The world beyond Syria and Christian Ponder

WaPo had something interesting over the weekend that you might have missed:

The Obama administration secretly won permission from a surveillance court in 2011 to reverse restrictions on the National Security Agency’s use of intercepted phone calls and e-mails, permitting the agency to search deliberately for Americans’ communications in its massive databases, according to interviews with government officials and recently declassified material.

In addition, the court extended the length of time that the NSA is allowed to retain intercepted U.S. communications from five years to six years — and more under special circumstances, according to the documents, which include a recently released 2011 opinion by U.S. District Judge John D. Bates, then chief judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Okay, that's one thing. Here's the interesting part:

What had not been previously acknowledged is that the court in 2008 imposed an explicit ban — at the government’s request — on those kinds of searches, that officials in 2011 got the court to lift the bar and that the search authority has been used.

Someone remind me again -- who was president in 2008?

Now here's another question; how do you square this news with what the President said earlier this year?

"Nobody is listening to your phone calls." Perhaps in between all the sit-downs the president is doing with media outlets today regarding Syria, maybe one of the networks might ask him about this?