U.S. lawmakers vote reject immunity for phone firms involved in eavesdropping

By Eric Lichtblau
Friday, March 14, 2008

WASHINGTON: After its first secret session in a quarter-century, the U.S. House of Representatives on Friday rejected retroactive immunity for the phone companies that took part in the National Security Agency's warrantless eavesdropping program after the Sept. 11 attacks, and it voted to place greater restrictions on the government's wiretapping powers.

The decision, by a largely party-line vote of 213 to 197, is one of the few times when Democrats have been willing to buck up against the White House on a national security issue. It also ensures that the months-long battle over the government's wiretapping powers will drag on for at least a few more weeks and possibly much longer.

With President George W. Bush and Democratic leaders squaring off almost daily on the wiretapping question, neither side has shown much inclination to budge. The question now moves to the Senate, where lawmakers passed a bill last month that was much more to the liking of the White House. Unlike the bill approved Friday by the House, it would give legal immunity to the phone providers that helped in the National Security Agency's wiretapping program, which Bush says is essential to protect national security.

The House bill approved Friday includes three key elements: It would refuse retroactive immunity to the phone companies, providing special authority instead for the courts to decide the liability issue; it would add additional judicial restrictions on the government's wiretapping powers while plugging certain loopholes in foreign coverage; and it would create a congressional commission to investigate the NSA program.

Even if the House bill were to gain approval by the Senate - a prospect that appears unlikely - a veto by the White House appears certain. The margin by which the House vote was approved was far short of the two-thirds needed to override a veto.

Even before the first vote was cast, Bush assailed the Democrats' proposal in remarks Thursday at the White House, calling it "a partisan bill that would undermine America's security."

"Companies that may have helped us save lives should be thanked for their patriotic service, not subjected to billion-dollar lawsuits that will make them less willing to help in the future," the president said. "The House bill may be good for class action trial lawyers, but it would be terrible for the United States."

In fact, while some private lawyers are assisting in the litigation, the groups leading the efforts, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, are nonprofit advocacy groups.

Bush also blasted the requirement in the legislation to create a bipartisan commission with subpoena power to examine the workings of the NSA's program. Democrats say it may be the only way they will learn how the program was really run, but Bush called it "a redundant and partisan exercise that would waste our intelligence officials' time and taxpayers' money."

The House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, was sharply critical of the president's assessment that the legislation would not make America safer. "The president is wrong, and he knows it," she said Thursday.

Republicans convinced Democratic leaders to convene a secret session of the House on Thursday evening to discuss classified intelligence related to the phone companies' role in the NSA program. Republicans said the session was crucial to understanding what role the companies had played, but Democrats accused their counterparts of political grandstanding. It was the first secret session since 1983, when the House met behind closed doors to consider funding for the contra rebels in Nicaragua.

Chertoff: Terrorism Prevention Efforts Successful

By Spencer S. Hsu and William Branigin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, March 6, 2008; 3:01 PM

The United States has successfully lowered the risk of a large-scale domestic terrorist attack in the near future, one of the reasons there has been an increase in attacks by Islamic extremists in Europe, Homeland Security Michael Chertoff said today.

Improvements in U.S. traveler screening and border security have shifted the focus of al-Qaeda operatives and sympathizers to Europe, which is perceived as a more open target, Chertoff told a group of Washington Post editors.

"We have significantly reduced the risk of a major attack in the short term," Chertoff said before meeting with President Bush to mark the fifth anniversary of the Homeland Security Department's creation.

In a speech commemorating the anniversary, Bush renewed his lobbying for a bill that would provide immunity from lawsuits to telecommunications companies that turned over information on their customers to the federal government after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. The bill would extend modifications of a surveillance law that expired last month.

"To stop new attacks on America, we need to know who the terrorists are talking to, what they're saying and what they're planning," Bush told DHS employees at DAR Constitution Hall in Washington. For that, the government needs the cooperation of private companies, he said, but some of them are being sued for billions of dollars for allegedly violating customers' privacy.

