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Cold War Warrantless Wiretapping

Posted by kdawson on from the all-your-call-are-well-you-know-the-rest dept.

somanyrobots writes "President Gerald Ford secretly authorized the use of warrantless domestic wiretaps for foreign intelligence and counterintelligence purposes soon after coming into office, according to a declassified document. The Dec. 19, 1974, White House memorandum, marked Top Secret / Exclusively Eyes Only and signed by Ford, gave then-Attorney General William B. Saxbe and his successors in office authorization 'to approve, without prior judicial warrants, specific electronic surveillance within the United States which may be requested by the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.'" And reader jlaprise1 adds, "My research [from 2009] makes the news! President Ford authorized warrantless wiretaps in December 1976 and laid the foundation (PDF) for US telecommunications security policy."

3 of 85 comments (clear)

  1. History Repeats Itself by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Insightful

    This can't really surprise anyone. I'm sure there are plenty of things our government has kept from us either "for our own good" (their rationale for hiding their actions) and for national security reasons (we can't disclose everything). But how much do we really want to know? No matter how much they tell us we always suspect more ... and the conspiracy theorists will only use the truth to build even more elaborate plots of imaginative intrigue and nefarious actions.

    1. Re:History Repeats Itself by Lakitu · · Score: 3, Insightful

      No, it's just that with a press corps that overwhelmingly identifies with the Democratic party, the excesses of Republicans are more likely to be investigated and reported on.

      Not quite. It's fun to believe in, but really, you're just an idiot with a persecution complex for doing so.

      They "always seem" to be Republicans because there's a terribly small sample size. There's only been 44 P's OTUS, and 2 of them have now been indicated as having "corrupted and subverted existing [wiretapping] laws", so it's not surprising at all that they are both affiliated with the same party.

  2. Where does the Constitution mention wiretapping? by jjo · · Score: 3, Insightful
    There seems to be a common understanding around Slashdot that domestic warrantless wiretapping is always unconstitutional.

    Wiretapping is not mentioned in the Constitution, but one's "persons, houses, papers, and effects" have been interpreted in many but not all cases to include electronic communications. Some of the cases where the courts have not extended constitutional protection in this way are for foreign communications and for domestic communications with agents of foreign powers.

    A few years after the Ford memo mentioned above, Congress passed the FISA statute, in an attempt to somewhat restrict these constitutionally-permitted warrantless wiretaps. However, it is not a settled question whether the Congress has the right, through legislation, to restrict the President's authority, as Commander-in-Chief, to conduct otherwise-constitutional foreign intelligence operations.

    The bottom line is that the issue is not as clear as you might think.