Some have mentioned: Why bring up NSA Spying now and not back in 2006?

[Octafish]

126. The Church Committee and FISA (Bill Moyers)

EXCERPT...

The Origins of FISA

As chief counsel of the Church Committee, Frederick Schwarz tells Bill Moyers that the most fundamental lessons learned from the Committee include that "when you start small, you go big...When you start in a way that seems legitimate, it inevitably goes too far."

In reaction to the Church Committee reports pushing for oversight, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978, which established a secret FISA court responsible for issuing warrants for domestic wiretapping activity. The FISA court consists of seven judges appointed by the Chief Justice and who serve for seven years.

In December 2005, the NEW YORK TIMES reported that President Bush had authorized the NSA to eavesdrop on American phone calls and emails without obtaining a warrant from the FISA court. That revelation was met with consternation, and investigations, by many in and outside of the political realm.

In August 2007, a temporary amendment to FISA passed called the Protect America Act, which as President Bush explains, modernizes FISA by "accounting for changes in technology and restoring the statute to its original focus on appropriate protections for the rights of persons in the United States - and not foreign targets located in foreign lands." But the battle's not over yet — civil libertarians on both the left and right accused the Democratic Congress of giving in easily on wiretapping and several Members of Congress have vowed to readdress the issue.

Project Shamrock

One important program brought to light by the Committee was Project Shamrock — domestic surveilliance that was subsequently prohibited by FISA. Shamrock was a NSA surveillance program stretching from 1947 to the mid-70's that involved the copying of telegrams sent by American citizens to international organizations. L. Britt Snider, former CIA Inspector General and council on the Church Committee, describes the project he was tasked to investigate:

Every day, a courier went up to New York on the train and returned to Fort Meade with large reels of magnetic tape, which were copies of the international telegrams sent from New York the preceding day using the facilities of three telegraph companies. The tapes would then be electronically processed for items of foreign intelligence interest, typically telegrams sent by foreign establishments in the United States or telegrams that appeared to be encrypted.

Shamrock actually predated the NSA, which was created by President Truman in 1952, and began as a continuation of censorship efforts conducted by the the Army Security Agency during WWII. As Fritz Schwarz explains to Bill Moyers, the program began with benign intentions, yet, "if you have secrecy and lack of oversight, you're going to get abuse." By the time the hearings began, many estimate the NSA was analyzing 150,000 messages a month.

When Snider submitted his report to chief counsel Schwarz, he initially recommended leaving out the names of the three telegram companies since they could be subject to litigation and that "the companies had cooperated purely out of patriotic motives." Schwarz decided to leave the names in the report, even after repeated pressing by the Ford Administration that such disclosure would damage national security.

CONTINUED w/links, videos, stuff that gets forgotten by most everybody else...

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10262007/profile2.html

I haven't had a chance to explore all the info there, but it's something that may come in useful.