Balkinization

There is a long and complicated piece about the NSA spying program that tries to unravel exactly what the hell happened, what the controversy is actually about, and how generally to conceive of the whole thing. The whole post is worth reading and trying to summarize it is too complicated:

Balkinization:


Third -- and this is to my mind the most likely possibility -- the legal problem wasn't the data mining itself, but instead that the uses of the data that were mined violated FISA. The Times story hints at this -- that perhaps it was not so much the data mining itself, but instead what what NSA did with the mined data, that caused the legal uproar: "Some of the officials said the 2004 dispute involved other issues in addition to the data mining, but would not provide details. They would not say whether the differences were over how the databases were searched or how the resulting information was used."
...

"...Unfortunately, most of the reaction to the Times story is about the question of whether it helps or hurts the allegations that the Attorney General lied to Congress. Folks, really, that's a sideshow. Of course he tried as much as possible to deceive the Congress, in numerous respects, including in order to keep them from discovering what Comey bravely and responsibly revealed. No one -- no one -- still thinks that Gonzales's testimony is at all valuable or relevant, or ever has been, for purposes of informing Congress about anything. For goodness sake, when Newt Gingrich and Jonah Goldberg and Orrin Hatch and Jeff Sessions all think you're dishonest, well . . . there isn't a single issue on which there is more consensus in America than whether Alberto Gonzales is trustworthy and has been a truthful Attorney General. And, in my view, whether the deceptions and prevarications and dissembling add up to perjury or not is really neither here nor there. It wasn't about perjury with Clinton, and it's not now. There was a serious cover-up here, but it largely occurred before the Times broke the NSA story in 2005. Since that time, the scandal is not that any particular Administration witness wrongly reassured any member of Congress about anything -- it's not as if anyone listened to Gonzales's testimony and then said, 'well, then, ok, never mind about that NS"