Poindexter's plan proposed to use state-of-the-art computer systems at the Army's Intelligence and Security Command, headquartered at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, to secretly monitor emails, credit-card transactions, phone records and bank statements of hundreds of thousands of American citizens on the chance that they might be associated with, or sympathetic to, terrorists.
Poindexter, who was the director of the Information Awareness Office in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, came up with the idea after 9/11 and discussed it over lunch with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, news reports said at the time.
Despite assurances that the federal government would not misuse the program, the JetBlue revelation proved that the administration was willing to sacrifice individual privacy rights in the name of national security. JetBlue officials said the airline was pressured by the Pentagon to hand over its private customer data to a Pentagon contractor named Torch Concepts. The contractor then bought demographic information on nearly half of the passengers from Acxicom, a marketing company. Torch then put together a study and posted it on the Internet.
At least one lawmaker had raised concerns at the time that implementing such a program could be illegal.
Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, told Rumsfeld during a public hearing in 2003 that the Total Information Awareness program "not only raises serious privacy concerns [but] might also be illegal and possibly unconstitutional."
Report Critical of NSA Program
Last week, an unclassified report prepared by inspectors general of five federal agencies said George W. Bush justified his warrantless wiretapping by relying on Justice Department attorney John Yoo's theories of unlimited presidential wartime powers, and started the spying operation even before Yoo issued a formal opinion, a government investigation discovered.
Essentially, President Bush took it upon himself to ignore the clear requirement of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that all domestic intelligence-related electronic spying must have a warrant from a secret federal court, not just presidential approval. Illegal wiretapping is a felony under federal law.
The July 10 report didn't identify any specific terrorist attack that was thwarted by what was known as the President's Surveillance Program (PSP), although Bush has claimed publicly that his warrantless wiretapping "helped detect and prevent terrorist attacks on our own country."
The inspectors general "s report also makes clear that the full PSP was more expansive than the Terrorist Surveillance Program, the warrantless wiretapping that was revealed by the New York Times in December 2005. The TSP involved intercepting calls between the United States and overseas if one party was suspected of links to al-Qaeda or to an al-Qaeda-affiliated group.
Though the undisclosed elements of the PSP remain highly classified, the report gave some hints to its scope by noting that the program originated from a post-9/11 White House request to NSA Director Michael Hayden to consider "what he might do with more authority."
Hayden then "put together information on what was operationally useful and technologically feasible," the report said. "The information formed the basis for the PSP."
In other words, the PSP stretched the limits of what the NSA could accomplish with its extraordinary capabilities to collect and analyze electronic communications around the world. Various journalistic accounts have suggested that Bush's spying program crossed the line from zeroing in on specific surveillance targets to "data-mining" a broad spectrum of electronic communications.
Suggesting that the government gathered information on many innocent people, the inspectors general stated that "the collection activities pursued under the PSP " involved unprecedented collection activities. We believe the retention and use by IC [intelligence community] organizations of information collected under the PSP " should be carefully monitored."
Copyright  2008 The Public Record. All rights reserved.
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