"Allowing these lawsuits to proceed would be unfair," as well as "unwise" and "dangerous," Bush said. Although a bipartisan majority in the Senate passed a "good bill," he said, House Democratic leaders blocked a vote on it last month, saying they needed another 21 days to deal with it. That "deadline" arrives Saturday, Bush said.

A previous House version of the bill did not include the immunity provision that the White House has demanded.

"If House leaders are serious about security, they need to meet the deadline they set for themselves, pass a bill and get it to my desk this Saturday," Bush said.

He also warned against complacency about terrorism, urging Americans to "remember that the danger to our country has not passed."

Listing a number of steps he said his administration has taken to prevent future terrorist attacks, Bush asserted that "we have made our borders more secure," unified terrorism databases and improved the detection of counterfeit travel documents.

He also pointed to programs to prevent the smuggling of biological, chemical, radiological or nuclear weapons into the nation's cities.

"We are determined to stop the world's most dangerous men from striking America with the world's most dangerous weapons," Bush said.

Chertoff also highlighted what he said was the department's effectiveness in keeping would-be attackers at bay.

"It's not impossible, but for terrorists who typically operate in being very careful because they don't want their plots disrupted, we have made it harder for them to come in," he said.

Chertoff likened the reaction to a car thief who passes over a locked vehicle set with an alarm and anti-theft devices and decides to steal the one next to it.

"One of the reasons we're seeing more attacks in Europe is because they think it's easier," he said, citing almost annual attacks since 2004 in Madrid, London and Glasgow and disrupted plots in Denmark, Germany, Italy, France and Portugal.

However, the intention of al-Qaeda and affiliated groups to strike at U.S. targets has not diminished, Chertoff warned, repeating U.S. intelligence assessments last year. For example, a disrupted Britain-based plot to smuggle liquid explosives onto transatlantic airliners in 2006 would have caused deaths on the scale of the Sept. 11 attacks, he said.

While al-Qaeda's capability is "uneven" and less than what it was before 2001, it is rebounding somewhat in the frontier areas of Pakistan, he said.

Chertoff's remarks come as Washington is pushing 27 of its European and other allies to accept tighter security requirements on travelers who can now visit the United States as tourists without visas. The restrictions include electronic check-in with authorities days before travel.

He also warned against complacency, saying al Qaeda inspired extremists are "continuing to refine themselves and improve themselves. If we don't do more than we're doing, if we stop, eventually that risk is going to start to increase."

Bush Moves to Shield Telecommunications Firms

By Dan Eggen and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 2, 2008; A07

President Bush said last week that telecommunications companies that helped government wiretapping efforts need protection from "class-action plaintiff attorneys" who see a "financial gravy train" ahead. Democrats and privacy groups responded by accusing the Bush administration of trying to shut down the lawsuits to hide evidence of illegal acts.

But in the bitter Washington dispute over whether to give the companies legal immunity, there is one thing on which both sides agree: If the lawsuits go forward, sensitive details about the scope and methods of the Bush administration's surveillance efforts could be divulged for the first time.

Nearly 40 lawsuits, consolidated into five groups, are pending before a San Francisco judge. The various plaintiffs, a mix of nonprofit civil liberties advocates and private attorneys, are seeking to prove that the Bush administration engaged in illegal massive surveillance of Americans' e-mails and phone calls after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, and to show that major phone companies illegally aided the surveillance, including the disclosure of customers' call records.

If the cases are allowed to proceed, plaintiffs' attorneys say, the courts could review, in secret if necessary, any government authorizations for the surveillance. The process might also force the disclosure of government memos, contracts and other documents to a judge, outlining the legal reasoning behind the warrantless wiretapping program.

Perhaps most important, disclosures in the lawsuits could clarify the scope of the government's surveillance and establish whether, as the plaintiffs allege, it involved the massive interception of purely domestic communications with the help of the nation's largest providers: AT&T, Cingular Wireless, BellSouth, Sprint and MCI/Verizon. (Verizon Communications bought MCI in 2006.)

