NSA Spying on Americans Is Illegal

• Point #2: There are only three laws that permit the government to spy 

Congress has explicitly stated that three laws are the exclusive means by which domestic electronic surveillance can be carried out (18 USC, Section 2511(2)(f)). They are: Title III and the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, which make up the statutes that govern criminal wiretaps in the United States; and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which is the law that governs eavesdropping on agents of “foreign powers” within the United States, including suspected foreign terrorists. 

• Point #3: The Bush-NSA spying was not authorized by any of these laws 

Title III and ECPA govern domestic criminal wiretaps and are not relevant to the NSA’s spying. FISA is the law under which the NSA should have operated. It authorizes the government to conduct surveillance in certain situations without meeting all of the requirements of the Fourth Amendment that apply under criminal law, but requires that an independent Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court oversee that surveillance to make sure that Americans who have no ties to foreign terrorist organizations or other “foreign powers” are not spied upon.  

FISA was significantly loosened by the PATRIOT Act (which, for example, allowed it to be used for some criminal investigations). Parts of it stand in clear violation of the Fourth Amendment. However, even the post-PATRIOT Act version of FISA does not authorize the president to conduct warrantless eavesdropping on U.S. citizens or permanent legal residents in the U.S. without an order from the FISA Court. Yet it is that very court order requirement—imposed to protect innocent Americans—that the president ignores.  

One member of the FISA Court, Judge James Roberston, has apparently resigned from the court in protest of President Bush’s secret authorization of this program. The New York Times reported that the court’s chief judge complained about the program when she was (belatedly) notified of it and refused to allow information gathered under the program to be used as the basis for FISA wiretap orders.  

• Point #4: Congress’s post-9/11 use-of-force resolution does not legitimize the Bush/NSA spying 

Congress after 9/11 approved the Authorization to Use Military Force against those responsible for the attacks in order to authorize the president to conduct foreign military operations such as the invasion of Afghanistan.  

But that resolution contains no language changing, overriding, or repealing any laws passed by Congress. Congress does not repeal legislation through hints and innuendos, and the Authorization to Use Military Force does not authorize the president to violate the law against surveillance without a warrant any more than it authorizes him to carry out an armed robbery or seize control of Citibank in order to pay for operations against terrorists.  

When President Truman tried to seize control of steel mills that were gripped by strikes in 1952, the Supreme Court decisively rejected his authority to make such a seizure, even in the face of arguments that the strike would interfere with the supply of weapons and ammunition to U.S. troops in Korea. 

The Supreme Court also rejected similar assertions of inherent executive power by Richard Nixon. FISA contains explicit language describing the president’s powers “during time of war” and provides that “the President, through the Attorney General, may authorize electronic surveillance without a court order under this title to acquire foreign intelligence information for a period not to exceed fifteen days following a declaration of war by the Congress.” So even if we accept the argument that the use-of-force resolution places us on a war footing, warrantless surveillance would have been legal for only 15 days after the resolution was passed on September 18, 2001 . 

• Point #5: The need for quick action does not justify an end-run around the courts 

FISA allows wiretapping without a court order in an emergency; the court must be notified within 72 hours. The government is aware of this emergency power and has used it repeatedly. In addition, the Foreign Intelligence court is physically located in the Justice Department building and the FISA law requires that at least two FISA judges reside in the Washington, DC area, for precisely the reason that rapid action is sometimes needed. 

Given the extensive (indeed, excessive) surveillance powers that the government already possesses, the Administration’s blatantly illegal use of warrantless surveillance raises an important question: why? One possibility, raised by the New York Times in a December 24, 2005 story (“Spy Agency Mined Vast Data Trove, Officials Report”), is that the NSA is relying on assistance from several unnamed telecommunications companies to “trace and analyze large volumes of communications” and is “much larger than the White House has acknowledged.”  

This, as security expert Bruce Schneier has noted, suggests the Bush administration has developed “a whole new surveillance paradigm”—exploiting the NSA’s well known capabilities to spy on individuals not one at a time, as FISA permits, but to run communications en masse through computers in the search for “suspicious" individuals or patterns. This “new paradigm” may well be connected to the NSA program sometimes known as Echelon, which carries out that kind of mass collection of communications (www.nsawatch.org). This “wholesale” surveillance, as Schneier calls it, would constitute an illegal invasion of privacy on a scale that has never before been seen (Schneier, “NSA and Bush’s Illegal Eavesdropping,” Salon.com).  

According to the Times , several telecommunications companies provided the NSA with direct access to streams of communications over their networks. The NSA appears to have direct access to a large volume of Americans’ communications—with not only the assent, but also the cooperation of the companies handling those communications.  

It is not clear from the report what companies are involved or how or what the NSA can access. But this revelation raises questions about the legal authority of the NSA to request and receive this data and also whether these companies may have violated federal laws protecting these communications or their own privacy polices (which may, for example, provide that they will only turn over their customers’ data with their consent or in response to a proper order). 

Regardless of the scale of the spying, we are facing a historic moment: the president of the United States has claimed sweeping wartime powers to brush aside the clear limits on his power set by our Constitution and laws—a chilling assertion of presidential power that has not been seen since Richard Nixon.