say the issue points up troubling logistical questions about the program. At a time when communications networks are increasingly globalized, it is sometimes difficult even for the N.S.A. to determine whether someone is inside or outside the United States when making a cellphone call or sending an e-mail message. As a result, people that the security agency may think are outside the United States are actually on American soil.

Vice President Dick Cheney entered the debate over the legality of the program on Tuesday, casting the program as part of the administration's efforts to assert broader presidential powers. [Page A36.]

Eavesdropping on communications between two people who are both inside the United States is prohibited under Mr. Bush's order allowing some domestic surveillance.

But in at least one instance, someone using an international cellphone was thought to be outside the United States when in fact both people in the conversation were in the country. Officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the program remains classified, would not discuss the number of accidental intercepts, but the total is thought to represent a very small fraction of the total number of wiretaps that Mr. Bush has authorized without getting warrants. In all, officials say the program has been used to eavesdrop on as many as 500 people at any one time, with the total number of people reaching perhaps into the thousands in the last three years.

Mr. Bush and his senior aides have emphasized since the disclosure of the program's existence last week that the president's executive order applied only to cases where one party on a call or e-mail message was outside the United States.

Gen. Michael V. Hayden, the former N.S.A. director who is now the second-ranking intelligence official in the country, was asked at a White House briefing this week whether there had been any 'purely domestic' intercepts under the program.

'The authorization given to N.S.A. by the president requires that one end of these communications has to be outside the United States,' General Hayden answered. 'I can assure you, by the physics of the intercept, by how we actually conduct our activities, that one end of these communications are always outside the United States.'

Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales also emphasized that the order only applied to international communications. 'People are running around saying that the United States is somehow spying on American citizens calling their neighbors,' he said. 'Very, very important to understand that one party to the communication has to be outside the United States.'

A spokeswoman for the office of national intelligence declined comment on whether the N.S.A. had intercepted any purely domestic communications. 'We'll stand by what General Hayden said in his statement,' said the spokeswoman, Judy Emmel.

The Bush administration has not released the guidelines that the N.S.A. uses in determining who is suspected of having links to Al Qaeda and may be a target under the program. General Hayden said the determination was made by operational people at the agency and 'must be signed off by a shift supervisor,' with the process closely scrutinized by officials at the agency, the Justice Department and elsewhere.

But questions about the legal and operational oversight of the program last year prompted the administration to suspend aspects of it temporarily and put in place tighter restrictions on the procedures used to focus on suspects, said people with knowledge of the program. The judge who oversees the secret court that authorizes intelligence warrants -- and which has been largely bypassed by the program -- also raised concerns about aspects of the program.

The concerns led to a secret audit, which did not reveal any abuses in focusing on suspects or instances in which purely domestic communications were monitored, said officials familiar with the classified findings.

General Hayden, at this week's briefing, would not discuss many technical aspects of the program and did not answer directly when asked whether the program was used to eavesdrop on people who should not have been. But he indicated that N.S.A. operational personnel sometimes decide to stop surveillance of a suspect when the eavesdropping has not produced relevant leads on terror cases.

'We can't waste resources on targets that simply don't provide valuable information, and when we decide that is the case,' the decision on whether a target is 'worthwhile' is usually made in days or weeks, he said.

National security and telecommunications experts said that even if the N.S.A. seeks to adhere closely to the rules that Mr. Bush has set, the logistics of the program may make it difficult to ensure that the rules are being followed.

With roaming cellphones, internationally routed e-mail, and voice-over Internet technology, 'it's often tough to find out where a call started and ended,' said Robert Morris, a former senior scientist at the N.S.A. who is retired. 'The N.S.A. is good at it, but it's difficult even for them. Where a call actually came from is often a mystery.'

DOMESTIC SURVEILLANCE: THE WHITE HOUSE; Defending Spy Program, Administration Cites Law
By DAVID JOHNSTON AND NEIL A. LEWIS; ERIC LICHTBLAU CONTRIBUTED REPORTING FOR THIS ARTICLE. (NYT) 1392 words
Published: December 23, 2005

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 - In its first formal response to Congress on the growing controversy over domestic spying, the Bush administration argued Thursday that the president's authorization of domestic spying was consistent with the 1978 law that governs the government's electronic eavesdropping.
The letter to Congress, which was signed by William E. Moschella, assistant attorney general for Congressional affairs, said the administration considered the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the court established through it, 'a very important tool' in fighting terrorism and 'makes full use' of it.

But the letter, which was sent to the chairmen of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, said the system 'could not have provided the speed and agility for the early warning system' demanded by President Bush.

It also argued that the administration could not have sought expanded authority from Congress under the law without risking exposure. To go to Congress for legislative authority, the department said, 'would have tipped off our enemies concerning our intelligence limitations and capabilities.'

The letter came as simmering tensions between the Justice Department and the secretive intelligence court that authorizes wiretaps and searches in national-security and terrorism cases spilled into public view with the disclosure of the domestic surveillance program.

