Friday, April 17, 2009
WASHINGTON (AP) — The head of the Senate Intelligence Committee said Thursday that the panel would conduct a hearing to get to the bottom of reports that the National Security Agency improperly tapped into the domestic communications of American citizens.
“We will make sure we get the facts,” said Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif.
The House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees learned of the problem in late February from the Justice Department, a congressional official said Thursday. The committees have since had multiple private briefings on the NSA transgressions.
The Justice Department confirmed Wednesday that it had reined in the NSA’s wiretapping activities in the United States after learning that the agency had improperly accessed American phone calls and e-mails while eavesdropping on foreign communications.
Justice officials discovered the problems during a routine review of NSA wiretapping. The government’s action was first divulged Wednesday by The New York Times.
The Senate hearing will be closed to the public. It will delve into questions raised by the Times story that have not been covered in closed-door informal briefings, a committee official said. The official would not say what those issues are.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because the NSA program is classified.
Justice officials said the problems have been corrected, but they declined to say what measures were taken. They would not detail how the law governing NSA wiretapping was violated or for how long, nor estimate how many Americans’ communications were compromised.
Critics of the secret program — the extent of which has never been revealed — contend the government has illegally wiretapped and used data-mining techniques to sweep up vast amounts of phone and e-mail communications.
Kevin Bankston, an attorney with the privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation, said the revelation shows the “NSA surveillance program is not narrowly targeted against international terrorist communications as the government has claimed, but actually sweeps in masses of domestic communications from telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic networks.”
For years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, President George W. Bush secretly authorized the NSA to intercept phone conversations and e-mails inside the United States.
He did so without the knowledge or permission of a court created by law 30 years ago to oversee just such activities to prevent government abuse of surveillance powers.