House Approves Warrantless Wiretapping Extension

An anonymous reader writes "The House of Representatives voted 227-183 to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to allow warrantless wiretapping of telephone and electronic communications. The vote extends the FISA amendment for six months. 'The administration said the measure is needed to speed the National Security Agency's ability to intercept phone calls, e-mails and other communications involving foreign nationals "reasonably believed to be outside the United States." Civil liberties groups and many Democrats said it goes too far, possibly enabling the government to wiretap U.S. residents communicating with overseas parties without adequate oversight from courts or Congres.'"

Comments

Re:And The Reason Is

[vidarh]

The entire point of FISA is to provide oversight of surveillance involving foreign parties. Internal US wired calls is entirely outside the scope of FISA, for a very good reason: They are already covered elsewhere.

mod parent down

[Anonymous Coward]

This -does- give full permission to wiretap anybody without a warrent. Anyone can be wiretapped without oversight as long as the claim is made that they are suspected of communicating with said foreign suspects.

Sheepocrats

[Anonymous Coward]

The Democrats are totally useless. They get control of both Houses of Congress in part because the American public is tired of Bush and his blatant power grabs. Then they go and authorize the very programs that have been found illegal. They are gutless chicken shits and I am ashamed to have voted for them.

Re:Sheepocrats

[unamiccia]

Chances are your congressional Democrats voted against the measure, unlike a single Republican senator and only two Republican representatives.

Democrats currently have 49 votes in the Senate (Senator Johnson from South Dakota is still out sick). That's 11 votes shy of passing legislation -- you need 60 votes to defeat Republican filibusters -- and 18 votes shy of overcoming a Bush veto of any nonevil legislation.

The 41 House Democrats who voted for this measure disgust me -- but 181 Democrats voted no. (Republicans? They rushed to destroy the Fourth Amendment by a vote of 186 to 2.)

In the Senate, the goddamned Republicans were unanimously in favor of this bill. Sixteen goddamned Democrats joined them, and if any one of them represents you I hope you consider it your duty to let them know early, often, and loudly how ashamed you are of them.

But the other 27 Democrats, joined by all zero of their nonevil Republican colleagues, voted against this horrible law.

Am I sick with anger about this? Sicker than you -- but I'm also angry about this "Democrats are totally useless" crap. Don't like how thin and impotent the congressional Democrats are? Don't like how imperfect their leadership is in the face of nearly total Republican evil? Fine, neither do I -- but I think it's a bit less counterproductive to dwell on monolithic Republican evil than the Democrats' failure to achieve omnipotence in the last election, won't you?

I posted five angry letters to congresspeople (and two big thank yous to my good Democratic senator and my good Democratic congressperson) before I came posting to Slashdot. What did you do?

FISA allows permission three days later already

[Dr. Manhattan]

FISA allows them to do the wiretapping, and then get permission up to 72 hours later. How frivolous are their reasons that they can't even be arsed to get a retroactive warrant?

Re:FISA allows permission three days later already

[NessunoImp]

There seems to be a lot of ignorance and hyperbole on slashdot regarding FISA.

First, the basics of "FISA". FISA is a statue meant to govern how and when government agencies may gather FOREIGN intelligence. FISA warrants are warrants issued by FISA-established courts authorizing the government to wiretap or survey individuals or phone numbers. A FISA warrant cannot be issued on domestic communications, since American residents and citizens are (yes, still) covered by the United States Constitution's protection against unreasonable search and seizure. So, to boil it down,

Second, warrantless wiretaps are and will always be legal (and constitutional) when both ends of the communication are outside the United States, not American citizens, and no part of the communication is routed electronically through the territorial US. Why? Because such people and communications are utterly outside the jurisdiction of the US Constitution. Think of it this way, should the US have to get a warrant (FISA or otherwise) to intercept a satellite phone conversation between Bin Laden and al-Zawahiri in Pakistan? What jurisdiction does a US court have to rule on that matter? Answer: None.

