Salon speaks with James Bamford, the pre-eminent American journalist when it comes to investigating the National Security Agency. He says the agency's latest shenanigans are illegal.

An excerpt (free with a day pass):

While politicians bicker over legal shades of gray, Bamford believes the president clearly broke the law, and he has called for a special prosecutor to investigate. "What you have here is the administration going around the only protection the public has from the NSA, and doing it on their own," Bamford told CNN during a marathon of interviews for MSNBC, NPR, C-SPAN, CBS News and NBC News. "That's how Richard Nixon got in trouble, and one of the reasons he left office."

For Bamford, there is only black and white when it comes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, a 1978 law that specifically requires warrants for any NSA wiretapping of U.S. citizens. "If you want to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens, you go to court. If you don't, you go to jail," Bamford says. "If you want to change the law, you go to Congress."

Bamford's outrage stems, in part, from having been misled by agency officials. For years, he says, his contacts at the NSA repeatedly assured him that the agency was strictly following the letter of the law, even after Sept. 11. At the same time, President Bush assured the American people that "nothing has changed." "When we're talking about chasing down terrorists," Bush said in one speech, "we're talking about getting a court order before we do so." Hayden, who became the deputy director of national intelligence, also reassured Congress, calling NSA "the most aggressive agency in the intelligence community when it comes to protecting U.S. privacy."

"I interviewed a lot of people at NSA, including the director a number of times. The impression I always got was they were keeping as far from the edge as they could in terms of what the law is," Bamford says. It was a message he believed and put in his books. "I went out of my way to defend NSA," he says. "I said they were not going back to the bad old days."

Those bad old days, when Nixon spied on his enemies and J. Edgar Hoover ordered illegal break-ins, drew Bamford's attention to the agency in the first place. During the 1960s and '70s, the NSA launched vast spying operations on American citizens over domestic concerns. One program, called Minaret, monitored the communications of Vietnam War protesters like Joan Baez and Jane Fonda. Another program, called Shamrock, monitored American cables sent overseas. After the Watergate scandal, Congress passed the FISA Act and ordered other reforms to end such abuses. "Back then there wasn't a law. The NSA saw itself as alegal -- it was under the law," says Bamford. "Now there is certainly a law. The FISA statute is as absolute as you can get."