White House Flip-Flopping on NSA Surveillance

Glenn Greenwald is quickly becoming a must-read stop on the daily blog rounds. Yesterday I didn't get the chance to mention a post Greenwald wrote on Tuesday that could blow the whole NSA spying scandal wide open. In fact, Greenwald's new information is so explosive that the Washington Post and the LA Times each picked it up this morning.

Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made one of the first comments about the secret NSA surveillance when the program was revealed late last year. In a self-contradictory statement at a December 19 press briefing, he said that the White House believed Congress had given the White House authority to conduct this kind of surveillance around the edges of FISA but that Congress would be very unlikely to change the FISA law to reflect that.

We believe Congress has authorized this kind of surveillance. We have had discussions with Congress in the past -- certain members of Congress -- as to whether or not FISA could be amended to allow us to adequately deal with this kind of threat, and we were advised that that would be difficult, if not impossible.

Apparently it's not quite so clear cut. Greenwald points out that in June 2002, Senator Mike DeWine (R-Ohio) introduced a bill to amend FISA to do just that. This amendment wouldn't have given the NSA the same free reign to set up surveillance that it's since assumed for itself, but it would've expanded the surveillance allowable under FISA. Given what we now know, surely the White House would've jumped at the chance to support this bill. But did they? No. The Justice Department declined to support the bill for two reasons: The current FISA requirements were not causing them any problems in getting the warrants they needed, and the amendment was quite possibly unconstitutional anyway.

So far, at least in the two newspaper articles linked above, the administration has not provided a coherent response to the situation. But an anonymous source in the LA Times piece suggests that the White House may have opposed the DeWine bill because it could've shed light on the secret NSA surveillance already underway:

There was a conscious choice not to have a public discussion about it. It could have exposed the program. This was a military defense intelligence program.

Thanks to Glenn Greenwald for bringing this to light in the first place. Surely more will be developing. We'll keep our eyes open.