National Security Agency U S

A day after announcing that it had scrubbed a controversial warrantless surveillance program, the Bush administration refused to provide details to Congress of how a new court-review process for terror-related wiretaps would work, triggering a fresh round of complaints and suspicions from Democrats about what the administration was doing.

The chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee on Tuesday rejected the Bush administration's claim that it had brought a controversial domestic spying program into compliance with the law, saying he wanted strict new rules requiring the government to obtain a separate warrant every time it places a wiretap on a U.S. resident. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.

Media companies lost a bid to unseal documents in a lawsuit accusing AT&T Inc. of helping the National Security Agency to spy on U.S. residents. U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, in a ruling filed in San Francisco federal court, allowed six news organizations to join the lawsuit. He denied their request to unseal records filed in April in the case, saying the documents weren't sufficiently related to the legal proceeding.

A civil liberties organization on Thursday sued the Justice Department and the National Security Agency in New York federal court, alleging that the government illegally spied on 16 lawyers who have represented detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station in Cuba. The suit, filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights, demands that the agencies comply with requests filed under the Freedom of Information Act to turn over all records of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of the attorneys.

A federal appeals court on Friday handed the Bush administration a major victory, ruling that plaintiffs who had challenged its domestic spying program did not have legal standing to do so. The 2-1 decision by the U.S. 6th Circuit Court of Appeals in Cincinnati sent the case back to a judge in Detroit, who last year ruled the program unconstitutional. The panel ordered U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor to dismiss the case, but it did not rule on the program's legality. After the Sept.

A secret federal court has ordered the Bush administration to respond to an ACLU request that the court make public its rulings that approved the National Security Agency's controversial Terrorist Surveillance Program. The order was announced Friday by the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the request this month. "This is an unprecedented request that warrants further briefing," wrote Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

washington -- A former Qwest Communications International executive, appealing a conviction for insider trading, has alleged that the government withdrew a $200-million contract after Qwest refused to participate in an unidentified National Security Agency program that the company's top lawyer said was illegal. Former Chief Executive Joseph Nacchio, convicted in April of 19 counts of insider trading, said the NSA approached Qwest more than six months before the Sept.

Emphasizing that "we are at war with an enemy who wants to hurt us again," President Bush on Sunday strongly defended the domestic eavesdropping program that began in 2002, and repeated his contention that the disclosure of its existence had caused the country "great harm."

A report to Congress released Friday concluded that the Bush administration's defense of the National Security Agency's domestic spying program was not as "well-grounded" in the law as the White House claimed. The report by the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service is the most comprehensive analysis yet of legal arguments for President Bush's authorization of warrantless eavesdropping in the U.S.

The chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee said Sunday that he had asked Atty. Gen. Alberto R. Gonzales to testify publicly on the legality of President Bush's top-secret domestic spying program. A prominent conservative on the committee said he was troubled by the legal arguments the Bush administration had presented for authorizing the National Security Agency to conduct surveillance on people in the U.S. without getting warrants from a special federal court established to approve them.