Court aware of surveillance, Hatch says

WASHINGTON — Two judges on the secretive court that approves warrants for intelligence surveillance were told of the broad monitoring programs that have raised recent controversy, a Republican senator said Tuesday, connecting a court to knowledge of the collecting of millions of phone records for the first time.

President Bush, meanwhile, insisted the government does not listen in on domestic telephone conversations among ordinary Americans. But he declined to specifically discuss the compiling of phone records or whether that would amount to an invasion of privacy.

USA Today reported last week that three of the four major telephone companies had provided information about millions of Americans' calls to the National Security Agency. However, Verizon Communications Inc. denied on Tuesday that it had been asked by the agency for customer information, one day after BellSouth said the same thing.

Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, said that at least two of the chief judges on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had been informed since 2001 of White House-approved National Security Agency monitoring operations.

"None raised any objections, as far as I know," said Hatch, a member of a special Intelligence Committee panel appointed to oversee the NSA's work.

Hatch made the comment in answering a question in an interview about recent reports of the government compiling lists of Americans' phone calls. When pressed later, Hatch suggested he was also speaking broadly of the administration's terror-related monitoring.

Asked if the judges somehow approved the operations, Hatch said, "That is not their position, but they were informed."

An aide later said Hatch's comments should in no way be considered confirmation of any efforts to collect phone records.

The surveillance court, whose 11 members are chosen by the chief justice of the United States, was set up after Congress rewrote key laws in 1978 that govern intelligence collection inside the U.S.

The court is charged with secretly considering individual warrants for physical searches, wiretaps and traces on phone records when someone is suspected of being an agent of a foreign power. Making such requests to a regular court might reveal highly classified information.

Since 9/11, the court has been led by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth, and then by U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, who succeeded him.

In December, U.S. District Judge James Robertson resigned from the court, in an apparent protest of the Bush administration's surveillance work.