Negroponte Had Denied Domestic Call Monitoring

WaPo When he was asked about the National Security Agency's controversial domestic surveillance program last Monday, U.S. intelligence chief John D. Negroponte objected to the question and said the government was "absolutely not" monitoring domestic calls without warrants.

And that is absolutely true.

"I wouldn't call it domestic spying," he told reporters. "This is about international terrorism and telephone calls between people thought to be working for international terrorism and people here in the United States." Three days later, USA Today divulged details of the NSA's effort to log a majority of the telephone calls made within the United States since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks

Talk about MSM distortion. The NSA is not "logging" those calls, they are getting records from the telephone companies of telephone numbers called for a database.

amassing the domestic call records of tens of millions of U.S. households and businesses in an attempt to sift them for clues about terrorist threats.

James Joyner blogged Would we expect that any administration would, upon the illegal leak to the press about a highly sensitive intelligence program, decide it was time to reveal all of our classified ops in order to provide full disclosure? Regardless of one’s position on the utility or even legality of these programs, surely keeping them secret on operational grounds is reasonable.

Sister Toldjah blogged So not only was the WaPo article poorly researched, but Eggan falsely implies that the calls themselves were monitored as if to say people’s private conversations had been listened to - what is actually being monitored are calling PATTERNS.

The media reporting on this story is beyond bad - it’s grossly misleading and negligently researched. What really makes this so bad is that the media are the ones who are supposed to help keep our politicians honest by reporting the facts - in this case, as it has been the case with so many other non-scandal ’scandals’, the media has gotten it horribly wrong. And their getting it wrong comes with a price: it hurts our chances of catching the REAL enemy, which as sane people know is NOT President Bush but instead the likes of Al Qaeda and other terrorist organizations hell bent on destroying the west.