Congress returned Tuesday from a two-week spring break to find the Bush administration now willing to talk compromise on new wiretapping powers, and on amnesty for telecoms that spied on U.S. citizens.

That means an end to the drama that's characterized the debate thus far – a closed congressional session; Mr. Smith Goes to Washington-style floor speeches, and unrelenting, factually-challenged charges that lawmakers are blindfolding the nation's spies.

Now negotiations over the bill will likely happen over weeks and months, behind closed doors, with the House horse-trading oversight provisions with the Senate in exchange for a compromise on total amnesty for the nation's telecoms.

If you've been having trouble tracking what the various surveillance bills are all about, don't blame yourself – there's been plenty of misinformation going around. Here's Wired.com's definitive guide to the congressional surveillance debate.

Why is Congress expanding the government's spying authority?

After 9/11, or possibly before, President Bush instructed the nation's spies to begin a secret spying program that reportedly includes data-mining records of U.S. residents' phones, travels and purchases in order to find targets to wiretap. The administration says its warrantless eavesdropping only listened in on international phone calls and e-mails.

After The New York Times revealed a portion of the program in December 2005, Bush eventually allowed a secret spying court to review it. After the secret court secretly declared the program illegal, Congress legalized portions of it temporarily in the summer of 2007. Called the Protect America Act, the law allowed the National Security Agency to continue to wiretap inside the United States, but did not allow it to target Americans inside the country without a warrant. Residents could still be spied on in bulk, say, by collecting every e-mail sent to or from someone outside the country, but the NSA couldn't focus on an American inside the United States without a warrant.

That law expired in February after House Republicans voted down an extension, hoping to force Democrats to pass a permanent law without debate in the House.

How is Congress expanding the government's spying authority?

The NSA says it needs to position wiretapping facilities inside the United States because, these days, much international-to-international communication passes through telecom hubs located on U.S. soil. While the agency could tap these communications overseas, it would be a real pain.

So the House and the Senate both passed bills that would let the NSA install wiretapping rooms in phone and internet hubs located in the United States.

This weakens the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, which largely required a special spying court to approve any intelligence gathering wiretaps inside the United States. Under FISA, the government had to show the court that it had good reason to think the target was a terrorist or an agent of a foreign power.

If both the Senate and the House passed this, why isn't it law yet?

The Senate bill included a controversial provision that would grant retroactive immunity to the telephone companies that allowed the NSA to illegally wiretap internet traffic and phone calls passing through their networks. These companies are being sued in some 38 class-action lawsuits.

President Bush had decried these lawsuits as the work of greedy "class-action trial lawyers" – like the Electronic Frontier Foundation and those bloodsuckers at the ACLU. He's threatened to veto any bill expanding his spying powers unless it also lets the phone companies off the hook.

The House bill does not include immunity, and that's the primary reason for the holdup.

There's also the little matter of exclusivity. The House bill reemphasizes that the FISA law rules how surveillance happens inside the United States. The Senate bill doesn't say that explicitly, largely because President Bush and his lawyers argue that he's a wartime president who doesn't have to follow the law.

So under the proposed new powers, any international e-mail or international phone call I make can be legally intercepted by the government?

Yes. But if the government decides your call has some intelligence value and writes it up in an intelligence report, they are supposed to black out your name or give you a pseudonym. But if your name is necessary to understand the intelligence information, or an official calls up the NSA and asks for your name, they'll identify you. Newsweek reported that this happened to 10,000 people in the United States from January 2004 to May 2005.

They can also use the information from your international communications to decide they need to target all of your calls and use that initial wiretap to get a more invasive one.

I saw ads saying that the Democrats want to make U.S. spies get warrants before listening in on terrorists in Pakistan phoning their comrades in Iraq, thus crippling our intelligence. Why do Democrats hate the United States?

The ads are false. The secret spying court has no authority over what the NSA does overseas. If the NSA finagled a way to wiretap entire cellphone networks in Iraq, Pakistan or Afghanistan, they are free to do so without getting a warrant.

So you may safely ignore attack ads from supposedly nonpartisan groups or columns like this one.

So what happens next?

The Senate leadership will decide whether to accept the House bill as the place to start negotiating a compromise bill, or they could reject it.

If Bush won't sign spying legislation without telecom amnesty and the House won't do that, what then?

The 2007 temporary expansion of spying powers known as the Protect America Act seriously degrades starting in August. Without a bill signed into law before then, the nation's spies will not have much in the way of blanket wiretaps inside the United States.

So if the House and Senate send Bush a bill that expands spying powers, but does not include amnesty, Bush will be forced to choose between powers that he says are necessary to prevent an attack on the country, or amnesty for the phone companies that helped him.

Bush could try to start the programs up again based on his theory of the "unitary executive," but it's unlikely any telecom would help out this time without a court order.

So the NSA would fall back on the long-standing FISA court to get warrants when they want to wiretap inside the United States, or figure out how to wiretap foreigners outside the county, like they used to.

__ What about the premise of the bill? Is it true that international communications are increasingly crossing the United States because of fiber optics?__

That depends on how you define "increasing." The total number of calls and e-mails from one country to another that travel through U.S. switches is going up, since that traffic continues to grow rapidly.

But the percentage of international traffic that transits the United States is dropping year after year, as more counties wire up to one another directly.

Remember those cable cuts in January? Those were cables running from Europe to Asia, meaning that it's increasingly unlikely that an e-mail or phone call from France to Japan will go through the United States.

Won't all this just go away if Clinton or Obama takes the presidency?

Two words. Clipper Chip. Or for a few more words, see Civil Libertarians See a Hopeful Dawn in 2009 … the Fools