Bush pressures Congress on FISA

President Bush on Thursday urged Congress to vote on an update to the terrorist surveillance bill, which allows the intelligence community to conduct surveillance on foreigners without a warrant.
A temporary update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act expired more than a week ago.
Bush has been pressing Congress to pass a permanent update, arguing that its delayed passage hurts national security.
The Senate passed a bill, but members of the House have taken issue with a provision in the Senate version that grants retroactive immunity from prosecution for telecommunications companies that assisted the government in its surveillance program.
Democrats have said that the existing 1978 law gives the government all the authority it needs to carry out surveillance and that passage of the final bill can wait until the House and Senate reconcile their differences.
Both the House and Senate versions of the bill would allow U.S. intelligence to tap into phone and Internet traffic overseas without obtaining a judge's warrant, even if the calls were routed through communications centers in the United States.
The Senate version contains a controversial measure that grants legal immunity to telecommunications companies that cooperated with the no-warrant wiretapping program Bush acknowledged in 2005. The immunity would apply retroactively.