Remember at the beginning of the National Security Agency wiretapping hubbub, when President Bush said warrantless and legally questionable wiretapping was only used to monitor international calls involving suspected terrorists or terrorism links? It turns out that the NSA has also been eavesdropping on millions of U.S. citizens using a database of call records turned over by commercial phone companies. So he lied. Again. Imagine our shock.
A USA Today story last week reveals President Bush’s earlier claim that the NSA wiretapping program involved only international calls. He said in order for the NSA to monitor a call, “one end of the communication must be outside the United States.”
In a Dec. 19 speech, U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales similarly said that “the President has authorized a program to engage in electronic surveillance of a particular kind, and this would be the intercepts of contents of communications where one of the – one party to the communication is outside the United States.”
Sounds like Gonzales conveniently forgot about the spying within the U.S.
We cannot express great surprise at yet another “variation on the truth” emerging from the White House. We are, however, ashamed that the U.S. government has been concealing the important information that our telephone calls may be monitored. Unless the NSA has a warrant or a court order, the agency should not be allowed to access call records to look for terrorism links. Citizens are growing weary of the federal government acting as though privacy rights may be trampled at will in the name of the “global struggle against violent extremism.”