NSA Spying Lies

The liberal website ThinkProgress has revealed that multiple claims by the Drudge Report and National Review Online dealing with an executive order passed by president Clinton -- that the order established the same practice for which Bush is currently being criticized -- are demonstrably false (article here).

Drudge omitted key language in his presentation of the order in order to create the impression that it established a right of the president (with the aid of the attorney general) to eavesdrop on American citizens without a warrant. In fact, the omitted language made it very clear that the eavesdropping in question could not involve "United States persons" (American citizens and permanent residents). Drudge made similar claims regarding an executive order signed by president Jimmy Carter, omitting details of the order which prohibited eavesdropping on US citizens. Liberal bias or not, the language of the order, revealed in full at ThinkProgress, explodes this defense that has been widely circulated around the conservative blogosphere.

From the analysis by ThinkProgress:

What Drudge says:

Clinton, February 9, 1995: “The Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order”

What Clinton actually signed:

Section 1. Pursuant to section 302(a)(1) [50 U.S.C. 1822(a)] of the [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance] Act, the Attorney General is authorized to approve physical searches, without a court order, to acquire foreign intelligence information for periods of up to one year, if the Attorney General makes the certifications required by that section.

That section requires the Attorney General to certify is the search will not involve “the premises, information, material, or property of a United States person.” That means U.S. citizens or anyone inside of the United States.

The entire controversy about Bush’s program is that, for the first time ever, allows warrantless surveillance of U.S. citizens and other people inside of the United States. Clinton’s 1995 executive order did not authorize that.

Examples of this sort of distortion are becoming more and more abundant as Republican groups fabricate justifications for Bush's NSA eavesdropping program, a program thought by many to be obviously unconstitutional and in violation of federal law.