Ray Kelly’s Wiretap Alarm
India’s three days of carnage stand as another warning about how easily terrorists can perpetrate a major attack. So when top New York City counterterrorism officials declare that U.S. intelligence laws are shackling their powers to prevent the next Mumbai, it ought to raise more than eyebrows.
AP
NYC Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.
Instead, almost nobody seems to care. Seven years without an attack on the U.S. mainland has created a growing public complacency. And the anti-antiterror lobby has exploited that complacency to assail and constrain critical Bush Administration intelligence programs, making it harder to intercept terrorists before they strike. As a consequence innocent Americans may be killed.
That’s the reality exposed in an extraordinary exchange of letters between NYC Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly and U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey. The city and the Justice Department are feuding over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, the 1978 domestic wiretapping law that was amended this year and requires a warrant to listen in on suspected foreign terrorists. Mr. Kelly says that Justice’s FISA policies are “unduly constraining” his high-priority “international terrorism investigations in the greater New York area.”
Two city applications for electronic surveillance, one in June and the other in September, got quashed — not by the FISA court, but by Justice’s own legal team. As a municipal outfit, the police intelligence division cannot appeal directly to the special FISA panel of rotating judges but must instead work through DOJ. Both cases are classified.