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Domestic spying is a cultural construct that is used, especially among civil libertarians and the media, to refer to internally directed surveillance programs initiated by a variety of formal agencies of social control and intelligence. In the current U.S. context, domestic spying primarily refers to the debate that erupted following several revelations about surveillance programs set up, without court approval or congressional oversight, to aid in the fight against terrorism. Although the debate on domestic spying is recent, internal surveillance programs have considerable historical antecedents.

U.S. domestic surveillance programs date back to the 1930s, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt secretly ordered the Bureau of Investigation (renamed Federal Bureau of Investigation [FBI] in 1935) to investigate the American Nazi movement. On September 6, 1939, 3 days after the British and French declaration of war on Nazi Germany, Roosevelt formally placed the FBI in charge of all surveillance activities relating to espionage, sabotage, subversive activities, and violations of U.S. neutrality laws. During World War II, the FBI was responsible for all domestic intelligence work and foreign intelligence in South America, while the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was the leading intelligence agency for all other regions.

Domestic surveillance in the United States remained primarily in the hands of the FBI after the war. Most distinct amongst these efforts was the Bureau's COINTELPRO or counterintelligence programs from the 1950s onward that acted against communist groups and a wide range of other organizations, including leftist groups, civil rights organizations, and the Ku Klux Klan. In the early 1970s, COINTELPRO was formally abolished, leading to passage of the Federal Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in 1978, which permits electronic surveillance within the United States on foreign agents and international terrorists on the condition that a judge in a specialized FISA court issues a warrant.

Presently, several partly interacting and overlapping surveillance agencies handle domestic intelligence duties, including the FBI, the National Security Agency (NSA), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and various federal and local law enforcement agencies.

In the current context of counterterrorism, domestic spying debates erupted following several revelations reported in the popular media about domestic surveillance programs, conducted by the NSA, that were secretly authorized by the president following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

In addition to these NSA surveillance programs, debate also raged over the expanded opportunities afforded to the U.S. intelligence and law enforcement community under provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act, a federal bill passed in 2001 that broadened police powers against terrorism. In November 2005, the Washington Post disclosed a rapidly growing practice of domestic spying under the provisions of the PATRIOT Act by the FBI seeking information on the basis of so-called national security letters. Such letters enable the FBI to secretly review the private telephone and financial records of suspected foreign agents. However, the letters program also included U.S. citizens and residents who were not suspected of any wrongdoing.

Most important in the recent debate on domestic spying, The New York Times on December 16, 2005, reported on a secret domestic surveillance program conducted by the NSA. This so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, initiated in early 2002 on the secret authorization of President George W. Bush, allows the NSA to intercept, without a court-approved warrant, communications that involve one overseas and one domestic party or at least one party suspected of holding ties to Al-Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist group.

The response to this revelation was intense. In January 2006, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Center for Constitutional Rights filed lawsuits, arguing that the NSA eavesdropping program violated Americans' civil rights. That same month, the Electronic Frontier Foundation filed a class-action lawsuit against the telephone company AT&T, accusing it of providing the NSA with unfettered access to customer phone calls and Internet communications in violation of the Fourth Amendment as well as federal wiretap and communication laws. On a political level, two Senate Judiciary hearings held in February 2006 discussed the status of the NSA program. Another revelation about contemporary domestic surveillance programs came when the newspaper USA Today reported in May 2006 that the NSA had kept logs of billions of domestic calls, a program that began, without court approval, soon after 9/11.

References:

1) Keller, William W. 1989. The Liberals and J. Edgar Hoover: Rise and Fall of a Domestic Intelligence State. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

2) Morgan, Richard E. 1980. Domestic Intelligence: Monitoring Dissent in America. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

3) Posner, Richard A. 2005. Remaking Domestic Intelligence. Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press.

4) Risen, James. 2006. State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration. New York: Free Press.

5) Wong, Katherine. 2006. "The NSA Terrorist Surveillance Program." Harvard Journal on Legislation 43:517-34.

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