WASHINGTON, May 19 (UPI) -- A former senior judge has said NSA wiretaps would not jeopardize prosecutions against terror suspects.
The former chief judge of the court that oversees domestic intelligence-gathering said that the National Security Agency's surveillance program probably won't jeopardize criminal cases, because he thinks the government has been "very careful" to keep information gathered by the NSA separate from other evidence obtained through normal procedures using a warrant, National Journal reported Wednesday.
In rare public remarks on May 8, Judge Royce C. Lamberth said he believed that government lawyers had not used NSA intercepts of phone calls and e-mails inside the United States to build their terrorism cases. When Lamberth presided over the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which grants warrants for domestic wiretaps, he was the only member of the 11-judge panel to know the details of the NSA's domestic eavesdropping program.
His remarks raised the possibility that government prosecutors were shying away from information obtained by NSA eavesdroppers, evidence that could be excluded at trial if a judge decided it was illegally obtained.
Lamberth spoke at an intelligence conference in Bethesda, Md., about his work in presiding over civil terrorism cases. In a separate question-and-answer session, Lamberth told National Journal that although he was confident that the NSA program and criminal investigations hadn't been mixed, he couldn't be absolutely certain. Lamberth's seven-year term on the court expired in May 2002.
Without revealing any personal knowledge, Lamberth said that based on what he has read in news accounts, the NSA domestic eavesdropping program would "require some tweaking" to make it comport fully with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the sole law governing electronic eavesdropping for intelligence purposes in the United States.
Lamberth also said that the FISA court should not decide the NSA program's legality.
