The Senate this week is expected to give final passage to an overhaul of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The bill restores some measure of the privacy protections that the Bush administration trashed — even as it helps cover up the manner in which the administration trashed them.

Missouri’s Sen. Christopher S. “Kit” Bond, the ranking Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee, calls the bill a compromise. Republicans generally wanted fewer limits on how and when intelligence agencies could monitor electronic conversations involving U.S. citizens.

Privacy advocates, including many liberal Democrats, argued that the provisions of the 1978 FISA law — wherein judges of the secret FISA court had to approve requests for intelligence wiretaps in the United States — still were adequate. The Bush administration ignored that law when it chose to and, when its practices were revealed, argued that the FISA law had not kept pace with the explosion in telecommunications technology.

Of particular concern was the role of telecommunications companies that opened up their U.S.-based routing systems to spy agencies. After The New York Times revealed the secret spying program in late 2005, some 38 lawsuits were filed against such firms as AT&T and Verizon charging that they illegally had compromised customers’ rights.

The latest rewrite of the FISA bill grants legal absolution to the telecoms for any of those past practices. Such after-the-fact immunity was a major demand of the administration, which may be less concerned with the telecoms’ liability than with what lawsuits might disclose about the government’s claims used to obtain their cooperation.

Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, has announced support for the compromise, although he also says he’ll try to strip the immunity provision from the bill when to gets to the Senate floor. That effort is all but doomed, but it may placate the party’s liberal base. Supporting the bill overall also insulates Mr. Obama from a “soft on terrorism” charge in the fall campaign.

The compromise bill says intelligence agencies may eavesdrop without seeking a warrant for up to seven days; after that, it needs permission from the FISA court. It also asserts that the FISA act is the exclusive authority on the legality of electronic surveillance.

That’s a nice sentiment, but we feel certain that President George W. Bush would ignore the 2008 FISA law in the same way ignored the 1978 law, claiming special powers and extraordinary need in time of national emergency. Those 38 telecom lawsuits might have exposed those claims as specious; now we’ll never know. Americans must hope future presidents have a higher regard for the law than the current one.