CHARLIE SAVAGE:

Right.

So, what we were hearing out of the administration was primarily focused on the expiration of these three laws you mentioned in their ordinary sense, not this bulk phone program, which purportedly is based on sort of a creative interpretation of one of those laws, in which a federal appeals court has already said is actually not legitimately based on that law, is part of the sort of mess of this situation.

The administration has been focused on the expiration of what they call the noncontroversial uses of these three laws. And you're right. They have been raising a lot ot of sort of scary rhetoric about how we're not going to be able to track terrorists and this is really irresponsible and so forth on the part of Congress.

That's been political language for a political purpose, which is to pressure opponents of the bill in Congress to back down. Operationally, if you talk to people inside of the government who are actually charged with carrying out these investigations, it's probably somewhat overstated, because there's a variety of tools they can use to fill this gap.

For one thing, all three of these laws had a so-called grandfather provision that says they don't expire, they last forever if it's for an investigation that had already begun before June 1. And among other things, the FBI has an open-ended investigation into all things al-Qaida.

And so, really, they could keep using these laws as long as they want for that kind of a counterterrorism investigation. And they can always use ordinary criminal tools as well, like grand jury subpoenas, that more or less do the same thing, but come with sort of slightly different rules and restrictions.