"I think the administration would be very loath for folks to realize that ordinary people were being surveilled," said Kurt Opsahl, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the lead lawsuit, against AT&T.

A prime goal in the litigation is to find out who the decision makers were, said Don Migliori, a partner with Motley Rice in Providence, R.I., a plaintiffs' attorney who is working on the lawsuit against Verizon. The plaintiffs intend to request not just government documents but also e-mails, including who contacted whom and when -- the very sort of "meta-data" that the administration is accused of mining as part of its surveillance program.

Peter Eliasberg, an American Civil Liberties Union attorney involved in cases against AT&T and Verizon, said that if the cases proceed, the plaintiffs could submit an interrogatory to the carriers seeking answers to the questions: Did you turn over customer phone records en masse to the government? Did you receive a warrant or a subpoena?

Answers to those questions, he said, might reveal that "everybody in the country" has had their phone calls "combed through, and lots of people will be outraged."

The uncertain, high-stakes nature of the litigation -- in which the plaintiffs are seeking not only disclosure to a judge of internal documents that might prove their allegations, but also a court ruling that the surveillance and collection of call records harmed millions of people -- helps explain why the administration is so adamant in supporting a Senate-passed bill aimed at strangling the lawsuits before they can proceed, according to government officials and privacy advocates.

"The whole point of [the] litigation is discovery of information," said a Justice Department official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic. "Obviously there is information here that could be damaging to national security if it was released, and of course that is a major concern."

Although the plaintiffs say that some of the documents at issue can be reviewed in secret by a judge, Bush raised concern about public disclosures at a Thursday news conference, when he said that "allowing the lawsuits to proceed could aid our enemies" and "give al-Qaeda and others a road map as to how to avoid the surveillance."

The dispute involves the Protect America Act, a temporary law that broadened the government's powers to spy on some Americans without warrants but expired on Feb. 16. The administration backs the Senate bill, which would renew the law and add immunity for the telecommunications firms; House Democratic leaders have balked, leading to two weeks of partisan squabbling.

The administration asserts that without immunity, companies may refuse to cooperate with vital surveillance efforts in the future for fear of being sued. But the administration's preferred bill is also backward-looking: It provides legal protections for company acts after the September 2001 attacks.

Whether such protections are actually needed is unclear. The companies and the government say they are, because the companies were acting in good faith to comply with national security-related requests but cannot defend themselves in open court, whereas the plaintiffs assert that the companies already have immunity for any actions pursuant to a valid government order.

All discovery has been blocked so far by the administration's argument, still awaiting court resolution, that the suits are barred because they involve state secrets. What tantalizing clues about the surveillance have emerged so far have come from affidavits entered into the record by the plaintiffs.

If the AT&T case is allowed to proceed, for example, the plaintiffs will ask a judge to consider documents provided by a former AT&T technician, Mark Klein, that suggest a massive effort by the National Security Agency to tap into the backbone of the Internet to retrieve millions of e-mails and other exclusively domestic communications.

The government, in a brief before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit in San Francisco, has denied the existence of any "dragnet" surveillance program. In the cases against the telecommunications firms, Justice Department attorneys have argued that merely to confirm or deny any "intelligence" relationship with AT&T or any company "could reasonably be expected to cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security."

Though the carriers have argued that they are barred from defending themselves against the allegations because of the government's invocation of the state-secrets privilege, at least one carrier, Verizon, has stated in regulatory filings that the cases against it are without merit.

There are also three separate surveillance-related lawsuits against the Bush administration itself that would not be stopped by either the House or Senate legislation. Though all three question the legality of the surveillance, these cases might be stopped by the courts because government officials enjoy a qualified immunity protection that the phone companies do not.

The companies themselves, including AT&T, Verizon and others, have said little publicly about the debate, citing concerns over the ongoing litigation and state secrets. However, the companies have brought senior executives into town to meet with the few lawmakers who have been briefed in detail on the government's surveillance programs.

