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to the FISA court. Judge Royce C. Lamberth, who headed the court from 1995-2002, refuted this argument, saying that court procedures had been streamlined in 2001 to make the court more responsive. In August 2007, DNI McConnell revealed that legal changes were necessary because a judge on the FISA court had ruled that court-sanctioned warrants were required on any communications traveling through the United States, even if the two parties involved in the exchange were both overseas. This was seen as a major setback for surveillance, as many Internet communications will pass through the United States. According to press reports, intelligence officials said this ruling had resulted in a 25 percent drop in intercepts. McConnell also revealed that one hundred or fewer individuals in the United States were under surveillance. He also acknowledged that some telecommunications companies had assisted the warrantless surveillance program.

After an intense and partisan debate that lasted almost a year, Congress passed a new law in July 2008 that was largely seen as a victory for the Bush administration. The law allows emergency wiretaps on American targets for one week without a warrant to preclude losing important intelligence and if there is strong reason to believe that the target is linked to terrorism. There is a similar one-week provision for foreign targets. Broad warrants, versus specific ones, will be allowed against foreign communications. The law also grants legal immunity to telecommunications firms that cooperated with the earlier warrantless program, which had been a major issue. The new law also makes clear that changes can only be made in the wiretap program within the law and not solely on order of the president. Various oversight provisions by the FISA court and by inspectors general are laid out as well.

A controversy involving U.S. and British SIGINT operations arose in 2004. A Government Communications Headquarters employee alleged that NSA had conducted SIGINT at the UN, against Security Council members, during the debates prior to the war against Iraq. Both governments refused to confirm the allegations. The UN, by treaty, is deemed to be inviolate from such activity. At the same time, all nations know that the UN is an excellent intelligence collection target as virtually all nations of the world have missions and representatives there. (See chap. 13 for a fuller discussion.)

MEASUREMENT AND SIGNATURES INTELLIGENCE. FISINT and ELINT are both major contributors to a little-understood branch of collection known as MASINT. MASINT refers to weapons capabilities and industrial activities. MSI and HSI also contribute to MASINT.

An arcane debate rages between those who see MASINT as a separate collection discipline and those who see it as simply a product, or even a by-product, of SIGINT and other collection capabilities. For our purposes, it is sufficient to understand that MASINT exists and that, in a world increasingly concerned about such issues as proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, it is of growing importance. For example, MASINT can help identify the types of gases or waste leaving a factory, which can be important in chemical weapons identification. It can also help identify other specific characteristics (composition, material content) of weapons systems.

MASINT practitioners think of their INT as having six disciplines.

1. Electro-optical: the properties of emitted or reflected energy in the infrared to ultraviolet part of the spectrum, including lasers and various types of light—infrared, polarized, spectral, ultraviolet, and visible

2. Geophysical: the disturbance and anomalies of various physical fields at, or near, the surface of Earth, such as acoustic, gravity, magnetic, and seismic

3. Materials: the composition and identification of gases, liquids, or solids, including chemical-, biological-, and nuclear-related material samples

4. Nuclear radiation: the qualities of gamma rays, neutrons, and x-rays

5. Radar: the properties of radio waves reflected from a target or objects,