The CIA lost some of its clout when it fell under a newly created director of national intelligence as part of reforms enacted after intelligence failures over the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Some bureaucratic wrangling resulted as the new intelligence arm sought to assert itself over the CIA and met some opposition from the veteran spy agency.

The announcement on Goss was made at a hastily arranged event in the Oval Office attended by Goss and John Negroponte, director of national intelligence. A senior official said the resignation was based on a "mutual understanding" with Goss.

"Porter's tenure at the CIA was one of transition. He's helped this agency become integrated into the intelligence community. That was a tough job. He's led ably," Bush said.

Goss has been viewed in some circles as a CIA director whose tenure could be limited, due to a rift that developed early with senior members of the spy agency's clandestine service who have since departed in large numbers.

"Thank God," was the reaction of one former senior spy who spoke on condition of anonymity.

"It's gotten so bad there, it's just a charade at the moment. There's no senior leadership. The only people still there who are eligible to retire and have not are people with kids in college who have to stay to make tuition payments."

Lawyers were expected to square off Friday over the
Federal Communications Commission regulations before a three-judge panel for the U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia. In an unrelated case last year affecting digital television, two of the same three judges ruled that the FCC had significantly exceeded its authority and threw out new FCC rules requiring anti-piracy technologies.

In the current case, the FCC determined that providers of Internet phone service and broadband services must ensure their equipment can accommodate police wiretaps under the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act, known as CALEA. The new rules go into effect in May 2007.

The 1994 law was originally aimed at ensuring court-ordered wiretaps could be placed on wireless phones.

The Justice Department, which has lobbied aggressively on the subject, warned in court papers that failure to expand the wiretap requirements to the fast-growing Internet phone industry "could effectively provide a surveillance safe haven for criminals and terrorists who make use of new communications services."

Critics said the new FCC rules are too broad and inconsistent with the intent of Congress when it passed the 1994 law, which excluded categories of companies described as information services.

"Our significant concern is that if the FCC is essentially permitted to override the congressional exclusion, there are no limits," said John B. Morris, a lawyer for the Washington-based Center for Democracy and Technology, one of the civil liberties groups fighting the FCC's rules.

The case was expected to be decided by U.S. Circuit Judges Janice Rogers Brown, David B. Sentelle and Harry T. Edwards.

In the 2005 ruling against the FCC - the most recent major case involving the FCC before the circuit court - Sentelle famously told government lawyers that their new anti-piracy rules exceeded the authority Congress gave the agency. "You can't rule the world," Sentelle told them.

Edwards, another appeals judge in the current case, also came down hard on the FCC in 2005, saying it had "crossed the line" and "gone too far."

The NSA program is only one component of a much broader policy undermining basic democratic and constitutional rights in the United States, all justified by a supposedly ubiquitous terrorist threat. However, their real purpose is to vastly expand the powers of the government to monitor and repress internal dissent under conditions of mounting social tension and political opposition to the policies of the Bush administration.

Taken together, these developments provide a picture of a government that is systematically laying the foundations for a police state.

On Monday, May 1, the Justice Department released statistics documenting a sharp increase in the number of court-approved warrants the FBI has sought and received as part of the procedures established by the FISA Act. In 2005, the FBI received 2,072 warrants from the FISA court to conduct searches and electronic surveillance, up 18 percent from 2004.

Significantly, the FISA court did not reject any of the government's applications for warrants. The supposed difficulty of receiving warrants through the FISA procedures has been cited as one of the principal justifications for the warrantless NSA spying program, which is being carried out outside of any judicial oversight.

In addition to the FISA warrants, the government reported that the FBI issued 9,254 "national security letters" to US businesses and institutions to demand information on over 3,500 US citizens and residents. National security letters are used by the FBI to get personal records, including everything from Internet activity to records of purchases. They do not require any court review. The ability of the FBI to issue these letters was significantly expanded by the Patriot Act, passed shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

A Washington Post article published last year reported that the FBI is now issuing 30,000 national security letters every year, an enormous increase over previous years. However, unlike the figure of 9,254 reported by the government, the Post's numbers included a type of subpoena that only requests limited information such as a person's name. It is therefore impossible to say whether the 2005 figure represents an increase over the figure reported by the Post.

