Bill Bans NSA Eavesdropping

An anonymous reader writes "The US house of representatives today passed a bill outlawing illegal domestic wiretapping by the government. Now government agencies are only allowed to access your private communications under terms of FISA. 'As the Senate Report noted, FISA "was designed . . . to curb the practice by which the Executive Branch may conduct warrantless electronic surveillance on its own unilateral determination that national security justifies it." The Bill ends plans by the Bush Administration that would give the NSA the freedom to pry into the lives of ordinary Americans. The ACLU noted that, despite many recent hearings about 'modernization' and 'technology neutrality,' the administration has not publicly provided Congress with a single example of how current FISA standards have either prevented the intelligence community from using new technologies, or proven unworkable for the agents tasked with following them.'"

Comments

Of course they haven't.

[Chris Burke]

"the administration has not publicly provided Congress with a single example of how current FISA standards have either prevented the intelligence community from using new technologies, or proven unworkable for the agents tasked with following them."

They haven't provided it privately, either, and the reason is simple.

The FISA court is well-known as being basically a warrent rubber-stamping court. Out of thousands of requests sent in the last few years, only a handfull have been rejected, and most of those were accepted with changes suggested by the court. Since the court will issues warrants post-facto, even temporal urgency isn't an obstacle to getting a FISA warrant. Basically in any situation where the request is properly made and has any merit whatsoever the FISA court grants the warrant, it can be done retroactively, and there's pretty much no reason to skip the process. So why would the administration bypass the court in order to conduct a search?

Because the searches had so little merit that even FISA would not grant warrants.

So no, Bush's administration is not going to give an example of a situation where FISA got in the way of conducting legitimate security operations because no such case exists, it could only give examples of illegitimate ones and it isn't going to do that either.

This is a great start, though I hesitate to support the inherent thinking behind it -- which is, the President has the power to do whatever the fuck he wants until Congress specifically steps in and removes one of these infinitely many powers. But that's okay, we have to do something to at least make it explicit that when the President breaks the law, that means it was illegal, not that the Pres can put the pieces back together however he chooses. And I hope they continue to pass laws constraining government power, increasing oversight, and that they do this right up to the point where one of them gets in office and realizes they are subject to those same laws.

Bush Will Ignore It

[Doc Ruby]

The FISA itself already makes NSA wiretapping illegal in ways Bush personally ordered for years, as he's admitted. Last year a federal judge found that the NSA had violated the law (and the Constitution), and thereby that Bush had violated the law, in Bush's admitted offenses. The FISA makes it illegal for Bush to ignore the FISA court when wiretapping, and Bush has insisted he will continue to do just that.

Although Bush did lie about stopping his crimes when this issue first blew up in the news, last week he said he'd continue.

FISA was created after Congress (and America) learned about some of the extent to which Nixon had abused his power to spy on Americans without cause or Constitutional process. It has been amended over a dozen times since, to keep pace with changing technology and suspects. But Bush will ignore it all, because he's used to the Republican Congress Nixon lacked to perpetuate his tyrannies.

Bush is a committed criminal. Congress must impeach him immediately. While we still can.