In the current warrantless domestic spying controversy, echoes of the Church committee hearings, Washington veterans tell the NYT's Scott Shane:

To read through the documents of the earlier era is to spot many themes from the current controversy: the cooperation of major telecommunications companies with the N.S.A.; the challenges of fast-changing communications technologies (then the expansion of satellite communications, now the Internet explosion); the legal rationale as laid out in detail by the attorney general (then Edward H. Levi, now Alberto R. Gonzales, who is to testify Monday before the Senate Judiciary Committee). Government documents from the 1970's eavesdropping controversy were posted over the weekend on the Web site of the National Security Archive, a research center at George Washington University.

The N.S.A. revelations of 30 years ago were unearthed simultaneously by the Church Committee, two House committees and the press, focusing on two programs code-named Minaret and Shamrock.

Minaret was a watch list kept between 1967 and 1973 of Americans whose international communications — phone calls and telegrams in and out of the country — were collected by the security agency

The names were mostly submitted to the N.S.A. by other agencies because of targets' suspected involvement in four kinds of activities: terrorism; drug trafficking; threats to the president; and civil disturbances with "possible foreign support or influence," as Lt. Gen. Lew Allen Jr., then the N.S.A. director, told the Church Committee. That program ended up targeting some Vietnam War protesters and civil rights activists. ...

Senator Church emphasized to General Allen that he did not question the value of using electronic spying to catch terrorists, drug dealers or potential assassins, only "the lack of adequate legal basis for some of this activity."

Mr. Levi, the attorney general, acknowledged that the law on such spying was "ill-defined" but said courts had upheld the president's power to order surveillance for foreign intelligence without warrants.

Two Republican senators, Barry M. Goldwater of Arizona and John G. Tower of Texas, fought unsuccessfully against open hearings on sensitive N.S.A. matters, particularly the three companies' cooperation. "I must state my firm opposition to this unilateral release of classified information," Mr. Tower said at one point. ...

But in the end, the committee reached a broad consensus on most of its findings, including on the critical recommendation of banning eavesdropping in the United States without warrants, Mr. Schwarz said.

Posted by Laura at February 6, 2006 07:52 PM