Something you don't know about

As you read about the White House's urgent requests to create some sort of warrantless NSA legislation and the Democratic counteroffer, you definitely need to add this to the mix to understand the field they are playing on.

Isikoff - A secret ruling by a federal judge has restricted the U.S. intelligence community's surveillance of suspected terrorists overseas and prompted the Bush administration's current push for "emergency" legislation to expand its wiretapping powers, according to a leading congressman and a legal source who has been briefed on the matter.

The order by a judge on the top-secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act court has never been publicly acknowledged by administration officials—and the details of it (including the identity of the judge who wrote it) remain highly classified. But the judge, in an order several months ago, apparently concluded that the administration had overstepped its legal authorities in conducting warrantless eavesdropping even under the scaled-back surveillance program that the White House first agreed to permit the FISA court to review earlier this year.

The primary issue appears to be warrantless tapping of phone switches inside the US on foreign calls.