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Senate To Reconsider Wiretap Immunity
bughunter passes on a report from Wired Threat Level about the effort by Democratic lawmakers to roll back some provisions of the Patriot Act. Three of its provisions expire at the end of this year, and the reform attempt is expected to be attached to legislation to renew them. "Lawmakers are considering key changes to the Patriot Act and other spy laws — proposals that could give new life to lawsuits accusing the nation's telecommunications companies of turning over Americans' electronic communications to the government without warrants. On Oct. 1, the Senate Judiciary Committee likely will consider revoking that immunity legislation as it works to revise the Patriot Act and other spy laws with radical changes that provide for more government transparency and more privacy protections." Among the other likely goals of reform efforts, according to Wired, are limiting the government's power to issue National Security Letters, and limiting "black bag" searches to cases of spying or terrorism — 65% of past searches were authorized in drug cases.
Senate Democrats propose surveillance law changesWednesday September 23, @08:29AM
The AP is reporting (via yahoo) that Senate Democrats are actually trying to restore some of Americans' rights and freedoms that were lost when government panicked after 9-11.
Free Martian Whores!
I thought this was a troll, but it isn't.
Obama Backs Extending Patriot Act Spy Provisions
The thing is, the Democrats are as power hungry as the Republicans. And the PATRIOT act was passed by a nearly unanimous vote.
A pox on both their houses, I say.
Free Martian Whores!
Bypass Wired and NYT's filtering and read the source for yourself: the Administrative Office of the United States Court report on applications for delayed-notice search warrants.
http://big.assets.huffingtonpost.com/SneakAndPeakReport.pdf
You want Table 2, on page 6.
Top categories in order of frequency of report: drugs, fraud, weapons, tax evasion, racketeering, "unspecified," fugitive, theft... terrorism is so far down the list that it doesn't get a percentage to show its proportionality. In terms of raw frequency, there were 843 drug-related reports, and 5 terrorism-related reports.
The article you link doesn't say what you're saying. In fact it says the administration has the same stance as the summary. They're planning on renewing all three provisions, but including more protections for civil liberties.
I'd much rather they simply let all three expire, but your implied assertions that the Obama administration is opposed to adding civil liberty protections to the bill and is at odds with congress are both unsupported.
The actions the telecoms took were legal under the PATRIOT act
No, they weren't. Not even USAPATRIOT authorizes unlimited spying on domestic sources with no warrant. And nobody in the government has ever even claimed that the actions were legal under USAPATRIOT. The only statutory legal justification for the program would have been FISA and they did not go through FISA. The only claim on legality they ever made was AG Gonzales' legal theory that the President can ignore any law he wants as long as he thinks it's really important for national security that he do so -- a legal theory with what I will generously call "flaws".
Not even John Ashcroft thought the surveillance program was legal, and he was a huge proponent of USAPATRIOT. Does that not tell you something?
That's why Congress had to retroactively make those actions legal. That is the ex post facto law. Undoing an ex post facto law is not, itself, ex post facto.
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