Journalist's Daughter Falsely Accused of Contacting Al Qaeda

Wonder why FISA disarming is bad? Why would Obama and Clinton return to Washington to vote against renewal?
CQ

U.S. intelligence tapped the telephone calls of Lawrence Wright, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Looming Tower, starting in 2002.


[..]One of his intelligence sources had revealed to him that he had “read a summary of a telephone conversation that I had from my home with a source in Egypt.”


McConnell said the eavesdropping must have been triggered by getting a call “from some telephone number that’s associated with some known outfit.” The journalist, however, had originated the call.


What happened next bears repeating, not just because it has gone largely unreported, but because it’s the kind of encounter many more Americans can expect if they end up as a target of our distressingly sloppy — some would say incompetent — counterterrorism agencies, if Congress extends a law (PL 110-55) enacted last August, that expanded the government’s electronic surveillance authority.


The law, which expires on Feb. 4, in effect turned U.S.-based Internet servers into a mail drop for U.S. intelligence.


In 2002 Wright was visited by two FBI agents after placing calls in the course of researching The Looming Tower, his Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the rise of Al Qaeda and U.S. responses to it, as well as an article on Al Qaeda’s number two leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri.


“They were members of the Joint Terrorism Task Force,” he recounted. “They wanted to know about phone calls made to a solicitor in England” who was upset that I was talking to some of her clients, who were jihadis, former members of Zawahiri’s terror organization in Egypt, and they wanted to know what we were talking about.”


What startled him, however, was that the visiting gumshoes thought that his daughter, Caroline, had made the calls.


“Our understanding is that these calls were placed by Caroline Wright,” they said. But Wright’s daughter was off at college at the time. He now worries that “she’s now on the link chart as an Al Qaeda connection.”


Now that we have a seamless web of databases, it wouldn’t be surprising if Caroline Wright finds herself blocked from getting on an airplane, entering the country or renewing her passport.