Surveillance controversy puts NSA back into harsh spotlight

BALTIMORE -- Several years ago, officials at the National Security Agency sought to reassure taxpayers that the agency had long since repudiated its Vietnam-era spying on US citizens.

They insisted that the movie ''Enemy of the State," which portrayed the NSA as using its formidable technology to track and eavesdrop on Americans, was the stuff of Hollywood fantasy.

Now the NSA stands accused of abetting the White House in what civil liberties activists and others describe as a frontal assault on the constitutional right to privacy.

The program had reportedly traced thousands of calls from phones linked to terrorism suspects to and from locations in the United States, and then had reportedly involved listening to many of those conversations, all without seeking warrants from a special foreign intelligence court. E-mails messages also were tracked and read, according to news reports.

''I've stuck up for NSA innumerable times, saying I didn't believe they were engaged in illegal activity," said James Bamford, who is author of two acclaimed books on the NSA, ''The Puzzle Palace" and ''Body of Secrets."

But now, he said, there is no question that after the Sept. 11 attacks the agency broke the law.

Revelations about the warrantless surveillance effort, he said, have thrown the nation's largest and most secretive intelligence-gathering organization into turmoil.

''Most of the people I've dealt with there had no idea this was going on, and they were very shocked and disappointed that suddenly they're back to where they were 30 years ago, dealing with questions of domestic spying," he said.

Don Weber, an NSA spokesman, said in a telephone interview last week that the agency can't comment on operational issues in the interest of national security.

The surveillance effort will be subject to congressional hearings, expected to begin in the next several weeks.

Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and a leader of the committee's judicial oversight effort, was quoted as saying in The New York Times that he planned to hold hearings on the surveillance program after confirmation hearings for Judge Samuel A. Alito Jr. to the Supreme Court. Those hearings maystretch into late January or early February.

According to reports in the Times and elsewhere, the National Security Agency launched the program almost immediately after the September 2001 attacks, before President Bush issued a secret order authorizing it.

Bamford and others contend that, with or without presidential approval, the program had been conducted in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

That law prohibits NSA from intercepting calls or other electronic communications to or from a US citizen or resident alien without a warrant from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Bamford, who holds a law degree, said the statute was written ''to prevent exactly what just happened." Some critics are calling the president's authorization of the program a potentially impeachable offense.

''The eventual outcome will be a special prosecutor," Bamford predicted. ''Of course, it's an impeachable offense."

The Bush administration, meanwhile, has stood by the program, saying that president had the authority to authorize it based on his powers as commander in chief. Not only has the White House refused to cancel the program, the government has launched an investigation.

To its defenders, the NSA program was not just legal. It was a vital and necessary part of the efforts to prevent another Sept. 11-style attack.

''It was an integral and important part of the nation's counterterrorism toolkit," said John E. McLaughlin, who served as deputy director of the CIA from 2000 to 2004 and was briefed on the program.