The New York Times' revelation last week that President George W. Bush signed an order in 2002 authorizing the NSA to conduct domestic surveillance without warrants was mind-blowing. But did the administration violate federal law?

The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 outlines what the government's powers are and are not when it comes to conducting electronic surveillance operations. The USA PATRIOT Act made some changes to FISA, but the changes were, in my opinion, not very substantial. The USA PATRIOT Act brought FISA up-to-date with the times; for example, it re-defined "wire communication" to "cable" communications systems and packet-switched networks (i.e., the Internet). The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is known to history as 50 U.S.C. 1801, et seq.

Curiously, there should be no need to enact secret orders to spy on people. FISA has a provision for authorizing warrants for foreign intelligence surveillance: the foreign intelligence surveillance court. This is a special court composed of 11 U.S. District Court judges (3 of whom must live within 20 miles of Washington, D.C.) who have the authority to hear applications for electronic surveillance. If any one of these 11 judges rejects an application for foreign intelligence surveillance, then the decision gets reviewed by a panel of three other foreign intelligence surveillance court judges. If this panel rejects an application, then the decision can be appealed, under seal, to the U.S. Supreme Court. Since its inception in 1978, the foreign intelligence surveillance court has rejected only 4 applications for electronic surveillance, and those were all in 2003. (The court does, however, modify applications for various reasons.) The foreign intelligence surveillance court is, essentially, a rubber stamp.

And yet, the Bush administration felt that even this rubber-stamp authority was too restrictive for the activities it wanted to engage in. When an administration is upset that a secret order has become public knowledge, that's when we should be concerned. The administration didn't want the American people to know that the NSA was conducting surveillance on domestic targets, and that should be cause for concern. Once our government actively tries to hide things from us, we become more like all those oppressive dictatorships we claim to hate.

The National Security Agency (NSA) is probably the least-public of the three U.S. intelligence agencies, the other two being the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The agency was founded in 1952 by an executive order of President Truman. Its function is to monitor domestic communications, especially government communications, and collect and analyze foreign communications. It is especially concerned with cryptography. The NSA's charter prohibits it from conducting domestic surveillance. (For more information, watch the movie Sneakers.)

Did the president break the law? 50 U.S.C. 1802(a) allows the president, via the Attorney General, to "authorize electronic surveillance without a court order" if and only if the targets of such surveillance are exclusively "foreign powers." As defined in 50 U.S.C. 1801(a), a foreign power can be a foreign country, an agent of a foreign country, or "a group engaged in international terrorism or activities in preparation therefor." I went into this analysis believing that the president broke the law, but after reading this stuff, it's pretty nebulous. The definitions of "foreign power" have been so watered down that if the government can prove that it was conducting surveillance on domestic members of an international terrorist group, then its activities would be legal. This is not to say, of course, that Bush's activities are right -- I think they're wrong -- but whether or not they're within the boundaries of the law is a different issue. Fortunately, this information was revealed at precisely the time that the Senate is debating whether or not to renew particular elements of the USA PATRIOT Act. Currently, the debates are stalled and it doesn't look like the Act's provisions will be renewed before they sunset at the end of the year, since the Senate will soon take a Christmas recess.

After the revelations came to light last week, Bush was unapologetic and brazen as he declared that, yes, he had ordered such surveillance to be conducted, and such surveillance would continue. So, the president will continue to spy on Americans without warrants and without oversight. We just have to trust that he won't abuse his power. Man, what a relief!

We also learned last week that the FBI has been conducting surveillance of activist groups "in causes as diverse as the environment, animal cruelty and poverty relief". Forty years ago, activist groups were investigated for having even the mildest of communist slants. Now, activist groups are being investigated for having anti-war or pro-peace slants. Oh, and they're still being investigated for having communist slants. You know what they say: the more things change, the more every red-necked American betrayed his country by voting for a president based on his ability to keep the gays away.

But there's still hope. Just today, NYT reported that the NSA domestic spying program captured purely domestic communications, and that is 100% pure illegal. FISA was enacted precisely to prevent the domestic surveillance abuse that happened during the Vietnam War, when J. Edgar Hoover's FBI conducted surveillance on anti-war groups just for the hell of it. "Well, it's Thursday. Time to infiltrate the Black Panthers. Then we'll go to lunch."

And with Jack Abramoff and Tom DeLay being indicted and Ralph Reed and Bill "I can diagnose a patient from the Senate floor and then later lie through my teeth by saying that I did no such thing" Frist under investigation for insider trading, things are looking good for Americans who don't want to be involved in a pointless war and who care about their civil liberties. But, wait! That's not all the Republicans have done! Doug Bandow, a scholar at the Cato Institute, a conservative think-tank, resigned last Friday after it was revealed that he, too, took money from Abramoff in exchange for columns that were favorable to Abramoff clients. Ah, it feels good to be on the side of justice!