Sen. John D. Rockefeller stands up

Did you notice anything odd yesterday when the U.S. Senate voted 60-28 to pass emergency legislation to expand the federal government's power to conduct electronic surveillance without court approval?

Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller voted no.

That's worth a close look. While most of the members of the U.S. Senate have to take the president's word on intelligence matters, the chairman of the Intelligence Committee is fully briefed on everything.

Everything.

If there is anyone in the government who is in a position to know if the Bush administration is off the mark on intelligence matters, it's Senator John D. Rockefeller, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

And he thinks they are.

Sen. Rockefeller said the emergency legislation lacks "the privacy protections and safeguards American citizens deserve and expect."

He can't tell us what protections are missing, because he can't tell us what the intelligence agencies are doing, because everything about this surveillance program is secret.

The argument can be made that all this secrecy is actually counterproductive, and that if the intelligence agencies put more information on the table, it would actually increase our security by allowing the press and public to recognize both the errors and the suspects.

The argument also can be made that all this secrecy is unconstitutional, because secret courts and secret evidence and warrantless surveillance are specifically, in plain English, prohibited.

But that's a discussion for another day. Today, as the House of Representatives prepares to vote on a bill identical to the one passed by the Senate yesterday, the question is this: Can we trust the Bush administration with the power to collect the phone records of American citizens inside the United States?

Can we trust Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, a man who has been caught in so many lies that senators of both parties are considering perjury charges against him, to make the determination that warrantless surveillance in any specific case is allowable?

Justice Department officials have already admitted violating civil service laws by using political considerations to hire and fire federal prosecutors. What would they have done with secret access to everyone's phone records?

We can make a pretty good guess about the nature of the National Security Agency's terrorist surveillance program. It appears to be a database aimed at collecting the records of all the phone calls made in the United States. That's different from listening to the conversations, which probably will require a warrant, if the Bush administration follows the law. The creation of a database of calls would allow the government to search the phone records of people who are suspected of something, even though they were not suspected of anything at the time the information was collected.

In a perfect world, it would work like this: the moment a terror suspect is identified, the database would produce a complete list of everyone he ever called and everyone who ever called him. Then those phone numbers could be run through the database to find the phone numbers linked to each one.

But in the real world, the world in which the FBI has spent fortunes on two consecutive computer systems that don't work, the government's collection of all the phone records in the country presents problems. The machinery of federal law enforcement is powerful and oppressive. There is a very real risk that innocent people will be mistakenly suspected of terrorist connections.

Imagine the effect it would have on your career and family if a team of FBI agents swept into your workplace one day and walked out carrying your files and computers in cardboard boxes. It could easily happen if your phone number was believed to be linked to a phone number that once belonged to a suspected terrorist. That might be enough for a judge to sign a search warrant. Nobody wants to be blamed for the next terrorist attack.

But while the probability of error is very high, the likelihood of usefulness may be very low. Former CIA Director George Tenet said his agents were so backlogged with information before 9/11 that they failed to notify the FBI that al-Qaeda operatives had entered the country. Does it make us safer to vastly increase the irrelevant information in the CIA's in-box?

Is it really necessary to our safety to expand the warrantless surveillance program? It's all secret, so we can't answer that question.

But Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman John D. Rockefeller can. And he just did. And he said no.

The Members of the House of Representatives should look closely at that before they vote today.


Copyright 2007


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