Vaughn Walker, a federal judge, ruled Wednesday that the National Security Agency’s program of surveillance without warrants was illegal. His ruling establishes that state secrecy claims do not trump the requirements of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The ruling also provides a chilling account of the relentless efforts by the Bush and Obama administrations to kill the civil lawsuit filed by an Islamic charity in Oregon called Al Haramain. The group was subjected to warrantless surveillance and then declared a sponsor of terrorism in 2004.

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Recent intercepts of the private telephone calls and e-mail messages of Americans are broader than previously acknowledged by the National Security agency. here

Overcollection of American e-mail
Overcollection problems appear to have been uncovered as part of a twice-annual certification that the Justice Department and the director of national intelligence are required to give to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on the protocols that the N.S.A. is using in wiretapping. Congress gave the N.S.A. broad new authority to collect, without court-approved warrants, vast streams of international phone and e-mail traffic as it passed through American telecommunications gateways. The targets of the eavesdropping had to be “reasonably believed” to be outside the United States. Under the new legislation, however, the N.S.A. still needed court approval to monitor the purely domestic communications of Americans who came under suspicion. The issue appears now focused on technical problems in the N.S.A.’s ability at times to distinguish between communications inside the United States and those overseas as it uses its access to American telecommunications companies’ fiber-optic lines and its own spy satellites to intercept millions of calls and e-mail messages. That led the agency to inadvertently “target” groups of Americans and collect their domestic communications.

A new ruling is expected to have broad implications for federal wiretapping law. Barack Obama, when a United States senator, was highly critical of the presidential wiretapping power claimed by Mr. Bush, and threatened to filibuster the final bill. But he ultimately voted for the Protect America Act. A federal appeals court has now for the first time has ruled on the constitutional question of the president’s wiretapping power.


The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court of Review, in a decision released January 15 '09, has found that the Protect America Act did not violate the Constitution because the Fourth Amendment, which prohibits unreasonable searches and seizures, contained an exception for the collection of foreign intelligence information.

The opinion is not expected to directly rule on the legality of the once-secret operation authorized by President Bush between October 2001 and early 2007, which allowed the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on the international communications of Americans suspected of ties to terrorists. The disclosure of the program’s existence in The New York Times in December 2005 set off a national debate on wiretapping, privacy and the limits of presidential power. Critics charged that Mr. Bush had violated a 1978 law requiring that the government obtain a court order to listen in on Americans’ communications.