Sifting through the phone records of Americans at home and at work is vital to defending "the security and the liberty of the American people" from terrorist attacks, General Michael Hayden, U.S. President's George W. Bush's choice to head the Central Intelligence Agency, said yesterday.
Staunchly defending the newly disclosed program that has amassed billions of phone records, the White House seemed unfazed by accusations that it was riding roughshod over citizens' constitutional rights.
Two out of three Americans apparently agree that the hunt for al-Qaeda terrorists justifies the data mining of their telephone records and the no-longer secret program isn't a worrisome invasion of privacy, according to a snap poll conducted in the wake of revelations about the vast and clandestine database created by the National Security Agency. The ABC-Washington Post telephone poll was taken Thursday after USA Today published details of the phone records collection program.
Billions of call records were handed over and still are streaming into the NSA's supercomputers from AT&T Corp., BellSouth Corp., and Verizon Communications Inc.
Qwest Communications was the only big-league telephone company to reject the request to hand over telephone records, deciding customer's privacy rights trumped the government's probe, unless it was backed up by a warrant.
Former Qwest chief executive Joe Nacchio "concluded that these requests violated the privacy requirements of the Telecommunications Act," his lawyer, Herbert Stern, said yesterday in a statement from his law office.
Mr. Nacchio left Qwest in 2002 under a cloud after insider-trading allegations and after taking home more than $100-million in compensation the previous year.
Some U.S. senators, outraged at learning about the data-mining revelations, plan to call top executives from all the major telephone companies to explain their roles in the NSA program. That may mean top corporate executives taking diametrically opposing views on the merits of co-operating with a secret government request in the so-called global war on terrorism.
Some leading Bush administration critics were already hammering away at the President's claim that the program was legal and didn't invade American's privacy.
"The President of the United States [is] making a judgment that's not reviewable by the courts and not reviewable by the Congress, and we're supposed to say, 'Okay,' said Senator Joe Biden, a Connecticut Democrat.
"It's a little bit like what would happen if the bank turned over all your chequing records without your name but gave the chequing account number and every single purchase you made and pattern of your behaviour, and then you were told, 'Don't worry. That's not invasion of your privacy,' " he said.
Tony Snow, the President's new spokesman, spent his first full day on the job fielding questions about the controversial program and insisting that the White House was fully backing Gen. Hayden as the next CIA chief. He headed the NSA when the phone-record-collection program started.
"We're 100-per-cent behind Michael Hayden," Mr. Snow said.
