By Seymour Hersh, The New Yorker, 5/29/06
A few days before the start of the confirmation hearings for General
Michael Hayden, who has been nominated by President Bush to be the head
of the C.I.A., I spoke to an official of the National Security Agency
who recently retired. The official joined the N.S.A. in the
mid-nineteen-seventies, soon after contentious congressional hearings
that redefined the relationship between national security and the
public’s right to privacy. The hearings, which revealed that, among
other abuses, the N.S.A. had illegally intercepted telegrams to and
from the United States, led to the passage of the 1978 Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA,
to protect citizens from unlawful surveillance. ‘When I first came in,
I heard from all my elders that âwe’ll never be able to collect
intelligence again,” the former official said. ‘They’d whine, âWhy do
we have to report to oversight committees?’ ‘ But, over the next few
years, he told me, the agency did find a way to operate within the law.
‘We built a system that protected national security and left people
able to go home at night without worrying whether what they did that
day was appropriate or legal.’ [read more]