Third, the legislation in question was needed and rushed in before Congress goes on vacation because of a new ruling by a FISA judge, which had the effect of overruling the NSA's previously established powers under FISA. In other words, a judge decided in a new ruling to overturn the way things had been previously been done. This had the effect of placing our intelligence community in <a panic because it effectively crippled our ability to intercept foreign communications. See this Newsweek article for more info. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20075751/site/newsweek /

Fourth, the legal issue at hand. The brand new FISA judge ruling concerned the issue of when you know one end of the conversation is foreign, but you don't know where the other one is. In other words, should an unknown second party be assumed to be American or in the US for purposes of foreign intelligence? The new ruling said yes, but previous rulings had said no. For more info on this, see the LA Times. http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la- na-spying2aug02,0,5813563.story?coll=la-home-cente r

The concern of the intelligence community was that given the current advanced state of technology and the ability to mask identities, the ruling effectively destroyed the ability of the US to wiretap ANY communication where one side was anonymous.

Maybe that's what some people here on Slashdot want, which is fine to argue. But I hope the discussion is at least conducted soberly and with some attachment to the actual difficult legal and national defense questions at hand.

Imagined responses to this

[Dasher42]

I can hear the Al Quaeda operatives now: "Oh shit, habibi! Talk quieter!"

Yeah, right. We had their communications shut down. Whenever a legislative lemming wants to pass more laws, you should ask whether the existing laws were inadequate, or the people that were supposed to be enforcing them. We had FBI alerts on the 9/11 hijackers and a briefing on President Bush's desk. We've had FISA for years and its restrictions are so lax - allowing even for warrants after the fact - that any protest of it can't be for good reason. Instead the incompetent and corrupt are getting more power to abuse, while making sure their buddies make money off the taxpayer.

I don't want to hear "Proud to be an American" from one more person who buys into this. Sit down and shut it up. I'm fed up with people who think it's patriotic to abandon the most basic, essential reasons this country exists. Not only should we listen to old Ben Franklin about giving up freedom for security, we should realize that freedom *is* our security. Bush and his crew have killed the last of our existing safeguards. They have paved the way for full-on oligarchic tyrrany here. We not only need to stop voting in people who do this, or supposed opposition parties that enable it, we need to re-establish the law of this land.

I was excited at last November's election, but I've repented of it now. I'm neither Libertarian nor Constitutionalist, but I wouldn't hesitate to work with them to fix this. We need Greens in on this because nothing's safe when the whims of the rich trump the law. Most Americans are convinced that something's really wrong with this country, we're just not agreed on what exactly, but this is should be clear to everyone - we need the rule of law back.

Bin Laden was never a good excuse for destroying our country from within in the first place!

Repeat afer me:

[nurb432]

"I will encrypt all my communications"

Email is easy, but are there any of the current crop of 'giveaway' cell phones that support it?

Re:poster...post right

[TheGavster]

If warrants are no longer necessary to wiretap, where exactly is the check to see if the people being wiretapped are foreign nationals? The whole point of a warrant is to make sure that a requested invasive measure is being applied properly.

Re:They did exactly what they said they would do

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that's always been the problem with democracy. Damn government does what the people want rather than doing the *right* thing.

Re:They did exactly what they said they would do

[TheRaven64]

This is the exact problem the republic is meant to solve. The average person doesn't have the time to learn what they need to know to do their job, and to learn what they need to do to make informed decisions on government policy. The solution is to select a few people to represent you and delegate your decision making to them. These representatives should not be making the choices you would make, they should be making the choices you would make if you sat down and studied the facts of the matter in detail.

At some point, however, we stopped electing representatives, and started electing leaders. From then on, it started to go down hill.

Re:poster...post right

[Dachannien]

That's not *entirely* true, though. The bill requires that the AG submit to the FISA court a set of procedures for determining whether a wiretap concerns people located outside the US, and those procedures have to be "in place" when the AG orders surveillance. In addition, if you happen to receive a directive from the AG ordering you to perform some action that fulfills such a surveillance order, you can file a petition with the FISA court to challenge the legality of the directive.

The opportunity for judicial review is minimal, but Lofgren overstates the matter by saying that there are no checks and balances at all.

Re:Every one of these idiots should be shot...

[TheRaven64]

Fuck them all. Next election, vote for anyone but the incumbent. According to TFS, 183 voted against this. If you want to make a difference, then make sure you vote for any member of the 183 and against any member of the 227 who happens to be up for election in your area, and make it clear that this is the reason for your vote. Start now; if your representative is in the 227, then write to them and explain why they have lost any chance of having your vote at the next election. Better yet, write to the local chairman of whichever party he or she stands for, and tell them you will not vote for this candidate, but you would consider voting for one who considered personal freedoms to be important.

