US intelligence eavesdrops on thousands of foreign calls: chief
Pastor Dale Morgan
US intelligence eavesdrops on thousands of foreign calls: chief *
Aug 22 06:56 PM US/Eastern
US intelligence eavesdrops on thousands of foreign telephone calls on
lines that cross through US territory but monitors the calls of fewer
than a hundred people in the United States, intelligence chief Mike
McConnell has disclosed.
McConnell's comments followed passage by the US Congress this month of a
law allowing the intelligence agencies to conduct warrantless intercepts
of calls between two foreign points.
McConnell stressed in an interview with the El Paso Times that
intelligence agencies must still obtain court warrants to monitor calls
in which at least one of the parties is in the United States.
"And so if a terrorist calls in and it's another terrorist, I think the
American public would want us to do surveillance of that US person in
this case," he said. "So we would just get a warrant and do that."
"It's a manageable thing. On the US persons side it's 100 or less. And
then the foreign side, it's in the thousands," he said.
The Texas newspaper, which interviewed McConnell last week, posted a
transcript on its website on Wednesday.
McConnell led the administration's campaign for passage of the new law,
which encountered fierce resistance in Congress.
He said he acted after a judge on a special court that oversees
intelligence surveillance activities ruled that the intelligence
agencies had to get warrants to intercept calls between foreign points
if they were carried on a US wire.
"The issue is volume and time," McConnell said.
He argued that it takes 200 man-hours to put together a request for a
warrant on a single phone number, making it impractical to do for
thousands of calls.
McConnell confirmed in the interview that US telecommunications
companies, which are now being sued for breaches of privacy law, had
assisted the government in conducting the surveillance.
He said the new law protects the companies from liability in the future,
but not retroactively.