No information has been provided by the government as to who it has targeted with these secret subpoenas, or what information has been collected.

Draconian intelligence bill passes US House of Representatives

The House passed the Fiscal Year 2007 Intelligence Authorization Bill on April 26, allocating $44 billion to the various US intelligence agencies.

Republicans in the House blocked various amendments placing minor restrictions on the NSA spying program, including one that would require that classified reports on the program be given to the full House Intelligence and Judiciary committees. This hardly would have hampered the illegal spying on US citizens, as the government has already given regular reports for years to a smaller group of legislators of both parties, who have helped keep the program secret from the American people.

The intelligence bill must pass the Senate before becoming law. Republican Senator Arlen Specter, the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, has suggested that he might file an amendment that would block spending for the NSA program. However, Specter has already assured the White House that he won't actually seek a vote on the amendment at this time.

In addition to massive spending and the rejection of any constraints on the NSA program, the intelligence authorization bill also includes several measures that would significantly increase the spying and policing powers of the CIA and the NSA. Sections 423 and 432 of the bill would give certain personnel responsible for security within the CIA and the NSA authority to "make arrests without a warrant for any offense against the United States committed in the presence of such personnel, or for any felony cognizable under the laws of the United States." Section 432 also gives NSA officials explicit authority to carry firearms.

In an April 24 letter sent to Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee Peter Hoekstra and ranking Democrat on the panel Jane Harman, the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) noted that the majority of illegal acts committed by the CIA in the 1960s and 1970s were done in the name of CIA security powers to protect its facilities-the powers that are now being expanded to allow the agency to arrest anyone, anywhere in the country.

"As the 1976 Church Committee report noted," POGO wrote, "the stated basis for the creation of programs that resulted in the improper investigation of US citizens and US political groups, such as Projects RESISTANCE and MERRIMAC, was a dubious reading of statutes authorizing the Director of Central Intelligence to 'be responsible for protecting intelligence sources and methods from unauthorized disclosure.' This was expansively interpreted by the CIA as 'authorization for the protection of CIA personnel and facilities against any kind of "security threat" including the possibility of violent demonstrations by the public.' The application of this interpretation resulted in the proactive infiltrating by CIA operatives into student and political groups."

The intelligence bill not only gives the CIA increased powers needed to engage in such activities again, but grants the same powers to the NSA at a time when the agency has been implicated in massive illegal spying of US citizens. The NSA police forces, which currently have the power to arrest people within a 500-foot perimeter of NSA facilities, have also been recently involved in collaborating with local police forces to monitor peace groups planning protests of the NSA.

These measures are further steps in the establishment of a secret intelligence/police agency in the United States that is able to monitor virtually any communications between US citizens and rapidly make arrests of individuals deemed to be engaging in illegal activities, including protesters who are designated as "threats" to intelligence or defense facilities.

The bill also includes a measure that would require the director of national intelligence to study the possibility of revoking the pensions of intelligence agents who leak classified information without authorization. The section is a transparent response to a number of significant leaks in recent months that have revealed aspects of the criminal activities of the government, including the NSA spying program and the CIA's use of secret torture and detention centers in Europe.

The administration has threatened to criminally prosecute intelligence agents as well as journalists for their role in publishing classified information.

The intelligence authorization bill passed the House by a vote of 327-96, with overwhelming bipartisan support.

On the same day that the intelligence bill passed the House, the government filed a motion in a federal court in San Francisco to dismiss a lawsuit brought against AT&T by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF, an organization that promotes electronic privacy, has brought a class-action civil lawsuit against the telecommunications giant, charging it with collaborating with the NSA in violating the privacy of its customers by giving the government access to emails and other communications.

As part of the suit, the EFF has filed documents obtained by a former technician at AT&T proving that the company set up a separate room for the NSA and allowed the agency to monitor all the communications passing through its routers. The agreement with AT&T was part of the NSA's secret spying program. Administration officials have claimed that the program is intended to monitor only calls involving someone in another country who is suspected of having ties to Al Qaeda. The documents obtained by the EFF, however, indicate that the NSA has access to vast databases of communications that include purely domestic emails and calls between US residents and citizens.

