Newsweek:

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, said one lawyer who has been briefed on the order but who asked not to be publicly identified because of its sensitivity. [...]

Congressional aides (who asked not to be identified talking about ongoing negotiations) said today that Democratic and Republican leaders of the intelligence committees met until late Tuesday night trying to reach an agreement on a short-term measure that would grant some of the enhanced authority—including the ability to tap telecommunications switches without warrants—that the administration is seeking. One stumbling block that has emerged: the administration's insistence that Attorney General Alberto Gonzales be given an expanded role to oversee the program—a particularly controversial move at the moment, given new allegations that the embattled attorney general has misled Congress about legal disputes over the surveillance program. Sen. Jay Rockefeller, the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, said today in a statement that he has "become convinced that we must take some immediate but interim step" to expand surveillance, but that the administration proposal to grant Gonzales greater authority "is simply unacceptable." ...

The judge's ruling was a few months ago, but presumably there's some reason for the rush now to get it passed.

Update: The Post reports on a compromise measure proposed.

Posted by Laura at August 1, 2007 10:42 PM