Last fall, former attorney general John D. Ashcroft signed a letter to top members of the Senate Judiciary Committee urging retroactive immunity for the companies. His consulting firm, the Ashcroft Group, was on retainer to AT&T at the time. An Ashcroft spokeswoman declined comment.

Staff writer Jeffrey H. Birnbaum and staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

Listening In

Without protection against lawsuits, are the telecoms less willing to cooperate with government spying efforts?
By Mark Hosenball
Newsweek Web Exclusive
Updated: 5:39 PM ET Feb 22, 2008

It's been barely a week since the Democratic-controlled Congress allowed a temporary electronic spying law to lapse. But U.S. intelligence agencies are already encountering problems maintaining and expanding vital operations, the Bush administration claims.

In a letter sent late on Friday to House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and Attorney General Michael Mukasey claimed that in the six days since the temporary law expired, some "partners" in intelligence operations have "reduced cooperation." According to two government officials, who asked for anonymity when discussing sensitive material, the "partners" referred to in the letter are (unnamed) U.S. telecommunications companies, who-with administration backing-have been aggressively lobbying Congress for a controversial clause in new electronic spying legislation. The clause would effectively wipe out a series of private lawsuits seeking damages against the telecoms for their cooperation with what civil libertarians and administration critics claim was an illegal expansion of electronic spying against targets inside the U.S.-an expansion authorized by President Bush in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

In their letter, McConnell and Mukasey claim that since the so-called Protect America Act lapsed, partners "have delayed or refused compliance with our requests to initiate new surveillances of terrorist and other foreign intelligence targets under existing directives issued pursuant to the Protect America Act."

The letter continues: "Although most partners intend to cooperate for the time being, they have expressed deep misgivings about doing so in light of the uncertainty and have indicated that they may well cease to cooperate if the uncertainty persists."
Mukasey and McConnell say that they are currently "working to mitigate these problems and are hopeful that our efforts will be successful." But they add that unless Congress passes a version of a new electronic surveillance bill, approved by the Senate, which includes the controversial retroactive lawsuit immunity for telecom companies, "the broader uncertainty caused" by the temporary spy law's expiration "will persist." The letter adds that: "This uncertainty may well continue to cause us to miss information that we otherwise would be collecting."

The letter amounts to a stepping-up of pressure on Democrats in Congress--and in the House in particular--to pass a surveillance bill to the liking of the White House and the telecom industry.

A majority in the Senate, with the backing of Democratic Senate Intelligence Committee chair Jay Rockefeller, approved a bill which would extend many provisions of the electronic surveillance law that recently expired. That legislation, which was opposed by a small group of liberal senators, would also give the telecoms the retroactive immunity they are seeking.

The administration and the Senate majority pressured the House to go along with the Senate bill. But the House approved a version which contained additional civil-liberties protections-and omitted any retroactive immunity for the telecoms. That left Congress deadlocked; the White House has indicated President Bush will veto any version of a new surveillance law that does not include the immunity provision.

The letter from Mukasey and McConnell does not spell out precisely what kind of new intelligence operations are being thwarted because of the congressional impasse. And administration critics, including Rep. Reyes, have recently accused the administration and its supporters of exaggerating the threat to current intelligence activities caused by the congressional standoff.

Administration critics note that eavesdropping operations undertaken under the intel law which just lapsed are allowed to continue for 12 months after they were first authorized. However, administration officials claim the telecoms are nervous that the situation leaves them with insufficient protection against new private lawsuits.

In a statement released late Friday, Reyes, Rockefeller and several other Democrats lashed out at the White House's tactics. "Further politicizing the debate, the administration today announced that they believe there have been gaps in security since the Protect America Act expired. They cannot have it both ways; if it is true that the expiration of the PAA has caused gaps in intelligence, then it was irresponsible for the President and congressional Republicans to openly oppose an extension of the law. Accordingly, they should join Democrats in extending it until we can resolve our differences."

