Eavesdropping 2.0

By MICHAEL DUFFY

As soon as the Bush administration acknowledged in late 2005 that it had been listening to conversations between suspected terrorists overseas and people in the U.S. without obtaining a court warrant, Democrats started debating privately what to do about the so-called warrantless wiretapping. They quickly split into three camps: one wanted to outlaw the unsupervised surveillance, another preferred to rewrite the law to okay the practice, and a third just wanted to punish the White House for overreaching.

It has now become clear that the Democrats are taking the middle road, allowing the wiretapping to continue but with new legal hurdles for the snoopers and additional oversight by the courts. This effectively boils down to the Dems' saying, We don't mind what you are doing--we just don't like the way you did it. A bill by Democratic Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan would require getting a warrant to listen to calls of suspected terrorists in the U.S. But the act would authorize most other warrantless intercepts of calls between targets or suspects overseas and phones in the U.S. The measure requires that intelligence officials submit procedures to a court before starting such blanket snooping. Officials must also prove that the law isn't being used to launch fishing expeditions that needlessly infringe on the privacy of innocent Americans. To check up on this, the legislation would make a secret court audit the surveillance program periodically and require Congress to reauthorize it in two years.

Republicans warned that the cumbersome restrictions would cause delays that would help enemies planning to attack the U.S. Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York stood firm, saying, "We need intelligence professionals gathering intelligence, and we need the courts protecting our liberty."