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The president also went further than his review panel in suggesting the US needed to rein in its overseas surveillance activities. “We have got to provide more confidence to the international community. In a virtual world, some of these boundaries don’t matter any more,” he said. “The values that we have got as Americans are ones that we have to be willing to apply beyond our borders, perhaps more systematically than we have done in the past.”

Conspicuously, Obama declined to rebut one assessment from his surveillance review group – that the bulk collection of US call data was not essential to stopping a terrorist attack. Instead, he contended that there had been “no abuse” of the bulk phone data collection. But in 2009, a judge on the secret surveillance court prevented the NSA from searching through its databases of US phone information after discovering “daily violations” resulting from NSA searches of Americans’ phone records without reasonable suspicion of connections to terrorism. That data was inaccessible to the NSA for almost all of 2009, before the Fisa court was convinced the NSA had sufficient safeguards in place for preventing similar violations

In another indication of the shifting landscape on surveillance, the telecoms giant AT&T announced on Friday that it will begin publishing a semi-annual report about its complicity with government surveillance requests. AT&T followed its competitor Verizon, which announced a similar move on Thursday.

The first such report is expected for early 2014, Watts said. While technology firms like Yahoo and Google have pushed for greater transparency about providing their customer data to the government, the telecommunications firms – which have cooperated with the NSA since the agency’s 1952 inception – did not join them before the events of the past week.

Fearing blowback from Saudi jihadis engaged in the Syrian war, Riyadh has recently given the Syrian file to the interior minister Prince Mohamed bin Nayef, who has been in charge of an anti-terrorism campaign in the kingdom and Yemen, replacing intelligence chief Prince Bandar bin Sultan. The Wall Street Journal has quoted a key Saudi source who said the shift suggests that Riyadh could rely more on diplomatic than military means by exerting pressure on Russia, Iran and Hizbullah, Damascus’s chief supporters, to resolve the conflict by removing President Bashar al-Assad. Nevertheless, Riyadh also favours providing shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles to “vetted” rebels, well aware these weapons could fall into al-Qaeda hands.

Now, citizen, if you're concerned that misconduct is too easily forgiven and ignored in our society, take heart: the vast majority of people who get in serious trouble experience life-altering consequences that prevents them from ever getting similar jobs again, even after any draconian criminal sentences. Felony convictions, for instance, reliably keep people out of most positions of responsibility, not to mention housing, loans, youth activities, etc. So don't worry: the class of people who can commit grave misconduct with few long-term consequences is usually limited to law enforcement and, you know, banks and stuff. We want to be safe, right? So why should it bother us that, even in hotbeds of "liberalism," law enforcement misconduct generates little more than a shrug? Why should we be concerned that the "left" — once reliably protective of the rights of the accused — is now often a mouthpiece for "law and order" and contemptuous of the rights of the accused?

Glenn Greenwald, who met with Snowden in Hong Kong and was among the first to report on the leaked documents for the Guardian newspaper, said the former NSA contractor had "taken extreme precautions to make sure many different people around the world have these archives to insure the stories will inevitably be published.""If anything happens at all to Edward Snowden, he has arranged for them to get access to the full archives," Greenwald said in a June interview with the Daily Beast website. He added: "I don't know for sure whether has more documents than the ones he has given me... I believe he does."In an email exchange with Reuters, Greenwald, who has said he remains in contact with Snowden, affirmed his statements about Snowden's "precautions" but said he had nothing to add.Officials believe that the "doomsday" cache is stored and encrypted separately from any material that Snowden has provided to media outlets.

Sources familiar with unpublished material Snowden downloaded said it also contains information about the CIA - possibly including personnel names - as well as other U.S. spy agencies such as the National Reconnaissance Office and National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, which operate U.S. image-producing satellites and analyze their data.U.S. security officials have indicated in briefings they do not know what, if any, of the material is still in Snowden's personal possession. Snowden himself has been quoted as saying he took no such materials with him to Russia.

