White House may allow wiretapping review - Specter

WASHINGTON, June 25 (Reuters) The White House appears to be leaning toward allowing a secret federal court to look at its controversial warrantless wiretaps, a reversal of previous policy, a top Republican senator said today.

Sen Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, had been pressing the Bush administration to seek clearance from the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, court.

The act requires warrants from the court for intelligence-related eavesdropping inside the United States.

''I think there is an inclination (in the White House) to have it submitted to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court, and that would be a big step forward for protection of constitutional rights and liberties,'' Specter, who had harshly criticised the program, told ''Fox News Sunday.'' ''We're having a lot of conversations about that. We're close, I'm not making any predictions until you have it all nailed down,'' he added.

The Pennsylvania lawmaker had said the Bush administration may have broken the law in allowing the National Security Agency to monitor the international phone calls and e-mails of US citizens without first obtaining warrants if in pursuit of al Qaeda suspects.

'NOT THE SAME PRIVACY INTEREST' But Specter declined to criticize the Bush administration's scrutiny of hundreds of thousands of bank records, telling Fox that bank records are not the same as conversations.

''I believe there needs to be judicial oversight on wiretapping where you hear conversations where there is an expectation of privacy,'' he said. ''There is not the same privacy interest in bank records.'' Under the bank program, the Treasury Department has subpoenaed data from an international banking cooperative called the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunications, or SWIFT.

Based in Brussels, SWIFT is owned and controlled by nearly 8,000 commercial banks in 20 countries.

The records examined mostly involve wire transfers and other methods of moving money overseas or into and out of the United States.

''I think we need to know more,'' said Specter. ''We just have a newspaper report and, frankly, that's not sufficient for Congress to discharge its congressional responsibility for constitutional oversight.

''I want to have the attorney general on the record to find out what we can from him. That's a very high-level hearing. We need to know the specifics,'' he said.

Rep Peter King, a New York Republican, criticized the New York Times for publishing a story last week about the search of bank records, calling it a ''clear violation of statutory law.'' ''I think the administration acted entirely appropriately,'' he told Fox. ''I'm calling on the attorney general to begin a criminal investigation and prosecution of the New York Times.'' Specter disagreed, saying ''on the basis of the newspaper article, I think it's premature to call for prosecution of the New York Times, just as I think it's premature to say that the administration is entirely correct.'' REUTERS KD RS2325