Judge Richard Posner, an esteemed jurist and author, defends the NSA warrantless wiretaps program in The New Republic (registration required).
If I understand the judge correctly, he says that the program may well be illegal if it violages FISA, but that the important issue is whether it is effective and necessary.
Writes Posner:
Lawyers who are busily debating legality without first trying to assess the consequences of the program have put the cart before the horse. Law in the United States is not a Platonic abstraction but a flexible tool of social policy. In analyzing all but the simplest legal questions, one is well advised to begin by asking what social policies are at stake. Suppose the NSA program is vital to the nation’s defense, and its impingements on civil liberties are slight. That would not prove the program’s legality, because not every good thing is legal; law and policy…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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