U.S. Representative Jerrold Nadler of New York’s 8th Congressional District published an interesting piece on FISA reformation today-
The RESTORE Act Does What is Needed to Protect America
Jerrold Nadler, Huffington Post
Posted December 3, 2007 07:17 PM (EST)
| …
The Conyers-Reyes bill restores and enhances the role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in monitoring electronic surveillance programs, clarifies that monitoring communications among people in foreign countries does not require court approval, requires FISA warrants when targeting domestic communications, and strengthens protections against “inadvertent” warrantless surveillance of Americans ostensibly aimed at foreigners abroad. The bill also requires periodic audits of surveillance activities by the Justice Department’s Inspector General. Additionally, the bill provides resources to the National Security Agency and the Justice Department for processing FISA applications and other submissions to the FISA court in a timely and efficient manner, and to comply with the audit, reporting and record-keeping requirements. … We have refused to accept a key administration demand that telecom companies that cooperated with allegedly illegal government spying be immunized from any legal accountability. This is an outrageous demand, and has nothing to do with national security. The administration has never disclosed to Congress, even on a classified basis, what actions they believe need to receive legal immunity. What information we do have has been made public only through the press, and those reports are troubling. If they broke the law, it is not clear why the telecom companies should receive immunity; if they did not break the law, it is not clear why they would need immunity. In either case, questions of guilt or innocence are more appropriately decided by the courts than by the political process. … The House has passed a good bill. But the White House and its allies have made diversionary and untruthful allegations to oppose the bill. Earlier this year, it was reported that U.S. intelligence officials delayed wiretapping al Qaeda terrorists suspected of kidnapping an American soldier in Iraq, with terrible consequences. The administration and its supporters have argued that the legal requirements of FISA are to blame. The timeline of events released by the Director of National Intelligence, however, clearly shows that it was the Administration’s failure to act swiftly, not any lack of legal authority or flaw in the law, that led to disaster. … One thing that the RESTORE Act does not include is unchecked, blanket authority to conduct surveillance. While some have argued that the bill would allow for the wholesale collection of the communications of Americans, the bill is designed to do just the opposite. It requires the government to have court approved procedures for determining when it begins to target an American and must, therefore, get a warrant from the FISA Court. It would maintain the longstanding requirement that a warrant is needed to listen to a person in the United States or to a U.S. person abroad, and that a warrant is not needed to listen to communications from one person to another outside the United States. The act also contains minimization procedures to protect any U.S. person whose conversation may have been inadvertently monitored. … Indeed, to address the “concerns” laid out by the Republicans, the bill we adopted clarifies that the act will not stop lawful surveillance necessary to prevent Osama Bin Laden, al Qaeda, or any other terrorist organization from attacking America or its allies. And, and in a move to strengthen privacy protections, the RESTORE Act also prohibits the NSA and other agencies from sharing personal information about a U.S. person unless a Senior Executive determines that such action is necessary to protect national security. |
Adam B has previously published 5 paragraphs and said that up to 5 paragraphs of direct quotation are acceptable without permission. I’ll admit I’m pushing the limit.
Is this the bill we want? The best we can expect?
Are we going to see midnight action in response to an administration with 25% approval whose leader pokes his head in the Rose Garden while the puppetmaster hides in the bushes pulling the string on lie after lie after lie.
Have you heard the one about Iran’s nuclear weapons program? They haven’t had one since 2003.
Today, tomorrow, yesterday, the day before that into the dim mists of 2000 when they stole the people’s house through fraud and lies this gang of common criminals and thieves have been joining with their ‘Village’ enablers to loot and pillage.
This far and no farther say I.
I’ve carried this shield a long way and the ax is sharp enough.
Updated with added emphasis and this comment from the dK version–
FISA, Hoover, and COINTELPRO (3+ / 0-)
We need to tell (and keep retelling) the backstory to the FISA law.
Current popular conventional wisdom seems to be that FISA was about Nixon and his abuses of Executive police and spying powers. But, while Tricy Dick’s bad behavior did offer the political nail to hang the effort on, FISA was mor about preventing another J. Edgar Hoover.
Hoover sat atop the FBI for 48 years. During that near-half century in charge of the Feds, he oversaw some of the worst civil liberties abuses in American history. Compared with Hoover, Nixon was a tiny piker. Perhaps the worst of Hoover’s abuses was a program called COINTELPRO.
COINTELPRO (short for “counterintelligence program”) used the foreign national security spy apparatus of the NSA to spy on and disrupt domestic political groups. The jaw-dropping details of the program were laid bare in one of the final appendices to the Church Committee report
There’s much to read in that document and I encourage everyone here to read it. But this small quote from the committe’s testimony captures the essence:
The risk was that you would get people who would be susceptible to political considerations as opposed to national security considerations, or would construe political considerations to be national security considerations, to move from the kid with a bomb to the kid with a picket sign, and from the kid with the picket sign to the kid with the bumper sticker of the opposing candidate. And you just keep going down the line. FISA (the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) was the remedy created by the Church Committe to make sure that programs like COINTELPRO could never happen again. It was enacted precisely because spying on furriners was repeatedly used as the pretext for spying on Americans, often for no other reason than politial disagreement.
FISA was carefully crafted to ensure that the spy and police agencies could do what they needed to do within legal means, while ensuring that citizen’s rights were protected. FISA does little more-or-less besides making sure that the FBI and NSA have to get a warrant before spying on Americans on “national security” grounds.
With the politicization of the DOJ and other agencies– turning them into de facto enforcers for the Republican Party– there can be little doubt as to why this administration wants to gut FISA. They want to get their COINTELPRO on with 21st century technology and they are using the fear of terrorism to make it happen.
Its up to us to stop them.
Please read the above documents and write about them here and wherever else you may blog and comment. Understanding why FISA was created is crucial to ensuring that the American people are not sold a pig in a poke under the banner of “reform”. I plead for your help and assistance, good Kosmopolitans.
The opposite of ‘liberal’ isn’t ‘conservative’, its ‘authoritarian’.
by kingubu on Mon Dec 03, 2007 at 07:31:02 PM PST
3 comments
Author
Crossposted at The Great Orange Satan.
is very impressive and makes me feel that at least some people representing us actually understand what the fight is all about.
provides for audits by other government yes men.
Hey guys, have you tazed a ten year old today?