In what is emerging as a burgeoning protest and a potentially serious problem for the Bush administration, one member of the 10-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court has resigned. In addition, the presiding judge of the panel has sought more information from the Justice Department and intelligence agencies about why the government seemingly ignored the court and the federal statutes that require the court's approval for electronic monitoring in national security cases on American soil.

The first sign that some of the judges on the court were angry came on Monday with the resignation of Judge James Robertson of Federal District Court in the District of Columbia, first reported in The Washington Post, as was the demand for more information. He was appointed to a federal judgeship in 1994 by President Bill Clinton. He will keep his seat on the bench, government officials said.

Later, the chief judge on the FISA court, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who was appointed to the bench in 1997 by Mr. Clinton, began an effort to arrange a classified briefing for other court members so the administration could explain why it sidestepped the court, the officials said.

In defending their actions, Mr. Bush and his chief legal advisers, including Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, have said the law allowed them to sidestep the court in some instances. Mr. Gonzales said at a news conference this week that the law establishing the intelligence court applied to eavesdropping operations in the United States 'unless otherwise authorized by statute or by Congress.' In this case, he said, the electronic monitoring was authorized under a broadly worded Congressional resolution approved a week after the 9/11 attacks.

The letter on Thursday from Mr. Moschella provided a similar but more detailed argument that the program was consistent with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. He said that the act explicitly provides that domestic eavesdropping must be conducted under the law but that it contained an exception that would allow eavesdropping if authorized by another statute. The Authorization to Use Military Force enacted by Congress after the Sept. 11 attacks serves as that statute.

The letter said the authorization to use force included the ability to eavesdrop because 'throughout history, signals intelligence has formed a critical part of waging war.' The Congressional authorization for the president to protect American citizens, it said, 'cannot be read to exclude this long-recognized and essential authority to conduct communications intelligence targeted at the enemy,' adding, 'We can't fight a war blind.'

One element of the debate is certain to be whether Congress intended to authorize eavesdropping without warrants when it enacted the authorization to use force, as the administration has argued.

It is not altogether evident why the government has viewed the FISA court as an obstacle. The annual statistical summary provided by the court shows that the panel has overwhelmingly approved the warrants sought by the Justice Department. From 1995 to 2004, the court received 10,617 warrant applications, according to figures compiled by the Federation of American Scientists. It turned down only four, all in 2003 for unexplained reasons.

But the statistics mask a more robust and adversarial relationship between the FISA court and Justice Department lawyers who appear before it in secret sessions, creating tensions that the eavesdropping program has forced to the surface. Officials who have been briefed on the FISA process said that the government regularly withdrew or modified applications when it appeared the judges might disapprove them.

The officials spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the subject matter, which usually involves sensitive or classified material.

Before the September 2001 attacks, Justice Department officials said that the law and the department's own legal interpretations, which went beyond the requirements of the statutes, had created a confusing maze of regulations that often stymied investigations of suspected terrorists because of what became known as a legal 'wall.' The wall was a legal barrier that was said by F.B.I. agents to prevent national security investigators and criminal investigators from sharing information about the same suspects each was tracking.

Some agents complained that the FISA court's cumbersome submission requirements and insistence on strict adherence to the law had contributed to the impression that the court itself was an obstacle to aggressive investigation of terror cases. As an example, these agents suggested F.B.I. lawyers did not seek a FISA warrant in the case of Zacarias Moussaoui, who was arrested shortly before the 2001 attacks, in part because they believed the court would reject it.

The USA Patriot Act, adopted after the attacks, made information sharing easier, but until then, officials said, the special court had in fact closely monitored applications for special search or wiretap authorizations. For their part, FISA judges sometimes privately expressed suspicions that law enforcement officials were trying to use the FISA procedures, which required lower standards to obtain a warrant than would be in effect in a criminal case, to gather information for a criminal prosecutions, according to officials briefed on the subject.

The legal debate first became public in November 2002 when a special federal appeals court, established for the sole purpose of hearing cases brought up from the FISA court, ruled that the Patriot Act no longer set up a wall that legally blocked information sharing. The court added that it now believed that the barrier had been a false wall that had never been necessary or legally required.

Judge Royce C. Lamberth of Federal District, who had been the chief judge of the FISA court but no longer sits on the panel, has said publicly that he had often acted quickly to consider requests by officials. He said that after the bombings of United States Embassies in Africa in 1998, he held his first emergency sessions in his living room at 3 a.m. to review applications.

He recounted that while he was mowing his lawn the first weekend in April, 'I had to stop and do seven emergency hearings with four carloads of agents in the driveway.' His wife was obliged to go upstairs when he considered emergency applications, Judge Lamberth said, because she lacked the necessary security clearance, but his cocker spaniel remained by his side.

In one speech, Judge Lamberth gave some indication of how law enforcement officials might have felt there were obstacles to obtaining warrants. He said that when someone from the Justice Department makes an application, the agent making the request is put under oath, and, 'I ask questions and get into the nitty-gritty.'

Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act

US CODE: Foreign Intelligence Surveillance

CRS Report to Congress

May 13, 2006
The Surveillance Uproar, From Coast to Coast (11 Letters)
To the Editor:
Re "Bush Is Pressed Over New Report on Surveillance" (front page, May 12):

I strongly suspect that the latest revelations about the National Security Agency's collection of millions of telephone records represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the full extent of the Bush administration's domestic surveillance program.

If this activity is not illegal, it should be.

As a citizen, I call upon Congress to rein in this administration's activities. President Bush says he is doing this to protect us. I say he is systematically undermining the very freedoms he claims to protect.

John Trask
Thousand Oaks, Calif.
May 12, 2006

To the Editor:

How much longer are the American people and our elected Congress going to sit by idly and watch our civil liberties, our rights to privacy and our Constitution be systematically torn apart by President Bush and his administration?

This latest in a series of efforts to undermine the very freedoms this country is based upon, all in the name of protecting the country against terrorism, should make us ashamed and scared.

It is time we all stood up and said: "Don't lie to us again, Mr. President. We're not going to take it anymore."

Gail C. Weisgrau
Clifton, N.J., May 12, 2006

To the Editor:

The administration says it did not mine or "troll through" the phone calls of millions of Americans.

In fact, what it did was invade the house or persons of each of those Americans and steal their address books.

Tracing the ringing of millions of phones sure sounds like invasion of privacy to me.

Fred Schachat
Durham, N.C., May 12, 2006

To the Editor:

President Bush said that "every time sensitive intelligence is leaked it hurts our ability to defeat this enemy" (front page, May 12), but I find that hard to believe.

Does he think that Osama bin Laden and other members of Al Qaeda are so obtuse that they would not expect surveillance of their phone calls by United States intelligence agencies?

Moreover, the president has had almost five years to defeat "this enemy" but has failed for many reasons having nothing to do with intelligence leaks.

Chase Webb
Portland, Ore., May 12, 2006

To the Editor:

The idea that the National Security Agency wants to keep track of where all our phone calls are going is outrageous! The argument that it isn't interested in the content of the calls is a lie.

This kind of data collection is no different from wanting to know where everyone goes in the evenings. Does it make it any better if someone said he wasn't interested in what you were doing in a particular place?

We haven't seen this kind of trampling of our civil rights since the McCarthy era.

Bill Ko
North Plainfield, N.J., May 12, 2006

To the Editor:

Let me get this straight. We cannot find the world's most infamous 6-foot-4 terrorist in the barren tribal areas of Pakistan. The F.B.I. is years away from upgrading its computer systems to allow agents to search its own terrorism files.

Yet we're sorting through the telephone records of millions of Americans, looking for "evidence of terrorist activity"?

Karen Krane
Fair Lawn, N.J., May 12, 2006

To the Editor:

Re "Spy vs. Spy" (Op-Ed, May 10):

Thomas Powers writes that the man nominated to be the new director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, "created and helped to hide from scrutiny a large-scale N.S.A. eavesdropping program aimed at Americans."

Actually, the program is aimed at protecting Americans from foreign terrorists who want to kill us and our families.

The program does not threaten our civil liberties. It enhances them, by increasing our chances of traveling on a train or plane without being blown up or flown into an office building.

Lewis Regenstein
Atlanta, May 10, 2006
The writer was an intelligence officer for the C.I.A. from 1966 to 1971.

To the Editor:

Re "An Ever-Expanding Secret" (editorial, May 12):

It is ironic that at the same time the United States is spending billions of dollars fighting wars for democracy in Afghanistan and Iraq, we are losing our democracy here at home.

If after considering all the facts, our elected officials decide that we must lose some privacy to maintain our security, that is a democratic and acceptable option.

This president unilaterally decided to break our laws to ensure our security; we may be safe, but we are no longer free. The terrorists have won.

Linda K. Bowles
Chicago, May 12, 2006

To the Editor:

When word of a domestic spying program began to spread last year, Americans were told by the Bush administration that it was only the potential terrorists who were being monitored.

Now we learn that millions of citizens' telephone records are being given to a National Security Agency program.

What happened to the concept that we are innocent until proved guilty?

We still don't know where Osama bin Laden is hiding, but I'm at peace now, knowing that our government knows how many times I called my grandma this week to see how she's doing since she fell last Saturday.

Jerry T. Johnson
South Bloomington, Minn.

May 12, 2006
To the Editor:

Good luck to the National Security Agency if it can decipher my phone records. It will need more success than I had in understanding information provided by AT&T and Verizon when I spent hours analyzing my bills trying to find less expensive plans.

Margaret Smyth
Charlestown, Mass., May 12, 2006

To the Editor:

The Bush administration contends that the compilation of a database of records of billions of phone calls made by Americans to one another is O.K. because nobody is listening to the calls.

But suppose that somebody the government doesn't like has a phone conversation with you.

The suspect may be innocent of any crime. You may be innocent of any crime. It doesn't matter. The fact that a phone call took place is now a record in the National Security Agency database and could get you into trouble whether or not anybody listened to the conversation.

Is this the kind of government we want?

Mike Orkin