I’m too pissed off to post anything else, but as it turns out that carving out the institutional safeguards built into the FISA legislation, as the Democratic-led Congress cravenly acquiesced to in 2007, results in massive abuse in domestic surveillance collection.

The National Security Agency intercepted private e-mail messages and phone calls of Americans in recent months on a scale that went beyond the broad legal limits established by Congress last year, government officials said in recent interviews. 

Read the whole thing. Particularly this:

And in one previously undisclosed episode, the N.S.A. tried to wiretap a member of Congress without a warrant, an intelligence official with direct knowledge of the matter said.

The agency believed that the congressman, whose identity could not be determined, was in contact — as part of a Congressional delegation to the Middle East in 2005 or 2006 — with an extremist who had possible terrorist ties and was already under surveillance, the official said. The agency then sought to eavesdrop on the congressman’s conversations, the official said.

The official said the plan was ultimately blocked because of concerns from some intelligence officials about using the N.S.A., without court oversight, to spy on a member of Congress.

I hope it was Jay Rockefeller. Everything the ACLU and the left told you would happen by destroying the standards for domestic surveillance collection — individualized suspicion, for instance — has happened.