"Under cover of the quasi-war against Libya and the Japanese nuclear crisis, the Justice Department released two significant and long-outstanding Bush-era legal memoranda on Friday evening. Both deal with an intelligence community program so secret that even its name has to be redacted. Referred to by Bush Administration lawyers as simply “the program,” it apparently granted the Defense Department (and particularly its National Security Agency) authority to sweep through millions of communications—on telephone, by fax, in emails, through Internet visits, at home and abroad, involving U.S. citizens and foreigners. Josh Gerstein provides more context at Politico. The program seems to have been given an initial greenlight by Berkeley law professor John Yoo, then a deputy assistant attorney general at the Office of Legal Counsel. Yoo’s 21-page memorandum, shards of which can be examined here (PDF), apparently concluded that Congress never intended to restrict the president’s power to engage in “warrantless searches that protect the national security” when it enacted a law that made it a felony for officers of the executive branch to engage in domestic intelligence surveillance without first securing the approval of a special intelligence surveillance court. Thesecond memorandum (PDF), dated May 6, 2004 and issued by Yoo’s successor, Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, survived the redaction process with considerably more flesh on the bone. In his book The Terror Presidency, Goldsmith criticized “Yoo’s unusually expansive and self-confident conception of presidential power.” But Goldsmith’s own memorandum seems remarkably redolent of Yoo’s outré notions of a president outfitted with dictatorial wartime powers..." http://www.harpers.org/archive/2011/03/hbc-90008023
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