White House intensifies spying standoff

Bush administration officials tell congressional Democrats their failure to act has made the U.S. 'more vulnerable to terrorist attack.'
By Greg Miller
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON — The U.S. attorney general and intelligence director warned Friday that the nation has lost potentially critical intelligence during the last week because telecommunications companies cut their cooperation with the government after a controversial espionage law was allowed to lapse.

In an unusually blunt letter to Congress, Atty. Gen. Michael B. Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence J. Michael McConnell said the country "is now more vulnerable to terrorist attack and other foreign threats" because lawmakers failed to act.

The dire language marked a significant escalation in the standoff between the Bush administration and congressional Democratic leaders over legislation that would expand the government's eavesdropping authorities and protect telecommunications companies from facing lawsuits for cooperating.

Democrats denounced the letter, saying the administration was "further politicizing the debate" even as it has refused to allow the extension of existing authorities while the House and Senate work out differences on a complex new bill.

"They cannot have it both ways," four Democrats said in a written statement. "If it is true that the expiration of the [Protect America Act] has caused gaps in intelligence, then it was irresponsible for the president and congressional Republicans to openly oppose an extension of the law."

The statement was issued by the leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence and Judiciary committees: Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV of West Virginia, Sen. Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont, Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas and Rep. John Conyers Jr. of Michigan.

The lawmakers said their staffs had been meeting throughout the week to seek compromise on an issue that has polarized Congress since it was disclosed more than two years ago -- that President Bush had secretly launched a program of eavesdropping without court warrants on international calls and e-mails by U.S. citizens.

Since then, the administration has pushed Congress to pass legislation that would allow the government to continue the wiretapping operation -- which Bush launched shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks -- under the supervision of a secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

The House and Senate have passed separate versions of the legislation and remain at odds over whether to grant retroactive liability protection to phone companies that took part in the espionage operation before it was publicly disclosed.

AT&T, Verizon and other major carriers are facing about 40 lawsuits filed by consumers and civil liberties groups alleging violations of wiretapping and privacy laws. The suits seek billions of dollars in damages.

Both chambers of Congress have agreed to inoculate the companies against future lawsuits.

But the House has resisted retroactive immunity, with some members saying the companies should not be protected for taking part in what at the time may have been an illegal spying operation.

Laws passed in the late 1970s barred U.S. intelligence agencies from eavesdropping on the conversations of Americans without court warrants.

In their letter, McConnell and Mukasey said that the telephone companies have withdrawn their cooperation this week out of fear that their assistance may no longer be legally protected.

"We have lost intelligence information this past week as a direct result of the uncertainty created by Congress' failure to act," the two said. "Because of this uncertainty, some partners have reduced cooperation."

The letter, addressed to Reyes, also was sent to Rockefeller; Rep. Peter Hoekstra of Michigan, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee; and Sen. Christopher S. Bond of Missouri, the senior GOP member of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

In particular, McConnell and Mukasey said, certain companies have "delayed or refused compliance with our requests to initiate new surveillance of terrorist and other foreign intelligence targets."

Bush administration officials refused to say which companies were resisting, or even how many wiretapping requests had been issued or rejected.

McConnell has testified to Congress that phone company cooperation is crucial to U.S. intelligence agencies' ability to track Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups. That is because much of the world's phone and e-mail traffic flows across data networks inside the United States, including calls or messages that begin and end overseas.

Most of the companies involved "intend to cooperate for the time being," McConnell and Mukasey said. But "they have expressed deep misgivings about doing so in light of the uncertainty and have indicated that they may well cease to cooperate if the uncertainty persists."

The government can still intercept such communications without passage of the new law, but officials said the process is cumbersome because a warrant is required in each case. Delays in obtaining those warrants mean crucial calls or e-mails could be missed, officials said.

The magnitude of the problem has been a source of dispute, because even though the Protect America Act expired Feb. 16, eavesdropping activities initiated under its authorities can continue for a year before they have to be reauthorized by the FISA court.

In a conference call with reporters, senior Bush administration officials said the government had issued a series of requests to the phone companies over the last week, seeking to put newly identified foreign terrorism suspects under surveillance.

