> A senior British Foreign Office official said in response to the European
> Parliament report that "any surveillance that there is in Britain has to be
> authorised in accordance with the law as does any American activity here."
> However, we can tell you that NSA
> operates in strict accordance with U.S. laws and regulations in
> protecting the privacy rights of U.S. persons.
In neither case do they say under what conditions these laws permit
the monitoring of various categories of citizens (domestic, foreign,
suspected of this or that, etc).
During the Clipper debate all the official documents were careful to
say that keys could only be revealed under "lawful authority". They
REFUSED to say that a warrant from a court was required, though that's
what the press statements tended to imply, leading us to believe that
situations existed where they think it's lawful to wiretap someone
without a warrant.
I suspect that they've jiggered the laws in some way, buried in some
obscure corner of some law, permission to do whatever they want to
anybody. Both in the US and UK, of course. There's a theory I've
seen in a couple of law review articles that says the US Executive
Branch has the inherent authority to wiretap in national security or
foreign intelligece cases, with or without a statute or court order
(the other 2 branches of the govt).
John
