I have a long post below on the political implications of the recent FISA-NSA debate based on a wondefully candid interview by the El Paso Times with Mike McConnell, National Intelligence Director. But in this interview McConnell makes some statements which vindicate what I have been saying all along about the NSA-FISA dustup the NY Times started when it erroneously claimed we were ‘bypassing FISA” with NSA intercepts:

There are a couple of issues to just be sensitive to. There’s a claim of reverse targeting. Now what that means is we would target somebody in a foreign country who is calling into the United States and our intent is to not go after the bad guy, but to listen to somebody in the United States. That’s not legal, it’s, it would be a breach of the Fourth Amendment. You can go to jail for that sort of thing. And If a foreign bad guy is calling into the United States, if there’s a need to have a warrant, for the person in the United States, you just get a warrant. And so if a terrorist calls in and it’s another terrorist, I think the American public would want us to do surveillance of that U.S. person in this case. So we would just get a warrant and do that. It’s a manageable thing. On the U.S. persons side it’s 100 or less. And then the foreign side, it’s in the thousands. Now there’s a sense that we’re doing massive data mining. In fact, what we’re doing is surgical. A telephone number is surgical. So, if you know what number, you can select it out. So that’s, we’ve got a lot of territory to make up with people believing that we’re doing things we’re not doing.

I have said this for years now. The NSA was simply targetting known or highly suspected terrorists overseas and, if they came into contact with people here in the US, the complete information (content, name of person in America, location of person in America) was passed to the FBI for investigation and possible surveillance warrant. Priolr to 9-11 only the content of the communication could be passed on. The fact is the NY Times misled itself and/or the public about this issue, and in the process of this ineptitude exposed and crippled a key element of our national defence. This story is primarily about misleading and incorrect information, not issues of privacy or abuse of power.

Q. So you’re saying that the reporting and the debate in Congress means that some Americans are going to die?
A. That’s what I mean. Because we have made it so public. We used to do these things very differently, but for whatever reason, you know, it’s a democratic process and sunshine’s a good thing. We need to have the debate. The reason that the FISA law was passed in 1978 was an arrangement was worked out between the Congress and the administration, we did not want to allow this community to conduct surveillance, electronic surveillance, of Americans for foreign intelligence unless you had a warrant, so that was required. So there was no warrant required for a foreign target in a foreign land. And so we are trying to get back to what was the intention of ’78. Now because of the claim, counterclaim, mistrust, suspicion, the only way you could make any progress was to have this debate in an open way.

Basically, we are having this debate to correct this misrepresentations made by the NY Times and its sources. And because of them and their mistakes, Americans will die.