Back in 2002, the White House developed a sophisticated system aimed at identifying alleged terrorists who lived in the United States.
The new intelligence program granted traditional law enforcement agencies as well as the FBI and the CIA the authority to conduct what was then called “suspicionless surveillance” of American citizens.
“Suspicionless Surveillance” was developed by the Pentagon’s controversial Total Information Awareness department, led by Admiral John Poindexter, the former national security adviser who secretly sold weapons to Middle Eastern terrorists in 1980s during the Iran-Contra affair and was convicted of a felony for lying to Congress and destroying evidence. The convictions were later overturned on appeal.
The program was somewhat different from the warrantless wiretaps President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency to conduct in 2002. “Suspicionless surveillance” – unveiled in a Pentagon press release, also in 2002 – was broader in scope: it gave law enforcement the authority to mine commercial and other private data on American citizens, listening in on phone calls, monitoring emails, inspecting credit-card and bank transactions of thousands of individuals on the off-chance that one might be a terrorist – and all without any judicial oversight.
While the programs operated somewhat differently, the goals were essentially the same: to quickly unmask terrorists communicating with individuals inside the United States. But protests by civil liberty and privacy groups, as well as apprehension by Republican and Democratic lawmakers over what amounted to domestic spying, led Congress to shut down the surveillance program in 2003.
It now appears that shortly after the federal government told the White House it was trampling on individual privacy rights with its “suspicionless surveillance,” several current and former NSA officials said, President Bush signed an executive order authorizing the National Security Agency to secretly eavesdrop on American citizens’ email and international phone calls, thereby continuing, in effect, a domestic spying program that Congress had objected to.
In the summer of 2002, a public outcry over the revelation that JetBlue Airways turned over the names and addresses of 1.5 million passengers to the Pentagon so the agency could create a database about Americans’ travel patterns, and also authorized the agency to monitor credit card transactions, forced Congress to withhold tens of millions of dollars in funding for the project.
Civil liberties groups, including the American Civil Liberties Union, came out swinging, saying the Bush administration was violating the privacy rights of average American citizens. Like the current domestic surveillance program under way, administration officials insisted at the time that their goal was to carry out targeted surveillance.
In a resignation letter in September 2003, Admiral Poindexter, the originator of the Total Information Awareness program, said his goal in monitoring individuals was to identify “patterns of transactions that are indicative of terrorist planning and preparations.”
“We never contemplated spying and saving data on Americans,” Poindexter wrote in his resignation letter.
But that’s exactly what happened during the early stages of the program. The administration acknowledged that its aggressive campaign to unmask terrorists living in the US would be hindered if it were required to avoid spying on average American citizens.
Poindexter’s plan, which barely got off the ground before Congress stepped in and dismantled the project, proposed to use state-of-the-art computer systems at the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command, headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to secretly monitor emails, credit-card transactions, phone records and bank statements of hundreds of thousands of American citizens on the chance that they might be associated with, or sympathetic to, terrorists.
Poindexter came up with the idea after 9/11 and discussed it over lunch with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, news reports said at the time.
Despite assurances that the federal government would not misuse the program, the JetBlue revelation proved that the administration was willing to sacrifice individual privacy rights in the name of national security. JetBlue officials said the airline was pressured by the Pentagon to hand over its private customer data to a Pentagon contractor named Torch Concepts. The contractor then bought demographic information on nearly half of the passengers from Acxicom, a marketing company. Torch then put together a study and posted it on the Internet.
In its report, Torch said that the government would have to monitor an unknown number of passengers to “find a needle in a haystack without knowing what the needle looks like.”
At least one lawmaker raised concerns at the time that implementing such a program could be illegal.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, told Rumsfeld during a public hearing in 2003 that the Total Information Awareness program “not only raises serious privacy concerns [but] might also be illegal and possibly unconstitutional.”
Last week, the Democratic controlled Congress passed legislation that gave President Bush expanded surveillance powers and immunized telecom companies that participated in possibly illegal surveillance of American citizens.