"Some have been delayed, and some have just not been complied with," said one of the officials, who said they were authorized to speak only on the condition of anonymity.

The official said that the companies' concern "is that maybe . . . immunity is no longer viable now that the Protect America Act has expired. We don't believe that's the case. But that's something the attorneys for various companies that are assisting us are looking closely at."

The officials struggled to explain why the administration would allow crucial intelligence gaps to emerge rather than accept the Democrats' offer to pass a stopgap measure that would extend the existing authorities for 15 days while congressional talks continue.

In rejecting such an extension, Bush has said Congress has had ample time to reach compromise.

"Our concern is we're just going to be going into the same pattern over and over again," said one of the officials on the call. "The longer that this is temporary, the more disruptive it is to our operations."

White House says phone wiretaps back on "for now"

February 23, 2008

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The Bush administration said on Saturday U.S. telecommunications companies have agreed to cooperate "for the time being" with spy agencies' wiretaps, despite an ongoing battle between the White House and Congress over new terrorism surveillance legislation.

The Justice Department and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement saying wiretaps will resume under the current law "at least for now."

"Although our private partners are cooperating for the time being, they have expressed understandable misgivings about doing so in light of the ongoing uncertainty and have indicated they may well discontinue cooperation if the uncertainty persists," the statement said.

On Friday U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey and Director of National Intelligence Michael McConnell said telecommunications firms have been reluctant to cooperate with new wiretaps since six-month temporary legislation expired last weekend. As a result, they told Congress, spy agencies have missed intelligence.

Democrats accused the Bush administration of fear-mongering and blamed it for any gaps.

President George W. Bush has said he would not compromise with the Democratic-led Congress on his demand that phone companies be shielded from lawsuits for taking part in his warrantless domestic spying program.

The measure passed by the Senate would provide retroactive lawsuit immunity to firms which cooperated with warrantless wiretaps that Bush authorized after the September 11 attacks. But the House of Representatives has opposed it, and Democratic leaders of both chambers said they would try to find a compromise.

Democratic leaders of congressional intelligence and judiciary committees issued a statement on Friday saying they were committed to passing new legislation and urged Bush to support an extension of the temporary law. Bush has said he would hold out for a permanent overhaul of the 1978 surveillance law.

Senate Votes To Expand Warrantless Surveillance

White House Applauds; Changes Are Temporary

By Joby Warrick and Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, August 4, 2007; A01

The Senate bowed to White House pressure last night and passed a Republican plan for overhauling the federal government's terrorist surveillance laws, approving changes that would temporarily give U.S. spy agencies expanded power to eavesdrop on foreign suspects without a court order.

The 60 to 28 vote, which was quickly denounced by civil rights and privacy advocates, came after Democrats in the House failed to win support for more modest changes that would have required closer court supervision of government surveillance. Earlier in the day, President Bush threatened to hold Congress in session into its scheduled summer recess if it did not approve the changes he wanted.

The legislation, which is expected to go before the House today, would expand the government's authority to intercept without a court order the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States who are communicating with people overseas.

As currently written, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act already gives U.S. spies broad leeway to monitor the communications of foreign terrorism suspects, but the 30-year-old statute requires a warrant to monitor calls intercepted in the United States, regardless of where the calls begin or end.

At the White House, where officials had voiced concern about that requirement, a spokesman praised the Senate vote and called on House leaders to quickly follow suit. The legislation will "give our intelligence professionals the essential tools they need to protect our nation," spokesman Tony Fratto said.

Democratic leaders expressed disappointment about the result, but they pointed to language that would require lawmakers to reconsider the key provisions in six months.

"My Republican colleagues chose to rubber-stamp a flawed administration proposal that fails to provide the accountability needed in the light of the administration's past mismanagement of key tools in the war on terror," said Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).

Sixteen Democrats and Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.) joined all 43 Republicans in supporting the measure, which is nearly identical to a proposal prepared by the Bush administration. "We're at war. The enemy wants to attack us," Lieberman said during the Senate debate. "This is not the time to strive for legislative perfection."