The government, which is not named in the suit, has appealed for the case to be dismissed on the grounds that it could reveal state secrets. William Weaver, a law professor and senior advisor to the National Security Whistleblowers Coalition, told Wired News that the government's intervention will almost certainly end the EFF case and ensure that any documents in the case remain sealed. "There has never been an unsuccessful invocation of the state secrets privilege when national security is involved," he said. "The suit is over."

If the case is dismissed, it will close one of the few avenues available for challenging the illegal domestic spying.

Military steps up role in domestic spying

A report in the Wall Street Journal on April 27 ("Pentagon Steps Up Intelligence Efforts Inside US Borders" by Robert Block and Jay Solomon) documents the military's role in the surveillance of opposition groups in the Untied States.

"After 9/11," the newspaper reported, "the Bush administration declared the continental US a theater of military operations for the first time since the Civil War.... Now several parts of the vast Pentagon bureaucracy are building large databases of information from sources including local police, military personnel and the Internet. In doing so, the military is edging toward a sensitive area that has been off-limits to it since the 1970s: domestic surveillance and law enforcement."

The military has focused on antiwar protesters and according to the Journal, "the Pentagon has monitored more than 20 antiwar groups' activities around the country over the past three years. It has reviewed photographs and records of vehicles and protesters at marches to see if different activities were being organized by the same instigators."

The military database is connected to the program run by the NSA, as well to initiatives that were originally part of the Pentagon's now officially abandoned Total Information Awareness program. After a public outcry over TIA, which was to involve the accumulation of vast databases to help the government spy on the American people, the program was renamed and several of its components were moved around, but the basic plan has remained in place.

According to the Journal, some of the TIA components ended up in the hands of the Army's 902nd Military Intelligence Group, "the military's largest counterintelligence unit [which] has hundreds of soldiers stationed around the country." The 902nd makes extensive use of the Joint Regional Information Exchange System, "which gathers information collected by civilian law enforcement agencies around the country," the newspaper reported. "The Pentagon and local authorities including the New York Police Department and California's justice department set it up in December 2002," but it "got a boost when the Department of Homeland Security took it over and expanded it to include information from all 50 states and major urban areas."

Meanwhile, according to an article appearing in the May 8 issue of US News and World Report ("Spies Among Us," by David E. Kaplan), the Justice Department is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to fund state and local police intelligence units. Additional funds have gone into the development of regional law enforcement databases.

The newest intelligence units are called "fusion centers," which pool information from multiple local jurisdictions. These centers now exist in 31 states, with more on the way. There are plans to eventually have 70 such centers across the nation, providing what US News calls "a coast-to-coast intelligence blanket."

According to the US News article, Jack Tomarchio, the new deputy director of the Department of Homeland Security, told a law enforcement conference in March that the department intends to embed as many as three DHS agents and intelligence analysts at every site, adding that "the states want a very close synergistic relationship with the feds."

The New York Police Department (NYPD) has the largest number of officers assigned to homeland security-one thousand. The NYPD's chief of intelligence is the former director of operations at the CIA and its head of counterterrorism was a counterterrorism coordinator for the State Department. In addition, the NYPD has officers posted in half a dozen other countries.

Lawsuits filed against the NYPD reveal that its undercover officers have joined antiwar rallies, among other protest gatherings, and that they have acted as agents provocateurs in order to provoke arrests at at least one demonstration. Investigations also have been launched against undercover agents elsewhere, including in Fresno, California, where a sheriffs' department officer infiltrated a local peace group.

US News also reported that in order to qualify for federal homeland security grants, local authorities are now required, to report on how many "potential threat elements" or "PTEs" exist in their jurisdictions. "The definition [given by the Department of Homeland Security] of suspected terrorists was fairly loose," the magazine reported. "PTEs were groups or individuals who might use force or violence 'to intimidate or coerce' for a goal 'possibly political or social in nature.'"

