Surprise, Surprise

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.

Several intelligence officials, as well as lawyers briefed about the matter, said the N.S.A. had been engaged in “overcollection” of domestic communications of Americans. They described the practice as significant and systemic.

  NYT

In The New York Times last night, James Risen and Eric [...] passed on leaked revelations of brand new NSA domestic spying abuses, ones enabled by the 2008 FISA law. The article reports that the spying abuses are "significant and systemic"; involve improper interception of "significant amounts" of the emails and telephone calls of Americans, including purely domestic communications; and that, under Bush (prior to the new FISA law), the NSA tried to eavesdrop with no warrants on a member of Congress traveling to the Middle East.

[...]

These widespread eavesdropping abuses enabled by the 2008 FISA bill -- a bill passed with the support of Barack Obama along with the entire top Democratic leadership in the House, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, and substantial numbers of Democratic Senators -- aren't a bug in that bill, but rather, were one of the central features of it. Everyone knew that the FISA bill which Congressional Democrats passed -- and which George Bush and Dick Cheney celebrated -- would enable these surveillance abuses. That was the purpose of the law.

[...]

It's true that the Times article claims that these abuses were uncovered as part of the DOJ's preparation of the semi-annual report which the 2008 FISA law requires be submitted in secret to the FISA court. And, once they knew that the Times had learned of and was preparing to write about these abuses, Obama officials claimed in response that the abuses are being corrected and that eavesdropping activities are now in compliance with the safeguards of the law. The problem, however, is that "the law" -- thanks to the Democratic Congress -- now has exceedingly few safeguards in it.

[...]

All of those bills [...]that enabled these abuses were enacted with major Democratic support, despite the fact that opponents repeatedly made clear that exactly these abuses would happen.

[...]

Don't worry: current Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein -- who, after Jay Rockefeller, did as much as any Senator to cause a loosening of eavesdropping safeguards -- said today that she takes these revelations oh-so-very-seriously and vows to look into them. [...] The U.S. Government is increasingly hard to satirize.

  Glenn Greenwald

....but hey, do what you want....you will anyway.