Privacy advocates accused the Democrats of selling out and charged that this bill gives the government more authority than it had under a controversial warrantless wiretapping program begun in secret after the 2001 terrorist attacks. Under that program, the government could conduct surveillance without judicial oversight only if it had a reason to believe that one party to the call was a member of or affiliated with al-Qaeda or a related terrorist organization. This bill drops that condition, they noted.

Democrats "have a Pavlovian reaction: Whenever the president says the word 'terrorism,' they roll over and play dead," said Caroline Fredrickson, Washington legislative director of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Gregory Nojeim, senior counsel at the Center for Democracy and Technology, predicted that the bill's approval would lead to the monitoring of ordinary Americans by the National Security Agency, which conducts most of the government's electronic surveillance. "If this bill becomes law, Americans who communicate with a person abroad can count on one thing: The NSA may be listening," he said.

Congressional Democrats and the White House clashed throughout the day not only over the scope of the changes in the law but also over whether the other side was bargaining in good faith. Democrats said they were convinced that their proposal met key the demands of Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell, and House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer (D-Md.) quoted him as saying that the bill "significantly enhances America's security."

But Republicans cited a letter from McConnell yesterday afternoon calling the proposal unacceptable and warning that it would prevent him from protecting the country adequately from terrorist attacks. That assertion in turn prompted charges by Democrats that the White House had overruled McConnell in an effort to gain political advantage by painting their party as weak on terrorism.

"We did everything he wants," Brendan Daly, spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), said of McConnell, "and now he says he doesn't like the bill. They didn't move the goal post; they moved the stadium." Pelosi herself accused the Republicans of not caring "about the truth."

White House officials disputed Democrats' account of the tentative deal, and Republicans said McConnell's objections were justified by the Democrats' decision to subject more surveillance to oversight by a special intelligence court than the administration wants.

Adding to the drama was Bush's pressure on lawmakers to stay in Washington until a new measure is passed. The president said he opposes Congress's adjournment for its summer recess this weekend unless it approves "a bill I can sign." Presidents have the power to call Congress into emergency session to consider matters of national importance, although the power is rarely used.

"We have worked hard and in good faith with the Democrats to find a solution," Bush said at a news briefing after a meeting with counterterrorism officials at FBI headquarters yesterday morning. "But we are not going to put our national security at risk."

The administration and congressional Democrats agree on the need to update the FISA statute to reflect the realities of 21st-century telecommunications, including the ever-expanding digital world of e-mail, podcasts and text messages.

White House and intelligence officials have sought a broad overhaul of the act to allow spy agencies to listen in on terrorism suspects quickly, without having to apply for a court order, as is required for surveillance that targets U.S. residents. But Democratic leaders say the administration's proposals could lead to broad searches of phone calls and e-mails by ordinary Americans without judicial review.

"Given the experience of the last few years, we are reluctant to give blanket authority to any president, most especially this one," said a senior Senate aide familiar with negotiations on the surveillance bill.

White House officials complained that Democratic proposals do not give them a crucial tool: the ability to begin wiretapping without having to go to a court. "Every day we don't have [this wiretap authority], we don't know what's going on outside the country," a senior White House official said. "All you need is one communication from, say, Pakistan to Afghanistan that's routed through Seattle that tells you 'I'm about to do a truck bomb in New York City' or 'about to do a truck bomb in Iraq,' and it's too late."

The administration has been negotiating with Democrats for weeks over the issue, but talks intensified as Congress prepared to adjourn this week. Last year, the administration mounted a similar high-pressure campaign on the eve of a congressional recess, to revise legislation governing the interrogation and trial of detainees.

Adding to the urgency for the administration is a secret ruling by a FISA judge earlier this year that declared surveillance of purely foreign communications that pass through a U.S. communications node illegal without a court-approved warrant -- a requirement that intelligence officials have described as unacceptably burdensome.

Staff writers Josh White and Jonathan Weisman contributed to this report.