Senate Renews Warrantless Eavesdropping Act

New submitter electron sponge writes "On Friday morning, the Senate renewed the FISA Amendments Act (PDF), which allows for warrantless electronic eavesdropping, for an additional five years. The act, which was originally passed by Congress in 2008, allows law enforcement agencies to access private communications as long as one participant in the communications could reasonably be believed to be outside the United States. This law has been the subject of a federal lawsuit, and was argued before the Supreme Court recently. 'The legislation does not require the government to identify the target or facility to be monitored. It can begin surveillance a week before making the request, and the surveillance can continue during the appeals process if, in a rare case, the secret FISA court rejects the surveillance application. The court’s rulings are not public.'" The EFF points out that the Senate was finally forced to debate the bill, but the proposed amendments that would have improved it were rejected.

Comments

Perpetual war

[crazyjj]

These "wartime" acts will always be in place from now on, because the U.S. will never not be at war again.

Re:Perpetual war

[dkleinsc]

Of course: The US has basically been at war since 1941. It's also officially been in a state of emergency since September 2001, because presidents can do things in a state of emergency that they otherwise can't.

Another good example of a government under continuous emergency: Egypt was officially in a state of emergency from 1967 through May of this year.

Re:Passed by a Democrat controlled congress in 200

[crazyjj]

Passed by a Democratic Senate and House, signed by a Republican President, renewed by a Democrat controlled Senate and Republican controlled House, signed by a Democrat President. It's one of the few bi-partisan issues left.

Both sides can't agree on much of anything else, but they can both still agree to be evil. How touching.

See which bastards voted for it

[petsounds]

Here's the vote of each Senator on this bill. Only 23 voted Nay, only 3 of those Nays were Republicans, and 4 Senators didn't even show up to vote. And President Obama is quite ready to sign it into law.

This country is broken.

Re:Passed by a Democrat controlled congress in 200

[anagama]

Glenn Greenwald has some great analysis on this vote:

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/28/fisa-feinstein-obama-democrats-eavesdropping

Wyden yesterday had two amendments: one that would simply require the NSA to give a general estimate of how many Americans are having their communications intercepted under this law (information the NSA has steadfastly refused to provide), and another which would state that the NSA is barred from eavesdropping on Americans on US soil without a warrant. Merkley's amendment would compel the public release of secret judicial rulings from the FISA court which purport to interpret the scope of the eavesdropping law on the ground that "secret law is inconsistent with democratic governance"; the Obama administration has refused to release a single such opinion even though the court, "on at least one occasion", found that the government was violating the Fourth Amendment in how it was using the law to eavesdrop on Americans.

But the Obama White House opposed all amendments, demanding a "clean" renewal of the law without any oversight or transparency reforms. Earlier this month, the GOP-led House complied by passing a reform-free version of the law's renewal, and sent the bill Obama wanted to the Senate, where it was debated yesterday afternoon.

This is of course in contrast to his pre-election 2008 promise to oppose the original bill (which he didn't do, voting for it instead). Now he loves it so much, he won't countenance any modifications.

Democrats: The New GOP.