Even the rulings against it are done in secret

By Edward Copeland

The sudden rush and handwringing seeking to revise FISA rules on warrantless wiretapping seems to have been sparked by a judge's secret ruling earlier this year declaring parts of the program illegal. Now, the cause has been made public in an article in The Washington Post.

The judge, whose name could not be learned, concluded early this year that the government had overstepped its authority in attempting to broadly surveil communications between two locations overseas that are passed through routing stations in the United States, according to two other government sources familiar with the decision.
The decision was both a political and practical blow to the administration, which had long held that all of the National Security Agency's enhanced surveillance efforts since 2001 were legal. The administration for years had declined to subject those efforts to the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, and after it finally did so in January the court ruled that the administration's legal judgment was at least partly wrong.
The practical effect has been to block the NSA's efforts to collect information from a large volume of foreign calls and e-mails that passes through U.S. communications nodes clustered around New York and California. Both Democrats and Republicans have signaled they are eager to fix that problem through amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

Who should this leaker to the media be, presumably at risk of being punished by Dubyaland's threats to prosecute leaks it doesn't like? Why none other than House Minority Leader John Boehner, and on Fox News no less. I'm guessing neither will get in trouble.

There's been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States," Boehner told Fox News anchor Neil Cavuto in a Tuesday interview.

Of course, Boehner's spokesman Kevin Smith is quick to deny that his boss leaked classified information after House Democratic Caucus chairman Rep. Rahm Emanuel said that "John should remember the old adage: Loose lips very much sink ships."