Print

Email story

Comment

Letter to the editor

Politics

National intelligence director outs classified information

Mike McConnell's disclosures of previously classified details have raised some eyebrows.

By Associted Press
Published August 23, 2007

WASHINGTON - The man in charge of keeping the nation's secrets is letting a few out.

National intelligence director Mike McConnell pulled the curtain back on previously classified details of government surveillance and a secretive court that oversees the operations conducted on U.S. soil.

His comments - made in an interview with the El Paso (Texas) Times last week and posted as a transcript on the newspaper's Web site Wednesday - raised eyebrows for their frank discussion of previously classified eavesdropping work conducted under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA. Among the disclosures:

- McConnell confirmed for the first time that the private sector assisted with President Bush's warrantless surveillance program. AT&T, Verizon and other telecommunications companies are being sued for their cooperation. "Now if you play out the suits at the value they're claimed, it would bankrupt these companies," McConnell said, arguing that they deserve immunity for their help.

- He provided new details on court rulings handed down by the 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which approves classified eavesdropping operations and whose proceedings are almost always entirely secret. McConnell said a ruling that went into effect May 31 required the government to get court warrants to monitor communications between two foreigners if the conversation travels on a wire in the U.S. network. Millions of calls each day do, because of the robust nature of the U.S. systems.

- McConnell said it takes 200 hours to assemble a FISA warrant on a single telephone number. "We're going backward," he said. "We couldn't keep up."

- Offering never-disclosed figures, McConnell also revealed that fewer than 100 people inside the United States are monitored under FISA warrants. However, he said, thousands of people overseas are monitored.

McConnell's comments were a dramatic departure from the government's normally tight-lipped approach to disclosing any information about how it spies on electronic communications - some of its most sensitive and costly work. The FISA court's activities are particularly protected.

Even as he shed new light on the classified operations, McConnell asserted that the current debate in Congress about whether to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will cost American lives because of all the information it revealed to terrorists.

"Part of this is a classified world. The fact that we're doing it this way means that some Americans are going to die," he said.

McConnell was in El Paso last week for a conference on border security hosted by House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas. The spy chief joined Reyes for an interview with his local paper.

At the end of the interview, McConnell cautioned reporter Chris Roberts that he should consider whether enemies of the United States could gain from the information he just shared in the interview, Roberts said. McConnell left it to the paper to decide what to publish.

"I don't believe it damaged national security or endangered any of our people," said El Paso Times executive editor Dionicio Flores.

[Last modified August 23, 2007, 01:18:52]