In December 2005, The New York Times set off a political chain reaction by revealing a surveillance tactic that the Bush administration had begged the newspaper to keep secret. The debate took a familiar shape. Civil libertarians and the left accused the National Security Agency of violating federal law and turning back the clock to an era of unrestrained domestic spying. The right and Bush administration supporters defended the monitoring of international phone calls and e-mails as legal and necessary in tracking terrorists. Courts objected to the end run around their role in approving search ... Read More