This week's survey of 1,000 adults, including 865 registered voters, found:

- Just 33 percent of the public approves of Bush's job performance, the lowest of his presidency. That compares with 36 percent approval in early April. Forty-five percent of self-described conservatives now disapprove of the president.

- Just one-fourth of the public approves of the job Congress is doing, a new low in AP-Ipsos polling and down 5 percentage points since last month. A whopping 65 percent of conservatives disapprove of Congress.

- A majority of Americans say they want Democrats rather than Republicans to control Congress (51 percent to 34 percent). That's the largest gap recorded by AP-Ipsos since Bush took office. Even 31 percent of conservatives want Republicans out of power.

- The souring of the nation's mood has accelerated the past three months, with the percentage of people describing the nation on the wrong track rising 12 points to a new high of 73 percent. Six of 10 conservatives say America is headed in the wrong direction.

Republican strategists said the party stands to lose control of Congress unless the environment changes unexpectedly.

"It's going to take some events of significance to turn this around," GOP pollster Whit Ayres said. "I don't think at this point you can talk your way back from those sorts of ratings."

He said the party needs concrete progress in Iraq and action in Congress on immigration, lobbying reform and tax cuts.

"Those things would give the country a sense that Washington has heard the people and is responding in a way that will give conservatives a sense that their concerns are being addressed," Ayres said.

Conservative voters blame the White House and Congress for runaway government spending, illegal immigration and lack of action on social issues such as a constitutional amendment outlawing gay marriage. Those concerns come on top of public worries about Iraq, the economy and gasoline prices.

Candice Strong, a conservative from Cincinnati, said she backed Bush in 2004, "but I don't agree with the way he's handling the war and the way he's handling the economy. I think he should have pulled our troops out of Iraq."

Hardline conservatives are not likely to vote Democratic in the fall, but it would be just as devastating to the Republicans if conservatives lose their enthusiasm and stay home on Election Day.

AP-Ipsos polling suggests that Democrats may be winning the motivation game. Fewer voters today than in 2004 call themselves Republicans or Republican-leaning. In addition, 27 percent of registered voters were strong Republicans just before the 2004 election, while only 15 percent fit that description today.

Democratic numbers are the same or better since 2004.

"This tells us we've got our work cut out for us," said Sen. Sam Brownback (news, bio, voting record), a conservative Republican from Kansas who may run for president in 2008. "The key for us is to show restraint on spending and on dealing with immigration."

Bush's strong suit continues to be his handling of foreign policy and terrorism, an area in which he modestly improved his ratings since April. Still, a majority of Americans disapprove of his performance on both fronts.

It gets worse. Only 23 percent of the public approve of the way the president is handling gasoline prices, the lowest in AP-Ipsos polling. Those who strongly disapprove outnumber those who strongly approve by an extraordinary 55 percent to 8 percent.

As for his overall job performance, history suggests that Bush's paltry 33 percent spells trouble for Republicans in the fall.

In the past six decades, only one president had a lower job approval rating six months before a midterm election -
Richard Nixon in May 1974, the year in which Watergate-scarred Republicans lost 48 seats in the House and four in the Senate.

By November, Nixon was out of a job too, having resigned the presidency in August.

Nearly half of the public strongly disapproves of Bush, a huge jump from his 5 percent strong disapproval rating in 2002. The poll has a margin of error of 3 percentage points.

Of all Republicans, nearly 30 percent disapprove of the job Bush is doing, including 13 percent who feel strongly about it.

"Hopefully this is a wakeup call for my party to get out of its bunker and hunker mentality," said Republican strategist Greg Mueller, whose firm specializes in conservative politics.

He urged his party to start criticizing Democratic positions on the Iraq war, immigration and the economy.

"We've been like a punching bag," Mueller said.

Democrats need to gain 15 seats in the House and six in the Senate for control of Congress, no easy task in an era that favors incumbents.

"What we have to do is earn the public approval of our right to govern again," said Democratic Party chairman
Howard Dean.

The Democratic strategy is to nationalize the elections around a throw-the-bums-out theme.

Republicans counter that they will do better than polls suggest when voters are forced on Election Day to choose between candidates in their particular House and Senate races.

"But," Ayres said, "we better get in gear."