Cold War Warrantless Wiretapping

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."

Comments

A Little HIstory

[Anonymous Coward]

Who was Ford's first Chief of Staff? Donald Rumsfeld. And when Rumsfeld became his Secretary of Defense, who did Ford appoint Chief of Staff in his place? Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld's assistant. And who did Ford make his head of the CIA? George H. W. Bush. All of this happened during the "Halloween Massacre" of November 1975. This put Rumsfeld and Bush on Ford's NSC. Cheney would not have on the NSC, but he certainly would have known about it. Consider this story about memos Cheney wrote in 1975 regarding a Seymour Hersch story about the US tapping Soviet underwater cables. Cheney was clearly in the loop on intelligence and surveillance programs. So three of George W. Bush's closest advisors - his father, his Secretary of Defense, and his Vice-President - would have known about this. Don't you think when Cheney or Rumsfeld suggested this, they said to W. "Gerry Ford did it, and no one complained that it was unConstitutional - just ask your father." (Admittedly, Rumsfeld and Bush Sr. aren't exactly friendly - Rumsfeld tried to push Bush Sr. out at CIA back in the Ford days, and Bush Sr. was one of the main critics in the back-office attempts - eventually successful - to push Rumsfeld out at Defense in 2006. But it's very interesting to see how closely the Ford Administration was tied to the W. administration.) My point is that there was a cabal in the Ford and Bush administrations, with Rumsfeld and Cheney at its core, who have a history of evangelizing the idea of broad electronic surveillance which I would argue violates our Constitutional guarantees against arbitrary searches. There were other cliques in the W. administration with similar ideas (John Poindexter), so perhaps we should see this as something that W. believed in, strongly.

Re:A Little HIstory

[jlaprise1]

All true...though Ford was really concerned about the Soviet threat. He genuinely believed that this was the only way to deal with the threat of soviet eavesdropping on US microwave telecommunications. Ford was actually a champion of personal privacy. It's just that competing with the personal privacy that we think of everyday , there is a second kind of privacy which the government is concerned with. Their focus is protecting citizens from foreign surveillance threats and as these and other documents show, the responsibility of government to protect citizens' privacy from external threats trumps citizens' right to avoid surveillance from their government.

This duality is clear in the documentary record but does not show up in public. It's only a debate held in the White House. Perhaps it should be entertained elsewhere as well...

Should've Impeached Nixon

[Doc Ruby]

What finally pushed the Congress into preparing to impeach Nixon was the revelation that Nixon was secretly (and, of course, warrantlessly) wiretapping Congress. Keeping Vietnam going, using the CIA to break into Democratic campaign HQ at the Watergate (and a shrink's office) - all just "business as usual". But the wiretapping was enough to push them over the edge.

So George Bush Sr, Republican National Committee Chair, went to Nixon to explain that enough Congressional Republicans would vote to impeach that he would be impeached. So Nixon resigned. And Ford, who Nixon had got to replace his original VP, Spiro Agnew, when Agnew was convicted of income tax evasion (on massive bribes he'd taken but not reported to the IRS), inherited Nixon's evil empire. George Bush Sr inherited the CIA.

And then Ford started warrantlessly wiretapping people, just like Nixon had. Nixon was wiretapping not only Congress, but all kinds of political enemies, including anti-war and environmentalist activists, counterculture figures like John Lennon. Nixon turned the White House into a Republican Kremlin. And Ford kept it that way.

In 1978, with Democrat Carter in the White House a Democratic Congress passed FISA, which was designed to be the supreme law controlling wiretapping. Nominally subordinate to only the 4th Amendment, which it violated by allowing exceptions to the Amendment's requirement of a warrant issued prior to any wiretapping.

Republican George Bush Jr inherited the presidency in 2000. And soon wiretapped every American, all our phonecalls and email, without a warrant. Even though the FISA court issued a warrant, before or after the fact, for every single one of the hundreds of thousands of requests it got, however invalid any of those requests might have been.

Even to the point of wiretapping conversations between defendants and their lawyers in cases brought by the Bush "Justice" Department, which was just ruled illegal, years later. With Bush leaving office unimpeached.

The Congress should've impeached Nixon. It should have impeached Bush. Hell, it should've impeached Reagan, for running the secret Iran/Contra wars, illegally supplying Iran with weapons and shipping drugs like cocaine and opium around on CIA planes - the investigation probably would have turned up warrantless wiretapping to protect the other illegal programmes.

But we didn't. And Republicans, even Bushes (and Cheneys) get to walk around free, free to run for office. And a large section of the public that believes "it's only a crime if you get caught" treats those criminals and traitors to their oaths to protect the Constitution as "statesmen".

As every time before, the next one will be even worse. Hi, president Romney, how ya doin'?