Can the government spy on citizens without a warrant?

One section of the foreign intelligence law, FISA, authorizes warrantless surveillance under limited circumstances - but it does not appear to apply to the NSA operation as described by administration officials. Neither President Bush nor Attorney General Alberto Gonzales is claiming the secret operation was conducted in compliance with FISA.

Instead, they say the operation was carried out under President Bush's constitutional power as commander in chief, and under Congress's Joint Authorization for Use of Military Force, which was passed more than four years ago, shortly after the 9/11 attacks.

The administration made the same argument before the US Supreme Court in the case of alleged enemy combatant Yaser Hamdi. The court declined to address the president's power as commander in chief. Instead, it based its June 2004 decision upholding Mr. Hamdi's military detention solely on the congressional authorization argument. But given the splintered posture of the high court in that case and the possible arrival of a second new justice, the potential outcome in any future case is less than clear.

"It is a murky area," says Ruth Wedgwood, an international law professor at Johns Hopkins University.

"It is an area in which Congress has legislated but, to be sure, they didn't anticipate Al Qaeda in 1978," she says. "It is also an area where obviously Americans have high expectations about their privacy."

FISA was enacted to prevent domestic surveillance abuses that occurred during earlier administrations, including the Nixon White House.

Should the debate make it into a courtroom, at issue will be whether FISA preempts the president from taking actions as commander in chief in the war on terror that ignore or violate the surveillance statute.

"The president is simply off the rails," says Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, which closely monitors surveillance issues. Mr. Rotenberg says Bush's reliance on the commander-in-chief powers "is probably overly broad and will be rejected."

David Rivkin, a Washington lawyer and former Reagan and Bush I administration official, has a different perspective. "FISA was designed to deal with essentially peacetime counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations," he says. "We are now at war."

He says Bush's secret NSA operation is "tantamount to trying to break Japanese military codes or intercept German communications during World War II." The FISA requirement of judicial oversight of secret intelligence operations would mandate a war-fighting role for judges that the Constitution does not authorize, Mr. Rivkin says. "Where is it written in the Constitution that the president is supposed to exercise his commander-in-chief power based upon what a judge says or doesn't say?"

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