A second report from the independent Congressional Research Agency finds that Bush's warrantless NSA electronic surveillance did not comply with federal law.

The Congressional Research Service opinion said that the amended 1947 law requires President Bush to keep all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees "fully and currently informed" of such intelligence activities as the domestic surveillance effort.

The memo from national security specialist Alfred Cumming is the second report this month from CRS to question the legality of aspects of Bush's domestic spying program. A Jan. 6 report concluded that the administration's justifications for the program conflicted with current law.

Statement today by Al Gore (received by e-mail):

The Administration’s response to my speech illustrates perfectly the need for a special counsel to review the legality of the NSA wiretapping program. The Attorney General is making a political defense of the President without even addressing the substantive legal questions that have so troubled millions of Americans in both political parties.

There are two problems with the Attorney General's effort to focus attention on the past instead of the present Administration's behavior. First, as others have thoroughly documented, his charges are factually wrong. Both before and after the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was amended in 1995, the Clinton/Gore Administration complied fully and completely with the terms of the law.

Bump and Update: The ACLU press release is here. There is a webpage with documents and statements. The text of the complaint is here (pdf.)

The Center for Constitutional Rights press release is here.
The complaint is here. (pdf)

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Original Post (1/17 5:00 am)

The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights will be filing federal lawsuits today over Bush's warrantless NSA electronic surveillance program. The ACLU will file its suit in Detroit and CCR will file in New York.

Both groups are seeking to have the courts order an immediate end to the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional....officials said the Justice Department would probably oppose the lawsuits on national security grounds.

The New York Times has another first on the warrantless NSA electronic surveillance program Bush used after 9/11. Turns out, it was a flop.

In the anxious months after the Sept. 11 attacks, the National Security Agency began sending a steady stream of telephone numbers, e-mail addresses and names to the F.B.I. in search of terrorists. The stream soon became a flood, requiring hundreds of agents to check out thousands of tips a month.

But virtually all of them, current and former officials say, led to dead ends or innocent Americans.

FBI agents complained:

Al Gore rose to the occasion today and blasted Bush's warrantless NSA surveillance program as illegal. From the New York Times:

The speech in Washington was organized by the Liberty Coalition, a civil liberties advocacy group, and the American Constitution Society for Law and Public Policy, a liberal legal group.

"It is this same disrespect for America's Constitution which has now brought our republic to the brink of a dangerous breach in the fabric of the Constitution," Mr. Gore said. "And the disrespect embodied in these apparent mass violations of the law is part of a larger pattern of seeming indifference to the Constitution that is deeply troubling to millions of Americans in both political parties."

Raw Story has the text of Al Gore's speech. Crooks and Liars has the link to the video highlights. Peter Daou notes that the cable news stations didn't cover it, opting instead to feature an overturned tanker. Peter has more over at Huffpo. Firedoglake weighs in on the speech.

The ACLU today took out a full page ad in the Washington Post (viewable here) calling on Americans to tell the White House to stop illegal spying.

"It has never been acceptable for the government to spy on Americans without having to go to court and present evidence as to why the individual is under suspicion. It was unacceptable when they spied on Martin Luther King and it is unacceptable today," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "This fundamental tenet of American democracy has been blatantly violated by President Bush and he must be held accountable. No one, most importantly our elected leader, is above the law.”

Bump and Update: Update: al-Zawahiri was not killed in the attack on the Pakastani Village. Between 17 and 30 villagers were killed, and Pakistanis are protesting the air strike.

According to U.S. sources,

CIA-operated unmanned drones were believed to have been used in the attack, U.S. sources said. A Pakistani intelligence official said four missiles had been fired.

It looks like the raid has resulted in creating at least one future terrorist:

At another destroyed house, Sami Ullah, a 17-year-old student, said 24 of his family members were killed and vowed he would "seek justice from God."

by TChris

Former Attorney General John Ashcroft implemented the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS), which required thousands of Arab and Muslim men "to report to local immigration offices across the United States to be registered, fingerprinted, photographed and interrogated."

NSEERS was so poorly conceived and badly managed that it created chaos and fear. Trust between the immigrant community and law enforcement was severely strained, and in the end, there was no evidence that any terrorists were apprehended as a result of the effort.

Although parts of the program have been suspended, it continues to cause harm.

Rep. John Conyers has announced the Democrats will hold a hearing on Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance program on January 20.

Rep. Conyers also highly recommends constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe's letter outlining the illegality of the program, which he includes in his post.

The Supreme Court has never upheld such a sweeping power to invade the privacy of Americans at home without individualized suspicion or judicial oversight.

Law Prof Geoffrey Stone at Huffington Post writes that 14 constitutional scholars and former government officials have written a letter to Congress detailing the reasons that Bush's warrantless electronic surveillance program violates the law.

Although the program's secrecy prevents us from being privy to all of its details, the Justice Department's defense of what it concedes was secret and warrantless electronic surveillance of persons within the United States fails to identify any plausible legal authority for such surveillance. Accordingly the program appears on its face to violate existing law.

A new report from Congressional Research Service attempts to answer the question of whether Bush had the legal authority to authorize the National Security Agency to order warrantless surveillance on Americans. CRS is the public policy, independent research arm of Congress.

While the Congressional report reached no bottom-line conclusions on whether the program is legal or not, it concluded that the legal rationale appears somewhat dubious. The legal rationale "does not seem to be as well-grounded" as the Bush administration's lawyers have suggested, and Congress did not appear to have intended to authorize warrantless wiretaps when it gave President Bush the authority to wage war against Al Qaeda in the days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the report concluded.

Tom Kean, Chair of the 9/11 Commission agrees:

by TChris

How reliable is fingerprint evidence? Ask Brandon Mayfield, the Oregon lawyer who was arrested and detained as a material witness for two weeks after the FBI concluded that his fingerprints matched fingerprints found at the site of a train bombing in Spain. The Justice Department’s inspector general recently concluded that the fingerprints were “unusually similar” and that FBI lab technicians were “overly confident” of the match. (TalkLeft background on Mayfield is collected here. More information about the uncertain science of fingerprint comparison can be found in this post, and in this one.)

The inspector general also concluded that there was “no abuse of the USA Patriot Act” in Mayfield’s case, a conclusion that depends on the definition of “abuse.” As TalkLeft reported here and here, “sneak and peek” warrants were issued that permitted Mayfield’s property to be searched without his knowledge. That probably seems abusive to Mayfield, the innocent victim of the FBI’s intrusion. And the FBI's "overconfidence," which permitted it to disregard warnings from Spanish authorities that the prints didn't match, make the decision to subject Mayfield to the sneak and peek searches permitted by the Patriot Act seem even more abusive.