FISA Announcement: You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

It’s hard to make news that actually takes information away. But a day after the Attorney General announced that the Bush administration has decided to try to bring the NSA domestic spying program within the boundaries of U.S. law, he appears to have sucked information out of the air around the operation.

Did a court give a blanket OK to the program? Or did they approve surveillance against a single target, or group? How does the approval process work? How often does the NSA need to get approval? Who in Congress has been told, and how will they be kept informed? And — is it really legal?

In a conference call with reporters yesterday afternoon, Justice Department officials demonstrated how little information they’re actually making available about what has or has not changed. As the New York Times reports:

Justice Department officials said that the FISA court orders, which were not made public, were not a broad approval of the surveillance program as a whole, an idea that was proposed last year in Congressional debate over the program. They strongly suggested that the orders secured from the court were for individual targets, but they refused to provide details of the process used to identify targets — or how court approval had been expedited — because they said it remained classified. The senior Justice Department official said that discussing “the mechanics of the orders” could compromise intelligence activities.

Justice Department officials would not describe whether the court had agreed to new procedures to streamline the process of issuing orders or accepted new standards to make it easier for the government to get approval to monitor suspect e-mail and phone communications.

Clear as mud.

Moreover, there’s reason to wonder whether the announcement was entirely true.

Rep. Heather Wilson (R-NM) out-and-out called Gonzales a liar. In his letter released yesterday which contained the details of the switch, the AG stated that his department had already briefed members of the House and Senate intelligence committees. Wilson, who sits on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, cried foul. She was never told of the plan, she said, and from what she heard yesterday it likely stinks:

Ms. Wilson, who has scrutinized the program for the last year, said she believed the new approach relied on a blanket, “programmatic” approval of the president’s surveillance program, rather than approval of individual warrants.

Administration officials “have convinced a single judge in a secret session, in a nonadversarial session, to issue a court order to cover the president’s terrorism surveillance program,” Ms. Wilson said in a telephone interview. She said Congress needed to investigate further to determine how the program is run.