Will we ever get closure on this issue?

No one is surprised that the NSA is listening to phone calls, but the surprise is that it is occurring on our own soil...

Closure? You've got to be kidding me.. As long as technological developments change the architecture of the global communications network, these issues are going to keep coming up. FISA lasted in it's original state for 30 years. That's not a bad run for a set of law largely contingent on the architecture of the communications network.

We have damn good reason to be pissed off, and to continue being pissed off at the current state of things.. But the monitoring of international traffic that passes through US soil is a real issue not addressed by pre-2007 FISA, and that can't be ignored. The problem isn't that the IC is monitoring international traffic.. The problem is that they have had to ignore the current law on the books to do it, and that the folks on the hill have moved like a glacier when it comes to crafting the pragmatic solutions necessary to directly address the real problems.

It's more than challenging to see past the smoke and mirrors of the puzzle palace, but the real solutions are actually somewhat reasonable. The current administration feels that side-stepping the rule of law as an acceptable method of addressing the issues at hand, however, is not reasonable. Neither is it reasonable to grab more power than is necessary to directly confront the central problems.

The root problem is pandemic. The national dialog about issues of importance -- be it monitoring law, national security, or domestic policy -- is broken. Nothing is being directly addressed in meaningful dialog, and it's not because the issues are complex, as much as the environment the discourse lives in is fundamentally broken.

I am confident that history will judge the 4th estate more harshly than the three branches. And the three branches are not going to get off easy..

RE: Leahy: 'Time is up' for White House to produce surveillance opinions - CNN.com