LEGAL AND HISTORICAL BACKGROUND

Presidents have engaged in the practice of domestic and foreign intelligence collection since the advent of the United States. The colonies' envoy to France, for example, was America's first great, and perhaps its greatest, intelligence officer: Benjamin Franklin. At home, as Geoffrey Stone has illustrated, presidents authorized all measure of intrusion to identify persons engaged in espionage as well as to deter internal dissent. Electronic surveillance would come later, during the Civil War with the tapping of telegraph lines, and then in earnest following Alexander Graham Bell. But the concept of eavesdropping was clearly not new to the telephonic, electronic, computer, or Internet age. The term “eavesdropping” derives from agents standing under the eave of a house to listen to the conversations taking place within.

As historians have documented, in the landline age, presidents routinely authorized electronic surveillance (wiretapping) to collect foreign intelligence. In 1996, for example, the government declassified and released a history of its eavesdropping efforts on Soviet targets within the United States, known by the program name of Venona. In 1978, the Church Committee also revealed that