Bush Administration Aiming To Ease Surveillance Concerns

The administration wants Congress to make permanent the current law, which expires in six months. It also wants to broaden it to grant telecommunications carriers immunity from lawsuits alleging that they invaded Americans' privacy by assisting in the post-Sept. 11 warrantless surveillance program.

Wainstein and other senior administration officials have been consulting with lawmakers on the scope of the law, a measure that the administration said was intended to bring the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 in line with advances in technology.

Because of the new technologies, intercepts targeted at individuals overseas became subject to review by a secret FISA court for the first time, the administration said. A backlog of warrant requests developed, the administration said, resulting in vast amounts of intelligence going uncollected.

In the days and weeks leading to the bill's passage, the administration pointed to intelligence reports that the United States was in a "heightened threat environment" and that al-Qaeda was regrouping in Pakistan. The law passed over Democratic alternatives that included court oversight, with Republicans warning that failure to act would leave the country vulnerable to another terrorist attack.

Democrats feared being portrayed as weak on national security, and since its passage they have acknowledged that they did not sufficiently vet the bill for possible unintended consequences. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) has ordered up legislation to fix "the many deficiencies" in the law.

At seminars and hearings and on blogs in recent days, academics and civil liberties advocates have argued that the legislation authorizes a host of surveillance activities as long as they "concern" a person abroad.

The "person" could be a group or an individual and need not be a terrorist, the experts said, and the information collected could be mail, stored e-mail or phone records.

"In other words, this is not limited to phone calls of an al-Qaeda suspect into the United States," said Suzanne Spaulding, a national security consultant and former CIA assistant general counsel.

The Senate sponsor of the administration's bill, Christopher S. Bond (R-Mo.), this week expressed a willingness to clarify the law's scope. "We also need to talk about making the protection for all Americans, for U.S. persons, clearer," he said at a Georgetown Law Center seminar. "If we had a little time to work on it, we could make it clearer, that it applies only to communications."

Wainstein said that if the government were to do any of the things that critics say are possible, Congress would know because the administration is conducting monthly audits of the law's implementation for the key committees.