White House set to boost wiretap power

WASHINGTON -- A furious push by the White House to broaden its wiretapping authority appeared on the verge of victory Friday night.

The Senate approved a measure that would temporarily give the administration more latitude to eavesdrop without court warrants on foreign communications that it suspects may be tied to terrorism. The House is expected to take up the White House-backed measure this morning before going into its summer recess.

Democratic leaders acknowledged that it would likely garner enough votes to pass.

Democrats in both the House and the Senate failed to pass competing measures Friday that would have included tougher judicial checks and oversight on the eavesdropping powers.

The White House and congressional Republicans hailed the Senate vote as critical to plugging what they saw as dangerous gaps in the intelligence agencies' ability to detect terrorist threats.

"I can sleep a little safer tonight," Sen. Kit Bond, the Missouri Republican who co-sponsored the measure, declared after the Senate vote.

North Carolina's senators, Republicans Richard Burr and Elizabeth Dole, voted in favor of the bill.

The measure approved by the Senate "sunsets" in six months and would have to be reauthorized. The White House's grudging agreement to make it temporary helped to attract the votes of a number of moderate Democrats who said they thought that it was important for Congress to approve some version of wiretapping bill before its recess.

The White House and Republican leaders pressed the point throughout the day that a vote against the measure would put the nation at greater risk of attack.

Some Democrats and civil rights advocates accused the Senate of capitulating to White House demands by broadening the ability to eavesdrop without warrants on communications that are primarily "foreign" in nature, even if they may touch on Americans' phone calls and e-mail messages.

The measure "goes far, far beyond" the National Security Agency program that the president secretly approved after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, said Sen. Russ Feingold, D-Wis.

"The Democrats caved in to the politics of fear we're seeing from this administration," said Caroline Frederickson, head of the American Civil Liberties Union office in Washington. "They didn't want to be depicted as soft on terrorism. But this measure removes any court oversight from surveillance on Americans in a large number of cases."

The White House lobbying took on new urgency because of a still-classified ruling by the intelligence court this year that placed new restrictions on monitoring without warrants purely foreign communications that are routed through the United States.

Such communications were once considered outside the reach of the court, known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court or the FISA court.

"Time is short," Bush warned in an appearance at the FBI. "I'm going to ask Congress to stay in session until they pass a bill that will give our intelligence community the tools they need to protect the United States."

In an unusual maneuver, Bond pressed the case for new legislative authority by reading on the Senate floor, apparently to the surprise of some administration officials, an e-mail message that the office of the director of national intelligence, Mike McConnell, had sent to congressional leaders regarding the urgency of amending federal wiretap law.

What to monitor

"We understand that the FISA court judges urgently support a more appropriate alignment of the court's caseload and jurisdiction away from the focus on non-U.S. persons operating outside of the United States," the e-mail message said. "The judges have clearly expressed frustration with the fact that so much of their docket is consumed by applications that focus on foreign targets and involve minimal privacy interests of Americans."

Court officials and McConnell's office refused to comment on the message. The concerns from his office appeared to reflect, at least in part, the recent restrictions imposed by the court on the interception of what are known as "foreign-to-foreign transit traffic," in which both parties are outside the United States but the phone calls or e-mail messages are routed through telecommunication facilities within the United States.

For years, judges on the court have debated whether and under what circumstances communications that pass through U.S. "switches" should be subject to monitoring by U.S. intelligence agencies.

The FISA court's ruling was alluded to by John Boehner, R-Ohio, the House Republican leader, in an interview Tuesday evening on Fox News, and details were published Thursday in the Los Angeles Times.

Conflicting accounts emerged Friday about the nature of the court's restrictions and what impact they have had on current intelligence operations. The ruling remains classified.