TPM Muckraker: Today's Must Read

By Spencer Ackerman - August 13, 2007, 9:31 AM

Here's a guide for future intelligence chiefs who want to take a shortcut around the law. Start out with a genuine problem. Propose a genuine solution, but build into it a bit more leeway for intelligence collection. Negotiate slowly and deliberately. Then use the threat of a terrorist attack at the end of the congressional session to ram through an evisceration of the problematic law, carving out from it all meaningful protections for American citizens. Watch a stunned opposition acquiesce.

Both the Washington Post and the New York Times present that general outline to explain how the Bush administration gutted the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act earlier this month. As reported earlier, the FISA Court ruled in March -- the Post provides the date -- that foreign-to-foreign communications, previously unprotected under FISA, required warrants for surveillance as they passed through U.S. communication switches. Admiral Michael McConnell, the director of national intelligence, saw the National Security Agency "losing capability," in the words of one intelligence official, due to a surveillance backlog generated by the Court ruling.