The Jewishness of the state of Israel: Israel is a Jewish state because its population is overwhelmingly Jewish, Jewish religious and historical holidays are its national holidays, and Hebrew is its national language. But Israeli demands that Palestinians recognize that Israel has been and remains the national homeland of the Jewish people is intended to require the Palestinians to affirm the legitimacy of Israel’s replacement of Palestine’s Arab population with its own. It also raises Arab fears of continuing differential treatment of Israel’s Arab citizens. Israelis are right to demand that Palestinians recognize the fact of the state of Israel and its legitimacy, which Palestinians in fact did in 1988 and again in 1993. They do not have the right to demand that Palestinians abandon their own national narrative, and the United States should not be party to such a demand. That said, Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, provided it grants full and equal rights to its non-Jewish citizens, would not negate the Palestinian national narrative.

Israeli security: The United States has allowed the impression that it supports a version of Israel’s security that entails Israeli control of all of Palestine’s borders and part of its territory, including the Jordan Valley. Many former heads of Israel’s top intelligence agencies, surely among the best informed in the country about the country’s security needs, have rejected this version of Israel’s security. Meir Dagan, a former head of the Mossad, dismissed it as “nothing more than manipulation.” Israel’s confiscation of what international law has clearly established as others’ territory diminishes its security. Illegal West Bank land grabs only add to the Palestinian and the larger Arab sense of injustice that Israel’s half-century-long occupation has already generated, and fuels a revanchismthat sooner or later will trigger renewed violence. No Palestinian leader could or would ever agree to a peace accord that entails turning over the Jordan Valley to Israeli control, either permanently or for an extended period of time, thus precluding a peace accord that would end Israel’s occupation. The marginal improvement in Israel’s security provided by these expansive Israeli demands can hardly justify the permanent subjugation and disenfranchisement of a people to which Israel refuses to grant citizenship in the Jewish state.

The terms for a peace accord advanced by Netanyahu’s government, whether regarding territory, borders, security, resources, refugees or the location of the Palestinian state’s capital, require compromises of Palestinian territory and sovereignty on the Palestinian side of the June 6, 1967, line. They do not reflect any Israeli compromises, much less the “painful compromises” Netanyahu promised in his May 2011 speech before a joint meeting of Congress. Every one of them is on the Palestinian side of that line. Although Palestinians have conceded fully half of the territory assigned to them in the U.N.’s Partition Plan of 1947, a move Israel’s president, Shimon Peres, has hailed as unprecedented, they are not demanding a single square foot of Israeli territory beyond the June 6, 1967, line. Netanyahu’s unrelenting efforts to establish equivalence between Israeli and Palestinian demands, insisting that the parties split the difference and that Israel be granted much of its expansive territorial agenda beyond the 78 percent of Palestine it already possesses, are politically and morally unacceptable. The United States should not be party to such efforts, not in Crimea nor in the Palestinian territories. We do not know what progress the parties made in the current talks prior to their latest interruption, this time over the issue of the release of Palestinian prisoners. We are nevertheless convinced that no matter how far apart the parties may still be, clarity on America’s part regarding the critical moral and political issues in dispute will have a far better chance of bringing the peace talks to a successful conclusion than continued ambiguity or silence.

The co-authors, senior advisers to the U.S./Middle East Project, are, respectively, former national security adviser, former U.S. secretary of defense; former chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; former U.S. trade representative; former under secretary of state for political affairs, and president, U.S./Middle East Project.

The State Department official said Kerry “reiterated that the absence of measurable progress on implementing the Geneva agreement will result in increased sanctions on Russia”. Those messages were underlined on a visit to Kiev on Tuesday by Biden, who also stressed US support for Ukraine’s new leaders — in power since the ouster in February of the pro-Kremlin president after months of pro-EU demonstrations. Biden called on Russia to pull back its forces from the border, and to reverse its annexation of the strategic Crimea peninsula last month. Russia has deployed tens of thousands of troops to Ukraine’s eastern border, while the United States was sending 600 soldiers to NATO member countries near Ukraine to boost defences in eastern Europe.

