Stepping in it
Posted by Greg on January 23, 2006
Gen. Michael Hayden, the principal deputy director of national intelligence said today the administration wasn’t going through telecommunications records for data mining, but unfortunately his explanation doesn’t go a long way toward clearing things up. If anything, it makes it worse for the administration.
At Kos, it’s pointed out that he doesn’t even have the constitutional principles right.
Kevin Drum observes:
Unless I’ve missed something along the way, this is important news. Hayden is saying that the NSA program isn’t some kind of large-scale data mining operation that the authors of the FISA act never could have foreseen. Rather, it’s “targeted and focused” and involves “only international calls and only those we have a reasonable basis to believe involve al Qaeda or one of its affiliates.”
In other words, it’s precisely the kind of monitoring that the FISA court already approves routinely and in large volumes. Another few hundred requests wouldn’t faze them in the least.
Hayden’s remarks in DC today were supposed to be a key part of the administration’s defense of the program. As far as I can tell, it makes the controversy worse, not better.
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