Fundamentally, this is an issue of law. FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, was established in 1978 to address a wide variety of issues revolving around Watergate, during which a President used foreign intelligence agencies to collect data on US citizens. As part of FISA, NSA has to get warrants to analyze and maintain collections of data involving US citizens. FISA has withstood all tests until now, and it involves a fundamental aspect of the US Constitution -- its system of checks and balances.

The FISA law allows NSA to request those warrants up to 72 hours after the fact -- that is, after the data has been analyzed. And lest you think that the courts from which such warrants are requested are staffed by a bunch of liberal, activist, criminal-coddling judges, they have reportedly turned down only five warrants in the last 28 years. So when President Bush says "If Osama bin Laden is calling someone in the United States, we want to know about it," followed by his nervous laugh, he's laughing at the American Public, as "knowing about it" is a totally irrelevant issue. FISA blocks no legitimate acquisition of knowledge.

It doesn't even slow the process down. The issue is not that NSA cannot examine calls into the US from terrorist suspects -- FISA provides for that -- but that the agency must justify acting on the results and keeping the information within 72 hours. The President claims that the process of getting those warrants -- of complying with the law -- is too time-consuming. Normally that would sound like simple laziness, but the reality is that the program is so large that they would need an army of lawyers to get all the warrants they'd need to be in compliance with FISA. But the law is the law. No president has the right to pick and choose which laws they find convenient to follow.

If Bush didn't like the FISA laws, he could have asked Congress to amend them. After all, after 9/11 Congress passed a wide variety of laws (without, for the most part, reading them) that were supposed to prevent another attack. They could have easily slipped something modifying FISA into all of that legislation. They did not, though recent revelations about this administration's use of signing statements may indicate that they simply didn't want to raise the possibility of questions.

Ignoring FISA's rules concerning warrants is illegal. It also weakens national security, since the process of obtaining the warrants has an effect on quality control. To date, FBI agents have been sent out to do thousands of investigations based on this warrantless wiretapping. None of those investigations turned up a legitimate lead. I have spoken to about a dozen agents, and they all roll their eyes and indicate disgust with the man-years of wasted effort being put into physically examining NSA "leads."