From this week’s Window on The Week:

The administration announced that the president will stop authorizing the NSA’s terrorist-surveillance program. All monitoring of terrorist communications that cross into the United States will now occur under the authorization of FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) courts. Spinning this apparent cave-in as a victory, Justice Department spokesmen contend that they have already gotten court authorization and that it permits everything the NSA program was doing, with equal “speed and agility.” This is a startling about-face, to say the least, since the administration cited FISA’s inadequacy as its reason for creating the NSA program in the first place. More generally, it’s hard to see how FISA (which requires a showing of probable cause and judicial approval) allows the same monitoring that is possible under the president’s constitutional authority (which, at most, requires that searches be reasonable, with no judicial supervision). When pressed for an explanation, attorney general Alberto Gonzalez said he’d love to give one except revealing the legal theory would get into classified “operational details.” Cynics might say that the administration has surrendered to pressure from Democrats and civil-liberties extremists, and that Justice is keeping its theory classified to avoid enraging those who suspect the new program will not be as effective as the old one. We’d like to think the cynics are wrong — but it’s not easy.

Read all of our editorial week in review here — now, too, with an audio version.

ALSO for your listening pleasure: Radio Derb and Fred Thompson on the Stomachless Senate.