US:The Bush administration is pressing the US Congress this week for the authority to intercept, without a court order, any international phone call or e-mail between a surveillance target outside the US and any person in the US.
Meanwhile, the administration's chief intelligence official has admitted that Mr Bush authorised a series of secret intelligence activities under a single executive order in late 2001, making clear that a controversial surveillance effort by the highly secretive National Security Agency (NSA) was part of a much broader operation than the president previously described.
The disclosure on Tuesday by the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, appears to be the first time that the administration has publicly acknowledged that Mr Bush's order included undisclosed activities beyond the warrantless surveillance of e-mails and phone calls that Mr Bush confirmed in December 2005.
The intercept proposal, submitted by Mr McConnell to congressional leaders on Friday, would amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) for the first time since 2006 so that a court order would no longer be needed before wiretapping anyone "reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States".
It would also give the attorney general sole authority to order the interception of communications for up to one year, as long as he certifies that the surveillance was directed at a person outside the US.
The administration and its Republican allies on Capitol Hill have mounted a full campaign to get the Democratic-controlled Congress to pass the measure before politicians leave town this week for the August recess, trying to portray reluctant Democrats as weak on terrorism.
Democratic politicians favour a narrower approach that would allow the government to wiretap foreign terrorists talking to other foreign terrorists overseas without a warrant if the communication is routed through the US.
The measure faces a number of procedural roadblocks due to the crowded congressional calendar. But the administration, in an effort to speed the process, separated its immediate demands from a more sweeping proposal to rewrite FISA that became tangled in a debate between Congress and the executive branch.
Civil liberties and privacy groups have denounced the administration's proposal, which they say would effectively allow the NSA to revive a warrantless surveillance programme conducted in secret from 2001 until late 2005. They say it would also give the government authority to force carriers to turn over any international communications into and out of the US without a court order.
Mr McConnell's revelations are contained in a letter to Republican senator Arlen Specter. He wrote that the executive order following the September 11th, 2001 attacks included "a number of . . . intelligence activities" and that a phrase routinely used by the administration - the Terrorist Surveillance Programme (TSP) - applied only to "one particular aspect of these activities, and nothing more".
Mr McConnell's letter was aimed at defending attorney general Alberto Gonzales from allegations by Democrats that he may have committed perjury by telling Congress that no legal objections were raised about the TSP. Mr Gonzales said a legal fight in early 2004 was focused on "other intelligence activities" than those confirmed by Mr Bush, but never connected those to Mr Bush's executive order.
But in doing so, Mr McConnell's letter also underscored that the full scope of the NSA's surveillance programme under Mr Bush's order has not been revealed. The TSP described by Mr Bush and his aides allowed the interception of communication between the US and other countries where one party is believed to be tied to al-Qaeda, so other types of communication or data are presumably being collected under the parts of the wider NSA programme that remain hidden.
News reports over the past 20 months have detailed a range of activities linked to the programme, including the use of data mining to identify surveillance targets and the participation of telecommunication companies in turning over millions of phone records. The administration has not publicly confirmed such reports. - (LA Times-Washington Post service)