Judge: Bush overstepped wiretapping authority

The ruling Wednesday by Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker of San Francisco focused on the surveillance of a single organization, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation - the only plaintiff in dozens of wiretapping lawsuits around the nation that had evidence its calls were intercepted.

But Walker's reasoning struck at the heart of the program President George W. Bush authorized after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, allowing agents to intercept phone calls and e-mails between Americans and suspected foreign terrorists without a warrant.

When Bush acknowledged the surveillance in December 2005, he claimed the power to override a 1978 law, passed in response to revelations of wiretapping of political dissidents, that required the government to obtain advance court approval for each act of eavesdropping.

Walker said Wednesday that Bush lacked that authority.

Under the argument advanced by the Bush administration, "executive branch officials may treat as optional ... a statute (the 1978 law) enacted specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority," the judge said.

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