WHY WE WORRY ABOUT THE NSA TAPS

You may recall that Gen. Hayden said that the authorization to go ahead with a tap is made by an NSA "shift supervisor," not the FISA court. There's no reason to believe that this procedure won't violate our right to privacy and there's a long history of such violations.

CIA Releases Files On Past Misdeeds
Assassination Plots, Domestic Spying Cited
By Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writers
Wednesday, June 27, 2007; Page A01

Several dealt with the agency's domestic spying on anti-Vietnam War groups during the Johnson and Nixon years. One described an operation, begun under President Richard M. Nixon in late 1972, to track telephone calls between people stateside and overseas, and foreign calls routed through the United States.

In October 1967, President Lyndon B. Johnson requested an interagency survey of possible foreign connections to U.S. groups opposed to the Vietnam War and worldwide student movements with communist links. Then-Director Richard M. Helms tasked the agency to do it, and the main input came from "sensitive intercepts" produced by the National Security Agency, according to another memo.

Agency officials became nervous years later because CIA reports on this issue included material on the homegrown radical group Students for a Democratic Society, known as SDS.

The New York Times has a little more:

Files on Illegal Spying Show C.I.A. Skeletons From Cold War
By MARK MAZZETTI and TIM WEINER
Published: June 27, 2007

The papers provide evidence of paranoia and occasional incompetence as the agency began a string of illegal spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s, often to hunt links between Communist governments and the domestic protests that roiled the nation in that period.

More than anything, the papers provide a dark history of the climate both at the C.I.A. and in Washington during the cold war and the Vietnam era, when fears about the Soviet threat created a no-holds-barred culture at the spy agency.

In 1967, for instance, President Lyndon B. Johnson became convinced that the American antiwar movement was controlled and financed by Communist governments, and he ordered the C.I.A. to produce evidence.

His director of central intelligence, Richard Helms, reminded him that the C.I.A. was barred from spying on Americans.

In his posthumous memoir, Mr. Helms said Johnson told him: “I’m quite aware of that. What I want for you is to pursue this matter, and to do what is necessary to track down the foreign Communists who are behind this intolerable interference in our domestic affairs.”

Though it was a violation of the C.I.A.’s charter, Mr. Helms obeyed the president’s orders. The C.I.A. undertook a domestic surveillance operation code-named Chaos that went on for almost seven years under Presidents Johnson and Nixon. Mr. Helms created a Special Operations Group to conduct the spying. A squad of C.I.A. officers grew their hair long, learned the jargon of the New Left, and went off to infiltrate peace groups in the United States and Europe.

The agency compiled a computer index of 300,000 names of American people and organizations, and extensive files on 7,200 citizens. It began working in secret with police departments all over the United States.