FISA court had reduced intelligence by 75%

NY Times:

At a closed-door briefing in mid-July, senior intelligence officials startled lawmakers with some troubling news. American eavesdroppers were collecting just 25 percent of the foreign-based communications they had been receiving a few months earlier.

Congress needed to act quickly, intelligence officials said, to repair a dangerous situation.

Some lawmakers were alarmed. Others, jaded by past intelligence warnings, were skeptical.

The report helped set off a furious legislative rush last week that, improbably, broadened the administration’s authority to wiretap terrorism suspects without court oversight.

It was a surprising victory for the politically weakened White House on an issue that had plodded along in Congress for months without a clear sign of urgency or resolution. A flurry of talk in the last three weeks on intelligence gaps, heightened concern over terrorist attacks, burdensome court rulings and Congress’s recess helped turn the debate from a slow boil to a fever pitch.

For months, Democrats had refused to give the administration new wiretapping powers until the White House agreed to turn over documents about the National Security Agency program to eavesdrop on some Americans’ international communications without warrants.

The White House refused to back down, even after Congressional subpoenas were issued. The administration ultimately attracted the support it needed to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act from moderate Democrats who felt pressed to act before the recess.

For the White House and its Republican allies, the decision by the Democratic-controlled Congress to act quickly was critical to safeguarding the country this summer as intelligence officials spoke of increasing “chatter” among Qaeda suspects.

To many Democrats who opposed the action, it was a reflection of fear mongering by the White House, and political capitulation by some fellow Democrats.

“There was an intentional manipulation of the facts to get this legislation through,” said Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin, a Democrat on the Intelligence Committee who voted against the plan.

The White House, Mr. Feingold said Friday in an interview, “has identified the one major remaining weakness in the Democratic Party, and that’s its unwillingness to stand up to the administration when it’s making a power grab regarding terrorism and national security.”

...

The prelude to approval of the plan occurred in January, when the administration agreed to put the wiretapping program under the oversight of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. The court is charged with guarding against governmental spying abuses. Officials say one judge issued a ruling in January that allowed the administration to continue the program under the court’s supervision.

A ruling a month or two later — the judge who made it and its exact timing are not clear — restricted the government’s ability to intercept foreign-to-foreign communications passing through telecommunication “switches” on American soil.

The security agency was newly required to seek warrants to monitor at least some of those phone calls and e-mail messages. As a result, the ability to intercept foreign-based communications “kept getting ratcheted down,” said a senior intelligence official who insisted on anonymity because the account involved classified material. “ We were to a point where we were not effectively operating.”

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There is much more.

This is one of those episodes that offer proof that Democrats are out of their league when it comes to national security. They think the administration won by scaring people into voting for something. That just shows how out of touch they are with the realities of the enemy we are dealing with and the problems with getting intelligence because of their ridiculous requirements of going to a FISA court to begin with. This is total nonsense when it comes to intercepting enemy communications in a time of war. The requirement that the government jump through hoops because the enemy might be talking with one of its agents in the US is just patently absurd. Those are the conversations that we must intercept to stop on going operations.

The Democrats continue to care more about procedures and the enemy's privacy rights than they do about stopping the next attack. Fortunately there were enough of them who ignored their leaders to give us a chance to gather intelligence on the coming attacks for a few months.