Russia has dismissed the threat of new sanctions and insists that it has the right to protect the Russian-speaking population in Ukraine, a former Soviet republic.

The article highlighted one document Osorio presented that revealed the bilateral precedent for what would become a multilateral system of regional repression: a secret accord between the Argentine and Paraguayan military intelligence services to "Collaborate in the struggle against subversion…" and the "… internment [of dissenters]…" " The agreement was dated September 12,1972, and signed by Paraguayan intelligence officer Col. Benito Guanes Serrano. Three years later, Guanes would also be one of the five original signatories of the secret Condor accords. Osorio discovered the document in the Archive of Terror in Paraguay. In September 1975, an assessment by a State Department intelligence analyst concluded that "The national security forces of the southern cone surpass the terrorists in cooperation at the international level…" Six weeks later, in Santiago, Chile, intelligence chiefs from Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay signed an "Acta" officially establishing Operation Condor. Osorio introduced that pivotal document - provided to the Archive by a source in Chile - into evidence as well.

Two declassified U.S. documents presented to the tribunal underscored the contradictory response of high U.S. officials as they became aware of Condor operations in the summer of 1976. One well-known 13-page memorandum of conversation between Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and Argentine Foreign Minister Admiral Cesar Guzzetti dated June 10, 1976, revealed Kissinger’s endorsement of the regional collaboration to repress the left. After Guzzetti informed Kissinger that the Southern Cone regimes were engaged in "joint efforts" to fight "the terrorist problem," Kissinger essentially supported this approach: "If there are things that have to be done, you should do them quickly. But you should get back quickly to normal procedures," according to the declassified transcript Osorio provided to the court. "We want you to succeed. We do not want to harrass [sic] you," Kissinger concluded. "I will do what I can … "

After a CIA briefing to Kissinger’s top aides in late July 1976 on the Condor countries’ plans to send assassination teams around the world to eliminate opponents, the Secretary of State authorized a démarche to General Augusto Pinochet in Chile, General Jorge Videla in Argentina, and other military leaders in the region calling on them to cease and desist. "Government planned and directed assassinations within and outside the territory of Condor members has most serious implication which we must face squarely and rapidly," stated the secret August 13, 1976, cable to U.S. ambassadors in those nations. But the démarche was never delivered to any of the Condor regimes. After the U.S. ambassadors raised objections about presenting the démarche to the generals, on September 16, 1976, Kissinger rescinded it, and ordered "that no further action be taken on this matter." In addition to Osorio, the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project director, Peter Kornbluh, testified in the Operation Condor trial for five hours in December 2014. Archive Advisory Board member, professor of journalism and author John Dinges presented evidence in April 2015. Read the Documents

The murder in Duma characterizes the group's ideological and operational perception. It wasn't an act of revenge but one aimed at igniting a conflict between the people, setting the region on fire and bringing down the Zionist regime which is "delaying salvation." In order to fulfill their goal, the group members are willing to sacrifice their lives and have no problem killing. It's a small group which carries out particularly harsh terror attacks, as part of its revolutionary outlook.   There is no rabbinical authority there. They do not accept the rabbinical authority linked to the "price tag" hooligans – like Rabbi Yitzchak Ginzburg. On the other hand, rabbis like Ginzburg disagree with their ideology.

