Warrantless wiretaps just the tip of the (classified) iceberg

This past Friday, the Offices of Inspectors General of the Department of Defense, Department of Justice, CIA, NSA, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence, released an unclassified summary of a report that fills in key details of the problems and controversies surrounding the large-scale electronic surveillance efforts that president George W. Bush authorized the NSA to undertake in the wake of 9/11.

In my previous article on the report, I described how the extraordinary secrecy around the PSP ended up sabotaging its practical effectiveness as a counter-terror tool. There are a number of security-related rationales for this secrecy, mostly of the “security through obscurity” variety, but there was a larger, more political reality that appears to have done as much as any operational security concerns to keep the program’s existence so closely held. In short, the OIG report recounts how the DOJ eventually decided that parts of the PSP were illegal, and the report’s narrative shows clearly that the program’s legality was actually a secondary concern for key members of both the executive and legislative branches, on both sides of the political aisle.

Click here to read the rest of this article