Warrantless Surrender

WaPo reditorializes The Democratic-led Congress, more concerned with protecting its political backside than with safeguarding the privacy of American citizens,

Maybe they were more concerned wil protecting the lives of American citizens, than worrying about whether an American borrowed a terrorists cell phone to call another number overseas.

left town early yesterday after caving in to administration demands that it allow warrantless surveillance of the phone calls and e-mails of American citizens, with scant judicial supervision and no reporting to Congress about how many communications are being intercepted. To call this legislation ill-considered is to give it too much credit: It was scarcely considered at all. Instead, it was strong-armed through both chambers by an administration that seized the opportunity to write its warrantless wiretapping program into law -- or, more precisely, to write it out from under any real legal restrictions.

Administration officials, backed up by their Republican enablers in Congress, argued that they were being dangerously hamstrung in their ability to collect foreign-to-foreign communications by suspected terrorists that happen to transit through the United States. The problem is that while no serious person objects to intercepting foreign-to-foreign communications,

But the editorial staff of WaPo does not have any serious people.

what the administration sought -- and what it managed to obtain -- allows much more than foreign-to-foreign contacts. The government will now be free to intercept any communications believed to be from outside the United States (including from Americans overseas)

How are they to know that a phone call originating overseas is from an American if they don't intercept it?

that involve "foreign intelligence" -- not just terrorism.