Legal memos released on Bush-era justification for warrantless wiretapping
“What these memos show is that nearly three years after President Bush authorized the warrantless wiretapping of Americans’ e-mails and phone calls, government lawyers were still struggling to put the program on sound legal footing,” said Patrick Toomey, staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained the memos through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
“Their conclusions are deeply disturbing,” he said. “They suggest that the president’s power to monitor the communications of Americans is virtually unlimited — by the Constitution, or by Congress — when it comes to foreign intelligence.”
Goldsmith argued that Congress’s 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force passed shortly after the al-Qaeda attacks on the United States provided “express authority” for the warrantless program. “In authorizing ‘all necessary and appropriate force,’?” he reasoned, the AUMF necessarily applied to electronic surveillance, including domestically.
He also asserted that the authorization can be read to “provide specific authority .?.?. that overrides the limitations” of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a law passed in 1978 that required a court order to wiretap an American or any person on U.S. soil.
the bloody rest:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/legal-memos-released-on-bush-era-justification-for-warrantless-wiretapping/2014/09/05/91b86c52-356d-11e4-9e92-0899b306bbea_story.html
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