Wiretap law protecting phone companies allowed to expire

There is little sign of anxiety among many intelligence and phone industry officials over the lapse in the wiretapping law. Indeed, for all the heated rhetoric in Washington about the government’s wiretapping powers, the debate over what a new surveillance law should look like has little to do with the present or the future and almost everything to do with the past. At its crux, the debate is about whether Mr. Bush can give retroactive legal protection to telephone carriers that cooperated in the program of wiretapping without warrants he authorized weeks after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, a program that critics charge was illegal.http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/01/us/01fisa.html?ex=1362114000&en=0c3d604da1ee96a6&ei=5124&partner=permalink&exprod=permalink