A bill essentially legalizing Bush’s warrantless surveillance program just sailed through the Democratic House and is expected to sail through the Democratic Senate. It would expand wiretapping powers against foreign targets, extend the grace period of warrantless domestic eavesdropping on Americans at home, and grant retroactive immunity to telecom companies that cooperated in illegal domestic spying. The New York Times calls it “the most significant revision of surveillance law in 30 years,” but it is also just the latest example in 30 years of Democratic betrayals of the Fourth Amendment.

In 1978, Democratic President Carter signed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act into law. A meager response to Nixon’s surveillance of peaceful activists and other such abuses, FISA established a secret court within the Justice Department to issue special warrants for wiretapping foreign suspects. Even when spying on a “United States person,” intelligence officials now had 72 hours before they needed a warrant. Carter said in his signing statement, “This is a difficult balance to strike, but the act I am signing today strikes it.” The Fourth Amendment lost its teeth.

From 1979 to September 11, 2001, more than thirteen thousand FISA warrants were issued. Not a single application was rejected.

WASHINGTON –– This is a cautionary tale.

In 1947, Gen. William "Wild Bill" Donovan proposed a new agency for gathering intelligence to replace the Office of Strategic Services that he had headed so successfully in helping win World War II. The legendary spymaster would have been the logical choice to lead an effort that would be at the forefront of the fight against communism throughout the Cold War.

But Donovan, a friend and ally of Franklin Roosevelt, was always held in some suspicion by Roosevelt's successor, Harry Truman. He never got the job, although men who had learned their craft under Donovan would play a major role in the early development of the new Central Intelligence Agency when Congress finally approved it. To make sure that Donovan was not going to be the first choice for the CIA, the White House leaked a story to the Chicago Tribune that Wild Bill had proposed a new approach to espionage that would include spying on Americans.

If the sweeping surveillance law signed by President Bush last week –– giving the U.S. government nearly unchecked authority to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e–mails of innocent Americans –– is allowed to stand, we will have eroded one of the most important bulwarks to a free press and an open society.

The new FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance. It allows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The court will not be told specifics about who will be wiretapped, which means the law provides woefully inadequate safeguards to protect innocent people whose communications are caught up in the government's dragnet surveillance program.

Hey, it's politics. In the primary, when Barack Obama wanted to connect with his party's disaffected left, he said that he would support a filibuster to stop a reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act if it granted retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that had cooperated with the federal government after the 9/11 attacks.

Now Obama has those voters in the bag. So he is reaching out to the majority of Americans who want aggressive international surveillance to prevent another terrorist attack.

Congress was outraged three years ago by reports in The New York Times about the Bush administration's eavesdropping on Americans without court warrants.

Two years ago, the nonpartisan Congressional Research Service produced a 44–page analysis challenging the legal basis for President Bush's evasion of federal wiretap procedures. A federal judge ruled the administration's warrantless eavesdropping program to be unconstitutional.

A year ago, senators in both parties grilled administration officials in televised hearings.

War On Terror: After keeping the homeland vulnerable for months, the Democratic Congress finally restored surveillance powers against terrorists. The supposedly "failed" Bush presidency wins big again.

The extraordinary nature of the White House victory this week in passing the overhaul of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is unlikely to be fully appreciated this election year.

Some forget that when the National Security Agency's terrorist surveillance program was revealed in late 2005 by The New York Times, it was seen as yet another death knell for George W. Bush.

The Senate has finally passed the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), 69–28, after months of dithering, but one vote among the yeas comes as quite a surprise. Sen. Barack Obama, who just a few months ago threatened to filibuster the bill, had a change of heart –– or was it just a change in campaign strategy?

The legislation authorizes continued warrantless wiretaps of suspected terrorists' overseas communications, so long as they are not U.S citizens, and gives retroactive legal immunity against lawsuits to telecommunications companies that assisted the government in earlier warrantless searches. In December 2005, the New York Times exposed the National Security Agency's secret program to monitor overseas conversations and e–mails of suspected terrorists –– drawing howls of protest from Democrats and groups like the ACLU. Ever since, Democrats have been trying to rein in the government's ability to eavesdrop on our adversaries, and Sen. Obama has been among the most vociferous critics.

This week Congress could do what President Bush has been trying to do almost from the day he assumed office: Increase the powers of the presidency by shredding some of Americans' most basic liberties. As regular readers of this page are aware, we have been sounding the alarm about this concentration of power for several years. Now it is necessary, even urgent, to sound it once again.
At issue is a purported reform of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978, adopted after the Watergate scandal, which safeguards the privacy rights of Americans. But the reform measure now before the Senate is far from a safeguard. Worse, it would set a horrible precedent by granting amnesty to the private telecommunication firms that turned over customer information to the government without first demanding to see a court order.

WASHINGTON –– Two years ago, I stated my belief that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program and disregard for domestic and international law poses a direct challenge to our constitutional order, and "constitutes a far greater threat than the lawlessness of Richard Nixon."

