DANIEL SCHORR: It's enough to make a congressman shudder.</s>MICHELE NORRIS, Host: NPR's senior news analyst, Daniel Schorr.</s>DANIEL SCHORR: The word on Capitol Hill as time was running out was that President Bush was prepared to deploy his ultimate weapon against Congress - a recall from its summer vacation, unless he got what he said he badly needed, a broader surveillance law to meet the post-9/11 anti-terrorist needs without interference by a meddlesome court.</s>DANIEL SCHORR: The need for a broadly permissive law became urgent after a judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court - his identity is secret, of course - advised the administration last January that it was acting illegally in conducting large-scale monitoring your communications of all kinds without a judicial warrant.</s>DANIEL SCHORR: Under the new law, the courts will be essentially shut out of the process except for subsequent review. But not to worry, wiretap authority will be given by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales.</s>DANIEL SCHORR: There is no doubt that trying to preserve privacy and civil liberties in an age of pervasive monitoring of communications represents a challenge. The National Security Agency can scoop up vast amounts of voice traffic, e-mail, and other means of communication, information ripe for data mining. One concession the administration made in its anxiety to get a law on the books fast was to limit its reach to six months. That means that between now and next February, the confusing debate will start all over again.</s>DANIEL SCHORR: I suspect that meanwhile, the al-Qaida terrorists, presumably aware of this debate going on in this country, will be circumspect about what they say uncoded on their cell phones. And with information about them being fed into a huge machine, how circumspect must Americans be?</s>DANIEL SCHORR: This is Daniel Schorr.
NPR Senior News Analyst Daniel Schorr says the Bush administration has successfully pushed through a broadly permissive surveillance law.