lly of how many wiretaps it has approved. None of its hearings are public, and it has issued only two public rulings since it was created in 1978, first in 1981 and then in 2002 in interpreting the effect of the USA Patriot Act.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a motion with the intelligence court last week asking it to make public its recent, classified rulings on the scope of the government's wiretapping powers.

On Thursday, the court said it would consider the request. In an order signed by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, the presiding judge, on Thursday and released on Friday, the court called the A.C.L.U.'s motion "an unprecedented request that warrants further briefing."

The court ordered the government to respond on the issue by Aug. 31, saying that anything involving classified material could be filed under court seal.

The court's recent rulings are believed to have restricted the government's ability to intercept certain types of communications, but there has been no official account of the decisions. Disclosures about the court rulings helped fuel the administration's successful efforts earlier this month to gain passage of broadened wiretap authority from Congress. But accounts have differed as to what exactly the court rulings said and how far they went in restricting the government's intelligence gathering, and some court officials were said to be upset that their classified orders were being used to push a political agenda.

Brian Roehrkasse, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said the department was reviewing the court's order on the question of making the court's rulings public. He declined to say whether the administration would oppose the A.C.L.U.'s request.

Anthony D. Romero, the executive director of the A.C.L.U., said the fact that the court ordered the government to respond to the request was itself a victory.

"At any step along the way, we could have been shown the door," Mr. Romero said in an interview. "What this shows is that the questions about the N.S.A. program are by no means closed. We didn't really know enough for Congress to give additional powers to the government."

The court order can be found at: http://www.aclu.org/pdfs/safefree/fisc_order_08162007.pdf.

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White House Wants More Time on Subpoenas

By Deb Reichmann

The Associated Press

Saturday 18 August 2007

Crawford, Texas - The White House on Friday asked a Senate panel for more time to produce subpoenaed information about the legal justification for President Bush's secretive eavesdropping program.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy had set Monday as the deadline for administration officials already subpoenaed to provide documents and testimony about the National Security Agency's eavesdropping program.

In a letter to Leahy, White House counsel Fred Fielding argued that the subpoenas called for the production of "extraordinarily sensitive national security information," and he said much of the information - if not all - could be subject to a claim of executive privilege.

Fielding asked Leahy to suspend the deadline until after Labor Day.

On June 27, the committee subpoenaed the Justice Department, National Security Council and the offices of the president and vice president for documents relating to the National Security Agency's legal justification for the wiretapping program. Since then, the issue has been the subject of several letters exchanged between Capitol Hill and the White House.

In one to Fielding on Aug. 8, Leahy noted that he had granted the White House's request to postpone the subpoenas' original July 18 deadline but was setting a new deadline of Aug. 20 because he could not wait any longer.

"You have rejected every proposal, produced none of the responsive documents, provided no basis for any claim of privilege and no accompanying log of withheld documents," wrote Leahy, D-Vt.

In Fielding's letter to Leahy, which was released by the White House in Crawford, Texas, where Bush is staying at his ranch, the president's lawyer said that while the White House had identified a core group of documents in response to the subpoenas, the work is "by no means complete" and could not be completed by Monday.

He suggested further conversations with the panel, saying the White House did not want the issue to interfere with the administration's desire to make more permanent the new powers Congress just gave NSA to monitor communications entering the United States involving foreigners who are the subjects of a national security investigation.

While Congress approved the measure, lawmakers specified that the new provisions would expire after six months, unless renewed.

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