That was not a casual comparison. When I was on the staff of the National Security Council, my home phone was tapped by the Nixon administration –– without a warrant –– beginning in 1969. The wiretap stayed on for 21 months. The reason? My boss, Henry Kissinger, and the director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, believed that I might have leaked information to The New York Times. Even after I left government, and went to work on Edmund Muskie's presidential campaign, the FBI continued to listen in and made periodic reports to the president.

WASHINGTON –– An internal State Department investigative report suggests that employees may have been snooping on the passport records of celebrities far more than previously disclosed. It urges new steps to secure the files.

In asking Congress to allow warrantless surveillance of Americans' international communications, President Bush is seeking permission to do something he believes he does not need permission to do. Like a parent confronted by a defiant teenager, Congress is giving in while insisting it isn't.

Federal law already says the government may listen to the phone calls or read the email of people in the United States only if it follows procedures established by statute. The amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) approved by the House last week say it again. Twice. In effect, Congress is saying, "We mean it. Seriously."

The revised surveillance law approved last week by the House is good news for the telecommunications companies that are facing lawsuits from customers over breaches of privacy. But it provides scant assurances to Americans that their privacy will be respected in the future.

The Senate must not allow itself to be rushed into signing on to the House version before adjourning. There is too much at stake to act in haste. At the very least, the Senate should fine–tune the House measure to safeguard basic liberties.

A compromise –– planned to be announced today –– has apparently been reached by Senate and House negotiators on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act legislation essential to continued intelligence gathering on terrorists.

The bill would renew for six years the repairs to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act made essential by a decision of the FISA court last year. That decision extended FISA warrant requirements to communications between two foreign parties that passed through US communications equipment. The law that fixed the problem –– the “Protect America Act” –– expired on February 16.

The compromise was to be announced yesterday but because of recalcitrant Democratic leaders and members it drifted another day. And its fate today is not at all certain.

VERGENNES, Vermont — If the U.S. intelligence community were a business, it would be obvious that there's something wrong: It's in the middle of a botched reorganization that makes the AOL–Time Warner merger look good; its most famous brand name, "CIA," has been badly tarnished; and it has lost the confidence of its three shareholders — the executive branch, the Congress and the American public.

This bear market in intelligence is not helpful for a nation that is fighting two major wars.

So what should the next president do to fix the U.S. intelligence community?

A group of past and present members of the spy world, joined by some journalists and academics, gathered here last week to discuss this covert conundrum.

Unless one can argue that doing something is its own reward (such as acts of charity), one tends to look for reason and justification. So, for every action or initiative, there has to be a measure of progress, of results attained through effort made and price paid. This doesn't tend to be how the Bush administration does things.

It rails against having to justify its actions to the poor saps who pay for it all, the American public, be it in Iraq (benchmarks, schmenchmarks), in the case of pointless abstinence–only education programs or in the case of its aggressive domestic spying, which the Los Angeles Times reports is yielding ever fewer terrorism prosecutions, it's ... well ... the whys and the hows are conveniently top–secret, so stop asking. At least, that's the expectation.

Even as he pushes Congress to expand the government's ability to gather private information under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act sans warrant, the gist of President Bush's argument is, "Trust me." Sure. Isn't that how we ended up in Iraq?

The American people have heard President Bush and his spokesmen say many times that the U.S. government does not engage in torture.

Whether Bush was believed is another story –– especially in light of the photographic evidence of the abuse of prisoners in Abu Ghraib, the prison near Baghdad.

Still, the official U.S. denials of torture continued until last month month when Bush acknowledged in an interview with ABC–TV that he knew about and approved "enhanced interrogation" of detainees, including "waterboarding."

In October 2001, when Congress passed the Patriot Act — and again when it reauthorized it in 2006 — the Bush administration assured nervous but compliant members of Congress that these expanded domestic surveillance tools were needed to protect the homeland.

Bush partisans scoffed at critics who worried these new spy powers might be used for nefarious political purposes. After all, that hasn’t happened since the ’70s — during the last ill–fated war (Vietnam) waged by a criminally inclined Republican president (Nixon) — and the ’80s — during the last illegal war (Central America) waged by a morally challenged Republican president (Reagan).

The next time Islamist terrorists attack us it could be with a nuclear weapon. By saying that, am I “fear mongering”? If so, I’m in good company. Graham Allison is a Harvard professor who served with distinction in the Defense Department under both Reagan and Clinton. He wrote a book in 2004 arguing that “on the current course, nuclear terrorism is inevitable.”

Finally, Congress is stepping up to curtail the FBI's use of National Security Letters via two bills, one in the House, one in the Senate. The FBI has been found to, and has admitted to using the letters improperly. In fact, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the agency even went so far as to deliberately delay an investigation by returning data it received lawfully, via subpoena, and then demanding the same records under the Patriot Act to show that it somehow ought to be able to act without judicial oversight.

Attorney general, trying to explain his emotional account in S.F. of an unmonitored terrorist phone call before the 2001 terrorist attacks, told Congress he was wrong about the call's place of origin.