Surveillance Law Goes Far Beyond What White House Needed

James Risen reports for The New York Times that Bush has signed legislation into law broadly expanding the government's authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and email messages of American citizens without warrants. The impact reaches far beyond what the Bush administration had said was needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. For the first time, the new law makes surveillance without warrants, which was being conducted in secret by the NSA and in disregard of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, legal. FISA is the 1978 law that was supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.

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