Legally Justifying NSA Surveillance of Americans

Kit Walsh has an interesting blog post where he looks at how existing law can be used to justify the surveillance of Americans.

Just to challenge ourselves, we'll ignore the several statutory provisions and other doctrines that allow for spying without court oversight, such as urgent collection, gathering information not considered protected by the Fourth Amendment, the wartime spying provision, or the president's "inherent authority" for warrantless spying. Let's also ignore the fact that we have general wiretaps ala the Verizon order on phone metadata and Internet traffic that we can fish through in secret. Let's actually try to get this by the FISA Court under 50 U.S.C. §§ 1801-1805 for electronic surveillance or § 1861 for documents and records.