Bush may consider oversight for domestic spying

WASHINGTON -- The White House and key congressional committees have begun crafting legislation that would try to overcome legal objections to the Bush administration's controversial domestic surveillance program and subject it to review by a secret intelligence court, government officials said yesterday.

Administration lawyers still maintain that President Bush has the authority to eavesdrop on domestic telephone calls between Americans and suspected terrorists overseas without the approval of a court, his aides said yesterday. But the closed-door negotiations marked a new willingness on the part of national security officials to accept congressional oversight of domestic surveillance.

The program has sparked an outcry from Republicans and Democrats, who have criticized the administration for failing to fully consult Congress and raised concerns that the spying program might violate the constitutional rights of private citizens.

``There are active discussions and they are ongoing," White House spokesman Ken Lisaius said yesterday. He declined to provide details, except to say that White House officials are in talks with the judiciary and intelligence committees in Congress.

``The administration has long said that while we do not believe additional legal authority is necessary, we are willing to listen to the ideas of members of Congress on possible legislation," he said.

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the administration decided to bypass the secret surveillance courts established in 1978 by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The domestic surveillance program has been run by the secretive National Security Agency and kept under wraps from most members of Congress.

The court has denied the intelligence services warrants in only a handful of the thousands of cases it has reviewed over the past three decades.

The Bush administration has maintained that the program has intercepted the calls only of Americans communicating with suspected terrorists, but some government officials have suggested that the conversations of citizens with no ties to terrorists may have been swept up as well.

The new discussions between the White House and Congress were prompted by exchanges between Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Republican chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Vice President Dick Cheney in recent weeks.

Specter, who has been among the fiercest critics of the domestic spying activities, yesterday said on ``Fox News Sunday" that ``we're getting close with the discussions with the White House, I think, to having the wiretapping issue submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court."

He added, ``After the vice president and I exchanged some letters, he said he was serious about discussions, we've had discussions, and I've talked to ranking officials in the White House."

Specter declined to predict when an agreement might be reached, but said ``we're close." He said submitting the program to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court for review ``would be a big step forward for protection of constitutional rights and civil liberties." The so-called FISA courts were established by Congress after congressional investigations in the 1970s -- the most famous headed by then-Senator Frank Church -- uncovered widespread abuse by the FBI, CIA, and other law enforcement and intelligence agencies for spying on Americans.

Specialists said the closed-door discussions on a legislative proposal to go before Congress underscored the view of many in Washington that current laws governing the eavesdropping on domestic communications are outdated.

Members of Congress and some legal specialists have said that the FISA court is sufficient to deal with the Bush wiretapping program but that laws on government phone surveillance should be reassessed because of technological advances such as digital and wireless communications.

The legal guidelines have not kept up with the threat posed by international terrorism, which is also domestic in nature, or the rapid development of new modes of telecommunications, they said. Aside from specific exemptions, the NSA is forbidden by the FISA law from gathering data inside the United States.

The discussions Specter has referred to involve revising the FISA law to expand the ability of the NSA to seek secret warrants for certain domestic spying, involving calls between Americans and foreign parties whether they originate in this country or abroad.

While the FISA law could be used to eavesdrop on calls to persons overseas, the Bush administration has argued the process for granting warrants is not timely enough in an age of instantaneous communications.

``A new law would be great for several reasons," said Abraham R. Wagner, a legal scholar at Columbia University. ``We never had the kind of [terrorism] threat that was internal and external. Secondly, there has been a telecommunications revolution over the past 30 years and the laws are old and don't address the realities."

The spying controversy was first sparked by revelations in The New York Times in December that since the Sept. 11 attacks, the administration has listened to phone calls made or received by as many as 5,000 Americans without court approval.

Last Friday, the Times reported on another post-Sept. 11 effort to compile the international banking transactions of American citizens. The story also appeared in other newspapers, including The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times.

Specter said yesterday that he also is seeking more information about the banking surveillance program, though he said bank records are not subject to same kind of privacy protections as personal conversations.

The program reported traces the international transactions of people suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda by reviewing records contained at a cooperative based in Belgium that routes nearly $6 trillion a day between banks, brokerages, stock exchanges, and other institutions, according to The New York Times report.

The fact that the Times disclosed the existence of the banking surveillance program prompted another Republican lawmaker yesterday to call on the Justice Department to prosecute the paper for revealing details of highly classified defense programs. Representative Peter King of New York, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, called on the attorney general to seek charges against the newspaper company, which also owns The Boston Globe. King told the Fox program that ``by disclosing this in a time of war, they have compromised America's antiterrorist policies."

The newspaper's editor, Bill Keller, defended the decision to publish last week, saying, ``We remain convinced that the administration's extraordinary access to this vast repository of international financial data, however carefully targeted use of it may be, is a matter of public interest."

Material from the Associated Press was included in this report.