The group was located by the Shin Bet, dozens of its members were called in for a deterrence talk, and some of them were subject to movement restrictions and ordered to spend the night at home. Some were even removed from the area. But without clear legal evidence, they were released.   This year alone, the Shin Bet has thwarted at least three terror attacks planned by this group – but only a very small number of indictments have been filed in light of restrictions on the Shin Bet's ability to question civilians.   The cell which carried out the attack at the Bethlehem church was caught, but the evidence obtained so far has made it impossible to file charges. They are working on it: Administrative orders have been issued against the suspects, but the legal proceedings are moving very slowly and there is no longer any deterrence.   On Sunday, the Shin Bet asked the cabinet to allow the implementation of quick and adamant legal proceedings. Five indictments have been filed so far in 2015, and 22 were filed in 2014, most of them for "price tag" activities. But only three suspects have been arrested for arson and sentenced to two-three years in prison. It was the first time the Shin Bet succeeded in arresting "price tag" members, and they mostly have Defense Minister Moshe Ya'alon to thank for that, following his decision to define the activity as an "unauthorized organization," which provided the Shin Bet with intensive tools. On Sunday, the Shin Bet demanded even more tools in order to eradicate this new insanity.

The system they built ultimately allowed the drug agency to stitch together huge collections of data to map trafficking and money laundering networks both overseas and within the USA. It allowed agents to link the call records its agents gathered domestically with calling data the DEA and intelligence agencies had acquired outside the USA. (In some cases, officials said the DEA paid employees of foreign telecom firms for copies of call logs and subscriber lists.) And it eventually allowed agents to cross-reference all of that against investigative reports from the DEA, FBI and Customs Service.

The result "produced major international investigations that allowed us to take some big people," Constantine said, though he said he could not identify particular cases.

In 1992, in the last months of Bush's administration, Attorney General William Barr and his chief criminal prosecutor, Robert Mueller, gave the DEA permission to collect a much larger set of phone data to feed into that intelligence operation.Instead of simply asking phone companies for records about calls made by people suspected of drug crimes, the Justice Department began ordering telephone companies to turn over lists of all phone calls from the USA to countries where the government determined drug traffickers operated, current and former officials said

The DEA obtained those records using administrative subpoenas that allow the agency to collect records "relevant or material to" federal drug investigations. Officials acknowledged it was an expansive interpretation of that authority but one that was not likely to be challenged because unlike search warrants, DEA subpoenas do not require a judge's approval. "We knew we were stretching the definition," a former official involved in the process said.Officials said a few telephone companies were reluctant to provide so much information, but none challenged the subpoenas in court. Those that hesitated received letters from the Justice Department urging them to comply.

A spokesman for AT&T declined to comment. Sprint spokeswoman Stephanie Vinge Walsh said only that "we do comply with all state and federal laws regarding law enforcement subpoenas."Agents said that when the data collection began, they sought to limit its use mainly to drug investigations and turned away requests for access from the FBI and the NSA. They allowed searches of the data in terrorism cases, including the bombing of a federal building in Oklahoma City that killed 168 people in 1995, helping to rule out theories linking the attack to foreign terrorists. They allowed even broader use after Sept. 11, 2001. The DEA's public disclosure of its program in January came in the case of a man charged with violating U.S. export restrictions by trying to send electrical equipment to Iran.At first, officials said the DEA gathered records only of calls to a handful of countries, focusing on Colombian drug cartels and their supply lines. Its reach grew quickly, and by the late 1990s, the DEA was logging "a massive number of calls," said a former intelligence official who supervised the program.

At its peak, the operation gathered data on calls to 116 countries, an official involved in reviewing the list said. Two other officials said they did not recall the precise number of countries, but it was more than 100. That gave the collection a considerable sweep; the U.S. government recognizes a total of 195 countries.

Hardly discussed in the pre-vote campaigns were the Snowden NSA revelations; the shady negotiations between Washington and Brussels over a free trade agreement which will be a boon for US Big Business; and how the financial casino supervised by the European Central Bank, the IMF, and the European Commission (EC) will remain untouched, further ravaging the European middle classes. The anti-EU crowd performed very well in France, the UK, Denmark and Greece. Not so well in Italy and the Netherlands. The mainstream did relatively well in Germany and ultraconservative Spain – even though losing votes to small parties.

