You say FEE-sah, I say FI-sah

Slate has a disturbing article about the checkered history of NSA spying on U.S. citizens. [link]

One thing that sticks out from the items in the article is that in May 2002, the FISA court, after two decades of granting 10,000 secret warrants, and never denying a single one, took the radical step of actually denying one. Right around this time -- the New York Times report isn't clear exactly when -- the President broke the law by authorizing NSA to go around the FISA court. In other words, when the law got inconvenient, Bush deemed it within his "inherent powers" simply to ignore the law (and the Constitution, for that matter). This isn't an isolated incident -- as the Slate article points out, the President authorized similar violations of other inconvenient laws, including the Geneva Convention, the General Convention on the Privileges and Immunities of the United Nations, the Headquarters Agreement for the United Nations, and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations. I can't say that it's evidence of a trend, but the data points are nevertheless interesting.