Congressional Research Service Report on NSA Surveillance:

The Congressional Research Service has published a report analyzing the DOJ letter sent to the Intelligence Committee on the NSA surveillance program. The CRS report is quite narrow. To condense its 44 pages into a sentence, it says that if you accept that the NSA program violated FISA, then the claims in DOJ’s letter as to why the AUMF or Article II trump FISA are relatively weak. I agree; the CRS analysis is pretty similar to my initial post on the NSA program. The CRS report is appropriately cautious, too. It acknowledges that we don’t have enough facts yet to analyze the legality of the program. I hope to post more on that, and some of my further ruminations on the NSA program, at some point over the next few days.