Contradictory Intelligence

This is interesting: a crack in the reasoning for The Administration's authorization of the NSA to illegally tap international calls:

The question from both Democratic and Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee at a hearing Monday was: Why stop there? Why not intercept domestic calls, as well?

"I don't understand why you would limit your eavesdropping only to foreign conversations," Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.) told Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales.

The committee's debate highlighted one of the most significant apparent contradictions in the administration's defense of the spying program, under which the National Security Agency intercepts some calls to and from the United States and contacts overseas.

Many national security law experts said yesterday that the distinction makes little sense legally, because the administration concluded that President Bush has the constitutional authority to order wiretaps on U.S. citizens and residents without court approval.

Once that threshold is crossed, numerous experts said yesterday, there is little reason to limit the kind of calls that can be intercepted. It is irrelevant where the other contact is located, they said.

"The rationale for this surveillance has nothing to do with anything tied to a border," said Geoffrey R. Stone, a University of Chicago law professor critical of the administration's legal justifications for the NSA program.

"There's no pragmatic reason and no principled reason why, if it is okay for NSA to listen in on phone calls between someone in Detroit and Pakistan without a warrant, they also can't listen in on a phone call between Detroit and New York," Stone said.

Bruce Fein, a deputy attorney general in the Reagan administration who is among a number of prominent Republican critics of the NSA program, said the argument underscores what he views as a lack of consistency in the administration's legal arguments.

"If it's good enough for international calls, then it should be good enough for domestic calls, too," Fein said.

So this restriction, by The Administration, doesn't make sense, given their reasons for pursuing the program. If you're going to spy illegally, without warrants, you might as well just spy illegally, without warrants, across the board. Why hold back? And if your fear is that there are cells of terrorists in the states taking guidance and collaborating, why wouldn't you want to snare that communication as well?

Gonzales told senators that Bush had considered including purely domestic communications in the spying program. The idea was rejected in part because of fear of public outcry. He also said the Justice Department had not fully analyzed the legal issues of such a move.

So Gonzales states that the reason not to do this are purely political- that once American's know that they are being spied upon without any legal authority to do so, they become annoyed and stop supporting you.

Not because it has any legal justification to do one without the other. Just because they were afraid people wouldn't like it if they were spied on.

But they are being spied on. And people don't like it.

Plus, it's questionable that it's doing any good anyway.