[andyfox]

"You can't quote the constitution about the president's not taking care to see laws are observed without specifying what laws you think were broken. So what laws were?"

The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). FISA requires the approval of a special court before conversations can be intercepted and recorded. The court may authorize warrants to obtain "foreign intelligence" information if the target is linked to "international terrorism." The law says the government must show probabe cause to believe the targeted person is involved in a terrorist group.

One possible explanation for why the president did not seek a warrant from the special court is that the president's lawyers believed he had the power, regardless of the law. Another might be that the administration might have thought it did not have enough evidence to obtain a warrant. Kenneth C. Bass III, an expert on FISA, speculated yesterday that authorities might have seized, say, a computer or a phone that was used by an Al Qaeda operative. "The scuttlebutt is they were then using all the links or phone numbers they found, "Bass said. "It certainly sounds reasonable to say, 'We are targeting people with links to Al Qaeda,' but it may be just a list of phone numbers. That probably wouldn't satisfy the FISA court."