Politics: Bush and Spying

Looking at folks debate the recent stuff about Bush's top-secret (at least in the vernacular sense) program to wiretap phone and data conversations of which US citizens may be a part... I notice it tends to get fractured into smaller, deeper debates about warrants in general or congress vs. the executive branch or whether simple suspicion of terrorism abrogates US citizenship, etc.

So to summarize the important facets about the current scandal:

1. Having a spy progam targeting...


2. US Citizens...


3. Without a warrant or court order...


4. Where existing law passed by congress prohibits doing so...


5. (Bonus) When a perfectly legal, fast, reliable way to do it with warrants exists (FISA)...


6. (Bonus) And Saying it's within your powers to utterly ignore US law becuase of "war powers" in a conflict which is technically not a war and is almost by definition unwinnable. (War on Terror. Terror's pretty hard to kill.)

There've been folks on the right saying "But Clinton/Carter did exactly the same thing"... as far as I know at least one of those 1-4 major points does not come into play in their examples, making it a flawed comparison. And all of the polls being conducted seem to leave something important out, asking questions which don't reflect the controversy.