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The program is limited to those linked to Al Qaeda or other known terror groups, and for calls made from the United States to somewhere overseas and vice versa, Bush said. Calls between two U.S. cities are not monitored unless an order is granted by a secret court under the provisions of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, through a system that has been set up since the 1970s.
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By mid-December 2000, President Clinton had issued 347 executive orders, which have far-reaching consequences. Among these, journalist Cliff Kincaid noted, there were 80 classified Presidential Decision Directives (PDDs) mandating secret, unilateral executive actions that impact on the freedom of Americans.
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PDD-62, issued on the pretext of fighting terrorism, grants the FBI the power to maintain surveillance on Second Amendment groups and civic organizations opposed to the U.N., as well as “extremist” Christian fundamentalist groups.

PDD-63, supposedly signed to prevent unauthorized access to government computers, instead allows executive agencies to spy on the electronic communications of private citizens using the Internet.
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RICE: And what is quite clear from that paper is that, from the time of Presidential Directive 62, which keeps the Defense Department focused on force protection and rendition of terrorists and so forth, all the way up through the period when we take office, this issue of military plans and how to use military power with counterterrorism objectives just doesn’t get addressed.

What we were doing was to put together a policy that brought all of the elements together. It tasked the secretary of defense within the context of a plan that really focused not just on Al Qaida and bin Ladeandy Berger’s testimony. He talked about the fact whenever they started to look at the use of military plans, the issue of whether you would get regional cooperation always arose. That was precisely what I was saying, when I said that we had to get the regional context right.

I am not going to tell thaw we were looking to invade Afghanistan during that seven months. We were not.

But we were looking in the context of a plan that gave you a better regional context that looked to eliminate the Al Qaida threat or Al Qaida that looked to eliminate Taliban support for them – how to use military power within that context.

KEAN: Last follow-up.

GORELICK: In order to keep us to our schedule, I’ll just make this comment, and we’ll, I think, profitably follow up with you in a private session.
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President Clinton signed Presidential Decision Directive 63 May 22, 1998. That document is so secret that it has not been made available to the public — in any form. The only information about it comes from a summary that was issued.

PDD 63 deals with protecting the nation’s critical infrastructures, particularly computer information systems that the government depends on. The visible effect of PDD 63 has been the creation of the Critical Infrastructure Assurance Office. That new agency is hard at work to prevent disruption of the nation’s critical computer services.
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Presidential Decision Directive 63 is an example of an additional grab for power. It is so vague that it is difficult to determine the full implication, but it seems to establish a new federal bureaucracy designed to deal with the inevitable consequences of a computer disaster by the year 2000.
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