Essentially, European voters said two things out loud: either “the EU sucks,” or “we couldn’t care less about you, Eurocrat suckers.” As if that sea of lavishly pensioned Brussels apparatchiks – the Eurocrats - would care. After all, their mantra is that “democracy” is only good for others (even Ukrainians…) but not for the EU; when the European flock of sheep votes, they should only be allowed to pick obscure Brussels-peddled and Brussels-approved treaties. Brussels, anyway, is bound to remain the Kafkaesque political epitome of centralized control and red tape run amok. No wonder the EU is breathlessly pivoting with itself as the global economy relentlessly pivots to Asia.

To believe that an EU under troika austerity will bail Kiev out of its massive outstanding debts is wishful thinking. The recipe - already inbuilt in the $17 billion IMF “rescue” package is, of course, austerity. Oligarchs will remain in control, while assorted plunderers are already lining up. Former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright – for whom hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children were expendable – “observed” the elections, and most of all observed how to privatize Telecom Ukraine, as she is doing now with Telekom Kosovo. There’s no evidence Right Sector and Svoboda will cease to be crypto-fascist, racist and intolerant just because Poroshenko – the King of Ukrainian Chocolate – is now the president. By the way, his margin for maneuver is slim, as his own markets – not to mention some of his factories – are in Russia. Heavy industry and the weapons industry in eastern Ukraine depend on Russian demand. It would take at least a whopping $276 billion for the West to “stabilize” eastern Ukraine. The notion of the EU “saving” Ukraine is D.O.A.

Moscow, once again, just needs to do what it is doing: nothing. And make sure there will be no economic or political help unless a federalized – and Finlandized - Ukraine with strong regions sees the light of day. Even the Brookings Institution has reluctantly been forced to admit that the US neo-con gambit has failed miserably; there’s no Ukraine without Russian help.

Signs so far are mixed. Poroshenko said Ukraine could “possibly” become an EU member state by 2025 (it won’t happen). He ruled out entering NATO (wise move). He rejects federalization (dumb move). He believes that with a strong economy Crimea would want to be back (wishful thinking). Still, he believes in reaching a compromise with Moscow (that’s what Moscow always wanted, even before regime change).

Back in NATOstan, there’s the crucial point of what happens to the ultra-right-wing anti-EU brigade in the Parliament in Strasbourg. They may all abhor the EU, but the fact is this ideological basket case will hardly form an alliance.

What this ultimately means is that conservative and moderate parties, as per the status quo, will remain in control, expressed via an extremely likely coalition of the European People’s Party (center-right) and the Socialists and Democrats (center-left). What comes next, in the second half of 2014, is the appointment of a new EU Commission. That’s Kafka redux, as in the bureaucrat-infested executive arm of the EU, which shapes the agenda, sort of (when it’s not busy distributing subventions in color-coded folders for assorted European cows.) There are 5 candidates fighting for the position of EC president. According to the current EU treaty, member states have to consider the result of EU Parliament elections when appointing a new president. Germany wants a conservative. France and Italy want a socialist. So expect a tortuous debate ahead to find who will succeed the spectacularly mediocre Jose Manuel Barroso. The favorite is a right-winger of the European People’s Party, former Prime Minister of Luxembourg Jean-Claude Juncker. He is an avid defender of banking secrecy while posing himself as a champion of “market social economy.”

Then there’s more Kafka: choosing the new president of the EU Council and the High Representative for Foreign Affairs. Translation: the EU won’t decide anything, or “reform” anything for months. That includes the critical negotiations with the Americans over the free trade deal. It’s absolutely impossible to spin these Sunday elections as not discrediting even more the EU project as it stands. As I’ve seen for myself, since early 2014, in 5 among the top EU countries, what matters for the average citizen is as follows: how to deal with immigration; how to fight the eradication of the welfare state; the implications of the free trade agreement with the US; the value of the euro –including an absurdly high cost of living; and what the ECB mafia is actually doing to fight unemployment.

