Mystery Solved...

Thanks to Xymphora for clearing up the mystery of why Bush felt the need to spy on citizens secretly when all they had to do was ask a special court (FISA) for permission after the fact. That court has only turned down a few cases out of more than 15,000 in thirty years. It was because they were using the data mining of Total Information Awareness to spy on everyone:

They were using Echelon to 'Able Danger' the whole country (this is Poindexter's Total Information Awareness, which is supposedly dead, in action). The problem is that FISA was enacted prior to the current capability for data mining, and didn't anticipate how ubiquitous it could be. The reason they couldn't use FISA is that they would have had to obtain a FISA warrant for every person in the country. Data mining requires that you follow each link discovered by your snooping, and wouldn't work if it had to be subjected to FISA or the Constitution. The NYT article, now being spun as resisted by the Bush Administration (as if the NYT would publish anything without Rove's say-so), appears to itself be part of the spinning, a limited hang-out to cover up the bigger scandal.