How the Fight for Vast New Spying Powers Was Won

"Everybody who heard him speak recognized the absolute, compelling necessity to move," Sen. Kit Bond (R-Mo.), vice chairman of the intelligence panel, said later of the closed session.

Democrats agreed. "At that time, the discussion changed to 'What can we do to close the gap during the August recess?' " said a senior Democratic aide who declined to be identified because the meetings were classified. As delivered by McConnell, the warnings were seen as fully credible. "He's pushing this because he thinks we're in a high-threat environment," the senior aide said.

Throughout this period, Republican lawmakers promoted the administration's version of the bill as a powerful response to the terrorism threat. Rep. Peter Hoekstra (R-Mich.), a former chairman of the House intelligence panel, told colleagues, for example, that "this is about protecting the homeland, and it is about protecting our troops in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan."

But McConnell consistently sought authority for warrantless surveillance not only of terrorist suspects outside the country, but of all foreign intelligence targets. In a letter to Senate leaders on Aug. 2, he said no such limitation existed when the FISA law was passed in 1978, "nor is one appropriate today. . . . The Intelligence Community must be able to gather needed intelligence information on the array of threats to our national security." A senior administration official mentioned the North Korean nuclear program as an example of a threat.

Where the matter became sticky -- and ultimately developed into tense exchanges between the Democrats and McConnell, with each side later accusing the other of misrepresenting their conversations -- was on the question of how to deal with surveillance of communications between persons outside the country and persons inside the country, including both U.S. citizens and foreigners.

Democrats were reluctant to give the NSA blanket permission to capture such data without a warrant unless independent oversight was provided, either by the court or by the Justice Department's inspector general. They also worried that providing warrantless authority to spy on targets other than foreign terrorism suspects would lead to potentially abusive monitoring of Americans innocently in contact with foreign targets.

Other provisions in the White House-backed bill added to the Democrats' discomfort. For instance, a Democratic bill would have authorized warrantless surveillance "directed" at individuals reasonably believed to be outside the United States. But the administration's draft -- and the one passed into law -- permitted collecting data "concerning" people reasonably believed to be outside the country. Democrats said the difference between collection efforts "concerning" foreigners and "directed" at foreigners could be enormous, allowing intelligence officials far greater leeway.

Partly, it was a matter of Democratic mistrust of the administration, due to what Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) called "the administration's repeated past mismanagement of key tools in the war on terror."

On July 31, McConnell met with Democratic leaders in an unusual night session to hash over their concerns. In McConnell's bill, the attorney general's office would certify that U.S. collection methods were in line with the law, a procedure Democrats told him they did not trust. In a series of conference calls, McConnell continued to complain about a Democratic-backed provision limiting warrantless surveillance to foreign suspects tied to terrorist groups. Democrats noted that an earlier, administration-backed measure had included similar language.

"There was a lot of back-and-forth," said a congressional official familiar with the discussion. Pelosi suggested as a compromise limiting the authority to "threats to national security." But McConnell -- whose office was getting e-mails throughout the negotiations from officials at the Justice Department, the vice president's office and elsewhere in the intelligence community -- remained firm, and eventually the Democrats relented and presented a bill that they believed had met McConnell's requirements.

McConnell deemed its fine print unacceptable, however, and in the end, it was the Republican bill, a near-copy of his proposal, that passed both chambers of Congress. It drew support not only from most Republicans but also from 16 Senate Democrats and 41 House Democrats. Hours after its passage, Pelosi declared portions of the bill "unacceptable" and forecast changes in the coming months.