Senators dubious of spying rules

Senators peppered top Justice Department and intelligence officials Tuesday with skeptical questions about their proposal to revise the rules for spying on Americans.

Senate Intelligence Committee members said the Bush administration must provide more information about its earlier domestic spying before it can hope to gain additional powers for the future.

“Is the administration’s proposal necessary, or does it take a step further down a path that we will regret as a nation?” asked Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.) as he convened a rare public hearing of the committee he chairs.

For two hours, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell, National Security Agency Director Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander, Assistant Atty. Gen. Kenneth J. Wainstein and their lawyers tried to parry increasingly dubious and hostile questions. They deferred many answers to a committee session closed to the public.

With little apparent success, they portrayed the administration bill as merely an adjustment to technological changes wrought by cellphones, e-mail and the Internet since the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was enacted in the 1970s. Under current rules, McConnell said, “we’re actually missing a significant portion of what we should be getting.”

But Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-R.I.) responded, “We look through the lens of the past to judge how much we can trust you.” Like other senators, he said that trust had been undermined by the recent disclosure that the FBI had abused so-called national security letters to obtain information about Americans.

Whitehouse added another factor. “The attorney general has thoroughly and utterly lost my confidence,” he said in reference to Alberto R. Gonzales’ shifting explanations for the dismissals of eight U.S. attorneys.

Rockefeller pressed a demand for documents and was joined by vice chair Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond (R-Mo.).

“There is simply no excuse for not providing to this committee all the legal opinions on the president’s program,” Rockefeller said.

The committee asked a year ago for Bush’s order -- and the Justice Department legal opinions supporting it -- that directed the NSA after the Sept. 11 attacks to eavesdrop without warrants on Americans believed to be in contact with terrorists.

Democrats and civil liberties and conservative groups complained that the directive violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which requires warrants from a secret court for intelligence surveillance of Americans. Bush agreed in January to put the program under the court’s supervision.

In 2006, the surveillance court approved all but one request to eavesdrop on people in the United States, according to the Justice Department. The court approved a total of 2,176 warrants.

The FISA court also approved 43 warrants allowing investigators access to business records of suspected terrorists and spies.

Even though the administration insists the warrantless wiretapping was legal under the president’s constitutional powers, the administration bill contains a provision blocking lawsuits against telephone companies that cooperated. The administration has won most of the court battles so far over that spying, but one judge declared it illegal.

“Congress is being asked to enact legislation that brings to an end lawsuits that allege violations of the rights of Americans,” Rockefeller said. “We cannot legislate in the blind.”