There is no change. Bush still can jail you indefinitely, tap your phone, kidnap you off the streets without contacting anyone, all by the word of the President that you are a terrorist. We all trust the President, right?
washingtonpost.com
The Bush administration said yesterday that it has agreed to disband a controversial warrantless surveillance program run by the National Security Agency, replacing it with a new effort that will be overseen by the secret court that governs clandestine spying in the United States.
The change -- revealed by Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales in a letter to the leaders of the Senate Judiciary Committee -- marks an abrupt reversal by the administration, which for more than a year has aggressively defended the legality of the NSA surveillance program and disputed court authority to oversee it.
Under the new plan, Gonzales said, the secret court that administers the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, will oversee eavesdropping on telephone calls and e-mails to and from the United States when "there is probable cause to believe" that one of the parties is a member of al-Qaeda or an associated terrorist group.
Under the previous approach, such intercepts were authorized by intelligence officers without the involvement of any court or judge -- prompting objections from privacy advocates and many Democrats that the program was illegal.
[...]But many details of the new approach remained unclear yesterday, because administration officials declined to describe specifically how the program will work.
Officials would not say, for example, whether the administration will be required to seek a warrant for each person it wants to monitor or whether the FISA court has issued a broader set of orders to cover multiple cases. Authorities also would not say how many court orders are involved or which judge on the surveillance court had issued them.
[...]"The issue has never been whether to monitor suspected terrorists but doing it legally and with proper checks and balances to prevent abuses," said Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vt.), chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. "Providing efficient but meaningful court review is a major step toward addressing those concerns."
[...]Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-N.M.), a member of the House intelligence panel, also referred to the new approach as "programmatic approval" and said it "does not have the protections for civil liberties" in FISA or in a bill she introduced last year.
[..]Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, which has been sharply critical of the NSA spying program, called the decision "an adroit back flip" by the Bush administration.
"It's clearly a flip-flop because they saw the writing on the wall," Romero said. "But it still does not address questions about whether the president broke the law. Complying with FISA now does not make his actions over the last 4 1/2 years legal."
Even before it was revealed publicly, the NSA program had infuriated [FISA Justice] Kollar-Kotelly and some other members of the FISA court, who questioned the program's legality and who warned the Justice Department that it could not use information from such monitoring to obtain warrants under FISA.
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