With Kafka in charge for the foreseeable future, what’s certain is that Paris and Berlin will drift further and further apart. There will be no redesign of the EU’s institutions. And the next Parliament, filled with sound and fury, will be no more than a hostage of the devastating, inexorable political fragmentation of Europe. “Saving” Ukraine? What a joke. The EU cannot even save itself.

As the Fourth Amendment is not absolute in its terms, our task is to examine and balance the basic values at stake in this case: the duty of Government 315*315 to protect the domestic security, and the potential danger posed by unreasonable surveillance to individual privacy and free expression. If the legitimate need of Government to safeguard domestic security requires the use of electronic surveillance, the question is whether the needs of citizens for privacy and free expression may not be better protected by requiring a warrant before such surveillance is undertaken. We must also ask whether a warrant requirement would unduly frustrate the efforts of Government to protect itself from acts of subversion and overthrow directed against it. Though the Fourth Amendment speaks broadly of "unreasonable searches and seizures," the definition of "reasonableness" turns, at least in part, on the more specific commands of the warrant clause. Some have argued that "[t]he relevant test is not whether it is reasonable to procure a search warrant, but whether the search was reasonable," United States v. Rabinowitz, 339 U. S. 56, 66 (1950).[16] This view, however, overlooks the second clause of the Amendment. The warrant clause of the Fourth Amendment is not dead language. Rather, it has been

"a valued part of our constitutional law for decades, and it has determined the result in scores and scores of cases in courts all over this country. It is not an inconvenience to be somehow `weighed' against the claims of police efficiency. It is, or should 316*316 be, an important working part of our machinery of government, operating as a matter of course to check the `well-intentioned but mistakenly overzealous executive officers' who are a part of any system of law enforcement." Coolidge v. New Hampshire, 403 U. S., at 481. See also United States v. Rabinowitz, supra, at 68 (Frankfurter, J., dissenting); Davis v. United States, 328 U. S. 582, 604 (1946) (Frankfurter, J., dissenting). Over two centuries ago, Lord Mansfield held that common-law principles prohibited warrants that ordered the arrest of unnamed individuals who the officer might conclude were guilty of seditious libel. "It is not fit," said Mansfield, "that the receiving or judging of the information should be left to the discretion of the officer. The magistrate ought to judge; and should give certain directions to the officer." Leach v. Three of the King's Messengers, 19 How. St. Tr. 1001, 1027 (1765).

Lord Mansfield's formulation touches the very heart of the Fourth Amendment directive: that, where practical, a governmental search and seizure should represent both the efforts of the officer to gather evidence of wrongful acts and the judgment of the magistrate that the collected evidence is sufficient to justify invasion of a citizen's private premises or conversation. Inherent in the concept of a warrant is its issuance by a "neutral and detached magistrate." Coolidge v. New Hampshire, supra, at 453; Katz v. United States, supra, at 356. The further requirement of "probable cause" instructs the magistrate that baseless searches shall not proceed. These Fourth Amendment freedoms cannot properly be guaranteed if domestic security surveillances may be conducted solely within the discretion of the Executive 317*317 Branch. The Fourth Amendment does not contemplate the executive officers of Government as neutral and disinterested magistrates. Their duty and responsibility are to enforce the laws, to investigate, and to prosecute. Katz v. United States, supra, at 359-360 (DOUGLAS, J., concurring). But those charged with this investigative and prosecutorial duty should not be the sole judges of when to utilize constitutionally sensitive means in pursuing their tasks. The historical judgment, which the Fourth Amendment accepts, is that unreviewed executive discretion may yield too readily to pressures to obtain incriminating evidence and overlook potential invasions of privacy and protected speech.[17]