Re:Remember Democrats are the Majority

[TheRaven64]

Considering that Democrats are now the majority in Congress, this bill would not have passed without their strong support

There are 435 seats in the house of representatives. Of these, 410 voted. To gain a majority from those voting, they required 206 votes. The Republican party controls 202 seats, meaning that if they had voted en bloc, they only needed 4 Democrats to vote with them in order to win. I haven't seen the exact break down of voting for this act, but it's entirely possible that 202 Republicans and 25 Democrats voted for this bill, and 183 Democrats voted against it.

The Democrats only control congress if they all agree. It doesn't take many dissenters to lose that control. We've seen this a few times here in the UK where the party on government has had a very small majority; they've failed to get acts passed because one or two members of their own party decided to abstain, letting the other two parties get the majority vote.

Re:huh?

[JackieBrown]

Wow, it's a good thing that the Congress majority is Democrat so this won't happen.

Oh wait ....

Re:poster...post right

[KingSkippus]

You're so naive.

I don't know how many times I've said this, and people still don't get it. When deciding whether a law is good or bad, you should always assume that the worst scum of the earth are going to be exploiting it for their own evil agendas, and then decide if you can live with its consequences.

Let's see what the Republican who defended the law says about it:

Republicans disputed [Democrat Zoe Lofgren's] description. "It does nothing to tear up the Constitution," said Rep. Dan Lungren, R-Calif. If an American's communications are swept up in surveillance of a foreigner, he said, "we go through a process called minimization" and get rid of the records unless there is reason to suspect the American is a threat.

So everything--including eavesdropping on domestic calls--is fair game if there is a reason to suspect that the American is a threat. Who gets to decide if the American is a threat? Why, the President and Attorney General, of course! And who do they have to tell? No one! And they have to be a threat of committing some sort of terrorist act, right? Of course not, they can be deemed a threat for any ol' reason they damned well please! "Wow, that person may get me voted out of office. I deem them a threat to national security." Don't think it could happen? You're not thinking hard enough, and you're still not assuming that the worst scum of the earth are in charge.

If you can't see the potential for abuse of this law, then you're beyond naive, you're an idiot. And if you think that George Bush would never abuse it in this way because he's such a nice man who is looking out for our safety, then imagine it in the hands of Hillary Clinton, because you're also giving it to whoever takes office after Bush, and whoever takes office after that, and whoever takes office after that. Do you trust whoever will be president in 20 years, even though you have no freakin' clue who that will be?

At the risk of going all Godwin in this thread, imagine that 20 years from now, a new Adolph Hitler manages to win the election. Do you trust him not to abuse the law too? Don't ever ask if you think the people in charge now will abuse the law, ask if Adolph Hitler would. Government is supposed to be designed in such a way that if a branch of government does become corrupted by a Hitler-like person, we'd be okay in the end because the other two branches would compensate for it with their checks and balances. Laws like this are specifically designed, though, to take those checks and balances away from other branches and concentrate the power in one branch (in this case, the executive branch). No matter how much you think it will only be used with good intentions, it will be abused at some point.

By passing this bill, Congress has failed us miserably yet again, and the biggest reason why is because of naive little Bush cheerleaders who are too stupid to know how government works.

Political brinksmanship and an "October Surprise"

[hey!]

What's going on here is that Democrats don't want to be "responsible" for another 9/11.

They want a bill that gives the administration wiretap powers, but subject to independent judicial oversight. However, any limitation on the Administration's power to wiretap faces a Republican filibuster in the Senate.

This leaves the Democrats with a choice: pass a bill without oversight measures, or be blamed for stopping the wirtap program altogether. Stopping the program altogether exposes them to an "October Surprise": a terrorist attack that might hypothetically been prevented if the administration could wiretap as they pleased.

Never mind the logical niceties: that the program could have operated effectively with judicial oversight, that the Republicans filibustered the bill, or that the Administration didn't have the Arabic language skills to handle all the intercepts they might have made. The Republican line from the last two elections was that a vote for a Democrat was a victory for the terrorist, that Democrats are traitors who are on the side of the terrorists. Nothing would suit them better than proclaiming that in front of another smoking hole in a major American city.

So, the Democrats punted for six months to see if the administration's popularity drops enough to get the bill they want through the Senate. The process will repeat until the Administration is so wounded nobody will stand up for it, or until after the 2008 elections.

Cowardly? Certainly. But you're right in one thin:, the problem is its the same old stupid, unreasonable boss. The problem is us. If we don't have the balls to defend the freedoms our ancestors handed down to us, then we don't deserve those freedoms.