Congress makes it easier to snoop

Critics fear that law-abiding citizens will see their conversations exposed along with those of criminal suspects.

"If law enforcement is listening on 10 telephones rather than two telephones, it's more likely that that they will catch other conversations they don't have warrants on," says Shari Steele, executive director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation in San Francisco.

Experts also question the wisdom of reducing judicial scrutiny, which ensures that someone outside the executive branch oversees wiretap requests.

Currently, a seven-member foreign intelligence court reviews all FISA wiretap requests in a secure room at the Justice Department.

"It's there as a check and balance," says Kenneth Bass, a Washington attorney who previously served as the Justice Department's intelligence counsel.

Yet even now, judges rarely deny wiretap requests.

The FISA court has turned down only one wiretap request in its entire history, while federal and state courts approved all 1,190 wiretap requests last year, according to an analysis by the Center for Democracy and Technology in Washington.

To address privacy concerns, House Democrats proposed allowing citizens to sue if information gathered from the new surveillance powers winds up going public, and also proposed making the roving wiretap power expire in 2003.

Congress also threw out more controversial items on the Justice Department's wish list. For example, the Bush administration had proposed allowing US prosecutors to use intelligence gathered by foreign governments - even if the information was obtained by methods that violate US law.

Even with the added tools, it's not clear whether better intelligence could have prevented the Sept. 11 attacks. Investigators confiscated evidence from a public computer in a Delray Beach, Fla., library where one of the hijackers accessed the Internet.

"Clearly, having these powers is going to make it easier for law enforcement to pick up leads and gather evidence," says Evan Cox, a San Francisco attorney specializing in Internet privacy and security at the firm of Covington & Burling.

But other observers say intelligence agencies need to do a better job analyzing the data they already receive.

"The FBI had the tools it needed to work with before," says Prof. Barry Kellmann of DePaul Law School in Chicago. "This clarifies, this simplifies, but does it really make the difference? I'm skeptical."

One issue left unresolved by the antiterrorism bills: encryption.

For years, law enforcement officials have said they need ways to get around encryption software that makes it difficult to crack e-mail messages. In the past, law enforcement officials unsuccessfully proposed requiring chips that would give them a backdoor that the government could access.

Cox predicts that the government may address the issue more quietly this time, approaching individual companies to urge them to install backdoors.

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