It may well be that, in the instant case, the Government's surveillance of Plamondon's conversations was a reasonable one which readily would have gained prior judicial approval. But this Court "has never sustained a search upon the sole ground that officers reasonably expected to find evidence of a particular crime and voluntarily confined their activities to the least intrusive means consistent with that end." Katz, supra, at 356-357. The Fourth Amendment contemplates a prior judicial judgment,[18] not the risk that executive discretion may be reasonably exercised. This judicial role accords with our basic constitutional doctrine that individual freedoms will best be preserved through a separation of powers and division of functions among the different branches and levels of Government. Harlan, Thoughts at a Dedication: Keeping the Judicial Function in Balance, 49 A. B. A. J. 943-944 (1963). The independent check upon executive discretion is not 318*318 satisfied, as the Government argues, by "extremely limited" post-surveillance judicial review.[19] Indeed, post-surveillance review would never reach the surveillances which failed to result in prosecutions. Prior review by a neutral and detached magistrate is the time-tested means of effectuating Fourth Amendment rights. Beck v. Ohio, 379 U. S. 89, 96 (1964).

But we do not think a case has been made for the requested departure from Fourth Amendment standards. The circumstances described do not justify complete exemption of domestic security surveillance from prior judicial scrutiny. Official surveillance, whether its purpose be criminal investigation or ongoing intelligence gathering, risks infringement of constitutionally protected privacy of speech. Security surveillances are especially sensitive because of the inherent vagueness of the domestic security concept, the necessarily broad and continuing nature of intelligence gathering, and the temptation to utilize such surveillances to oversee political dissent. We recognize, as we have before, the constitutional basis of the President's domestic security role, but we think it must be exercised in a manner compatible with the Fourth Amendment. In this case we hold that this requires an appropriate prior warrant procedure. We cannot accept the Government's argument that internal security matters are too subtle and complex for judicial evaluation. Courts regularly deal with the most difficult issues of our society. There is no reason to believe that federal judges will be insensitive to or uncomprehending of the issues involved in domestic security cases. Certainly courts can recognize that domestic security surveillance involves different considerations from the surveillance of "ordinary crime." If the threat is too subtle or complex for our senior law enforcement officers to convey its significance to a court, one may question whether there is probable cause for surveillance.

Nor do we believe prior judicial approval will fracture the secrecy essential to official intelligence gathering. The investigation of criminal activity has long 321*321 involved imparting sensitive information to judicial officers who have respected the confidentialities involved. Judges may be counted upon to be especially conscious of security requirements in national security cases. Title III of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act already has imposed this responsibility on the judiciary in connection with such crimes as espionage, sabotage, and treason, §§ 2516 (1) (a) and (c), each of which may involve domestic as well as foreign security threats. Moreover, a warrant application involves no public or adversary proceedings: it is an ex parte request before a magistrate or judge. Whatever security dangers clerical and secretarial personnel may pose can be minimized by proper administrative measures, possibly to the point of allowing the Government itself to provide the necessary clerical assistance.

Thus, we conclude that the Government's concerns do not justify departure in this case from the customary Fourth Amendment requirement of judicial approval prior to initiation of a search or surveillance. Although some added burden will be imposed upon the Attorney General, this inconvenience is justified in a free society to protect constitutional values. Nor do we think the Government's domestic surveillance powers will be impaired to any significant degree. A prior warrant establishes presumptive validity of the surveillance and will minimize the burden of justification in post-surveillance judicial review. By no means of least importance will be the reassurance of the public generally that indiscriminate wiretapping and bugging of law-abiding citizens cannot occur.

As the surveillance of Plamondon's conversations was unlawful, because conducted without prior judicial approval, the courts below correctly held that Alderman v. United States, 394 U. S. 165 (1969), is controlling and that it requires disclosure to the accused of his own impermissibly intercepted conversations. As stated in Alderman, "the trial court can and should, where appropriate, place a defendant and his counsel under enforceable orders against unwarranted disclosure of the materials which they may be entitled to inspect." 394 U. S., at 185.[21]