Bush giving court oversight of wiretapping program

WASHINGTON – The Bush administration said Wednesday that it has agreed to disband a controversial warrantless surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, replacing it with a new effort that will be overseen by the secret court that governs clandestine spying in the United States.

The change – revealed by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales in a letter Wednesday to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee – marks an abrupt reversal by the administration, which for more than a year has aggressively defended the legality of the NSA surveillance program and disputed court authority to oversee it.

Under the new plan, Gonzales said, the secret court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, will oversee eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mails to and from the United States when “there is probable cause to believe” that one of the targets is a member of al-Qaida or an associated terrorist group.

Under the previous approach, such intercepts were authorized by intelligence officers without the involvement of any court or judge – prompting objections from privacy advocates and many Democrats that the program was illegal.

Administration officials suggested the move was aimed in part at quelling persistent objections to the NSA spying by Democrats who now control Congress, and is intended to slow or even derail legal challenges making their way through the federal courts. The Justice Department immediately filed a notice with the 6th Circuit on Wednesday informing the panel of the new program and promising to file papers “addressing the implications of this development” on pending litigation.

But many details of the new approach remained unclear Wednesday because administration officials refused to describe specifically how the program will work.

Officials declined to disclose, for example, whether the administration will be required to seek a warrant for each person it wants to monitor or whether the FISA court has issued a broader set of orders covering a multitude of cases. Authorities also refused to say how many court orders are involved, or even to identify which judge on the surveillance court had issued them.

President Bush first issued a secret order in October 2001 authorizing the NSA to monitor telephone calls and e-mail between the United States and overseas if one party to the communication was believed to be linked to al-Qaida or related groups. The initiative, revealed publicly by the New York Times in December 2005, was later dubbed the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” by the administration.