15 Questions

The Judiciary Committee is going to start soon on it's hearings on the NSA terrorist spying related to domestic callers. Yeah, it's a long description, but far more accurate than the MSM or the Administration uses.

Specter has sent Gonzales a list of 15 questions that he wants answered in the hearing. You can see the letter here from NationalReview.com.

Some of the questions have interesting press:

• When foreign calls are made through U.S. switches, isn't such monitoring against the law or a violation of regulations that restrict the NSA from conducting surveillance inside the United States?

The last question goes to the heart of an argument McClellan has made in recent days that takes issue with calling the program "domestic spying."

The administration has said it allows the surveillance only when at least one end of the phone call or e-mail traffic is outside the United States and one person involved is a suspected terrorist.

"I think it leaves an inaccurate impression with the American people to say that this is domestic spying," McClellan said. "You don't call a flight from New York to somewhere in Afghanistan a domestic flight. It's called an international flight."

Very interesting. You could also point out that there is a very large amount of internet traffic that flows primarily through the US, because there is no direct data links between some foreign countries. If the NSA viewed these "conversations" while physically inside the US wouldn't mean that they are spying domestically. I'm going to guess that this is a clarification question, not one looking to provide new information.

Personally, I like number 6.

Didn't President Jimmy Carter's signature on the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and the statement Carter issued at the time, amount to a renunciation of presidential authority "to conduct warrantless domestic surveillance"?

Maybe you can phrase it differently. How about "Did Carter's signature mean that he was renunicating the presidential power of gathering foreign intelligence from sources within the US?" There is an analysis of the war time and security powers in a Volokh Conspiracy piece looking at the NSA program.

The Supreme Court also left this question open in the so-called "Keith" case, United States v. United States District Court, in 1972. Justice Powell's opinion in the Keith case concluded that there was no national security exception to the Fourth Amendment for evidence collection involving domestic organizations, but expressly held open the possibility that such an exception existed for foreign intelligence collection:

Further, the instant case requires no judgment on the scope of the President's surveillance power with respect to the activities of foreign powers, within or without this country. The Attorney General's affidavit in this case states that the surveillances were "deemed necessary to protect the nation from attempts of domestic organizations to attack and subvert the existing structure of Government." There is no evidence of any involvement, directly or indirectly, of a foreign power.

And let's ask a question. One that I don't have an answer to. Is the Congress over reaching it's constitutional powers by establishing laws that restrict the President's constitutional powers? The contention being missed is that there are powers intrinsic to the various branches of government, and only the power of the President is under scrutiny here. All the assumptions made by the MSM have been that the Congress is right. An assumption that I'm not willing to accept without some better facts.