F.I.S.A. nonsense

We certainly suspected there was less to the announcement that the Prez had decided to abide by F.I.S.A. than there appeared to be. Now the evidence is accumulating that we were right. It's beginning to look like the Administration simply bought off one judge on the F.I.S.A. court to give them a blanket warrant to do what they were doing before, so little is new. It's time for the Congress to act to stop this.

But senior lawmakers said they were still uncertain Wednesday, even after the administration’s announcement, about how the court would go about approving warrants, how targets would be identified, and whether that process would differ from the court’s practices since 1978.

The administration said it had briefed the full House and Senate Intelligence Committees in closed sessions on its decision.

But Representative Heather A. Wilson, Republican of New Mexico, who serves on the Intelligence committee, disputed that, and some Congressional aides said staff members were briefed Friday without lawmakers present.

Ms. Wilson, who has scrutinized the program for the last year, said she believed the new approach relied on a blanket, “programmatic” approval of the president’s surveillance program, rather than approval of individual warrants.

Administration officials “have convinced a single judge in a secret session, in a nonadversarial session, to issue a court order to cover the president’s terrorism surveillance program,” Ms. Wilson said in a telephone interview. She said Congress needed to investigate further to determine how the program is run.

This news was, of course, buried deep, deep in the NY Times article so as to be read by as few people as possible.