Rhetoric: High; Anxiety: Low
By ERIC LICHTBLAU
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The warnings from President Bush and his senior aides have grown more urgent over the last few weeks, now that Congress has let a temporary wiretapping law expire. But there is little sign of anxiety among many intelligence and phone industry officials.
At the Pentagon and the military’s Central Command, senior officials gave no indication of any heightened concern about the lapsing of the law. In Congress, staff members with access to updated briefings said they had not been given any specific information about lost intelligence that might endanger national security. And in the telecommunications industry, executives said it was largely business as usual.
Indeed, for all the heated rhetoric in Washington about the government’s wiretapping powers, the debate over what a new surveillance law should look like has little to do with the present or the future and almost everything to do with the past.
At its crux, the debate is about whether Mr. Bush can give retroactive legal protection to telephone carriers that cooperated in the program of wiretapping without warrants he authorized weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a program that critics charge was illegal.
As far back as last August, when Mr. Bush signed a temporary eavesdropping bill that left out the long-sought immunity clause, he made clear where his priorities lay. Congress, he said, still needed to provide “meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our nation following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
(Continued here.)
New York Times
WASHINGTON — The warnings from President Bush and his senior aides have grown more urgent over the last few weeks, now that Congress has let a temporary wiretapping law expire. But there is little sign of anxiety among many intelligence and phone industry officials.
At the Pentagon and the military’s Central Command, senior officials gave no indication of any heightened concern about the lapsing of the law. In Congress, staff members with access to updated briefings said they had not been given any specific information about lost intelligence that might endanger national security. And in the telecommunications industry, executives said it was largely business as usual.
Indeed, for all the heated rhetoric in Washington about the government’s wiretapping powers, the debate over what a new surveillance law should look like has little to do with the present or the future and almost everything to do with the past.
At its crux, the debate is about whether Mr. Bush can give retroactive legal protection to telephone carriers that cooperated in the program of wiretapping without warrants he authorized weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a program that critics charge was illegal.
As far back as last August, when Mr. Bush signed a temporary eavesdropping bill that left out the long-sought immunity clause, he made clear where his priorities lay. Congress, he said, still needed to provide “meaningful liability protection to those who are alleged to have assisted our nation following the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.”
(Continued here.)
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