The NSA performs SIGINT, which includes the collection of foreign broadcasts and communications over electronic media. Intercepting physical packages constitutes HUMINT and would fall under the authority of an organization like the CIA. It's important to understand that there are title authorities that provide strict legal definitions for who can do what, along with more ambiguous guidelines on how. I'd recommend you read the charters of both the NSA and CIA if you're genuinely curious about this.
Now, to clear up any confusion, allow me to explain the ambiguity: consider a phone call between non U.S. citizens originating and terminating outside the U.S. According to USSID 18 the NSA has full authority to intercept that phone call if it falls within their tasking. Now, consider that the phone call passes through a switch in the U.S. and cannot be reasonably intercepted anywhere else. The targets still fit the USSID 18 criteria, but the necessity of collection occurring inside the U.S. creates an ambiguity. This is the situation that wasn't anticipated by the original FISA bill because it was unheard of in 1978 when the NSA's bread and butter was standard RF and nascent satellite collection. The problem is that it has now become a very common occurrence, particularly in packet switched networks.
Why do you assume people won't be held accountable. To be clear, the cases against the telecoms were never about holding them accountable. It was always about the trail leading back to the administration. The goal was to get proof that the administration misrepresented itself or falsely provided indemnification, which everyone's almost certain they did. In such a case, you can't really prove the telecoms liable for anything, but you can hold the administration accountable. That's the purpose of the IG inspections. And while I generally have faith in an impartial and honorable IG, getting the Republicans out of power will make me feel even more comfortable about that.
So, accountability may not be immediate or certain, but the door is just as open as before. All that's been lost at this point is the public's opportunity to press the case themselves. While I agree that is not a negligible loss, it's not the end of the world that the net crowd seems to be claiming it is.
I think you have the argument backwards. The question should be: Are their any Americans who understand what FISA is and are against it? My knowledge of FISA happens to go back over a decade, and that understanding is why I support this bill. You can look at my comments on this topic for more background:
As I've commented elsewhere, the original FISA bill was written 30 years ago in the days before large global networks. As such, there has been a growing ambiguity as to whether the law dictates the manner of collection on systems inside the U.S. or just the parties targeted. The intelligence community has spent nearly 20 years trying to get clarification on this issue. Now they have it, along with additional oversight measures to prevent abuses.
Judicial review hasn't been removed, so the USSID 18 targeting criteria remain as strong as ever. Further, a warrant is still required to collect on any U.S. citizen or person located inside the U.S. While the emergency period has been extended past the PATRIOT Act's 72 hours to a full 7 days, a warrant still must be applied for and approved within that window regardless of the duration of collection.
On balance, it's a reasonable bill with reasonable protections. The telecom provision is bunk, but not a deal-breaker because oversight is expanded and criminal liability still exists. Of course, the effectiveness of the oversight will need to be assessed over time. But I don't understand why anyone who's read the different FISA bills and is familiar with title authority would be freaking out over this.
The original FISA bill was written before we had interconnected global networks. While NSA's charter in USSID 18 gives authority to collect on non U.S. persons (non-citizens located outside the U.S.), it does not address collection from systems located inside the U.S. (such as phone switches and routers). This ambiguity has been a serious problem for nearly 20 years. The amendment resolves that ambiguity, clarifies the intent of the targeting criteria with respect to collection methods, and provides additional oversight from all three branches of government. It does nothing to remove the explicit requirement for a warrant to collect on any U.S. person; it actually reinforces it (although arguably unnecessarily).
I agree that the telecom immunity was a garbage rider, but you cannot argue that this amendment did not address a valid need for reform. Moreover, your ambiguous statements and sweeping proclamations show that you either do not understand the bill or are being intentionally dishonest.
He wasn't a major contributor to the swift boaters. He was by far the major contributor, and he has a history of playing the media and greasing politicians to his personal benefit. So, yeah, I'll be keeping a suspicious eye on this one.
Though I might have stated it a bit differently, I'm glad that someone else pointed this out. Pickens is pure slime, and emphatically not to be trusted. Hopefully this is a real effort, but I'll withhold judgment until I see some real follow through.
The only upheaval was committee control. The Blue Dogs and Lieberman actually make Congress vote as a Republican on anything related to Iraq or national security. The moral is that you need to pay attention to who your politicians are, not just what party they're affiliated with.
Acid3 is a dumb test. Acid1 and Acid2 tested against a number of dependencies and special cases to ensure broad compliance with the standard. That's what made them useful tests.
In contrast, Acid3 is a hodgepodge of features from different standards that are broken or unimplemented in different browsers. It lacks the coherence of the earlier tests. That means you can game it pretty easily by implementing one small part of a standard while not having a genuinely useful implementation. In fact, that's what several browser vendors are doing.
Instead of randomly picking features from HTML, CSS, SVG JavaScript, and SMIL, Hixie should have done an Acid-style test for each standard. That would make it a lot more useful, like the previous Acid tests.
It may be allowed, but the truth is, voting "present" is just a way for a politician to avoid taking a stand or going on record.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just didn't take the time to read all six sentences of my comment. I would also encourage you to go back and reread my original comment, or just do a little research on the Illinois State Legislature if you're actually curious about how the "present" vote is used. Either way, please stop pretending to speak authoritatively on subjects you know nothing about. It just makes you look like an ass for getting it so wrong.
Sorry but this issue doesn't resonate anywhere near as well as the Slashdot crowd may think it does. I'm against the immunity, and a few other parts of the amendment. However, I completely understand why it will probably pass. A good leader would see that as well, and weigh the costs of fighting this battle now versus tabling it. Fortunately, the amendment doesn't provide criminal immunity and the provisions can be amended later when the issue is less of a political football. So, the smart strategy might be to retreat on this front for now.
You really need to learn how to use thomas.loc.gov properly. Although, if the best you've got is to knitpick an ad, then it's no wonder you don't understand how to use a simple website. Honestly, the biggest complaint in that FactCheck page is that he's touting his accomplishments in the Illinois Senate. They debunked nothing; they just took issue with him claiming to have "passed" legislation (as is their policy) and not noting the Illinois Senate legislation separately.
Now, I do have to admit that I was mistaken on the Feingold-Obama Ethics Reform Bill (S.230)--it hasn't been passed yet. However, here are three major pieces of Obama's legislation passed into law:
Coburn-Obama Google For Government (S.2590) Global Poverty Act (S.2433) Lugar-Obama Nonproliferation Legislation (S.1949)
It's funny really, for all McCain's constant bluster on earmarks it turns out that Obama's the one who's actually enacted legislation to help fix the system (S.2590). Of course, McCain was supposed to be involved in the Obama-Feingold Ethics Reform Act too, but he turned the first attempt into a very public, partisan car wreck. The resulting bill ended up being a watered down mess. Fortunately Obama and Feingold had the dedication to revisit the issue and revive the legislation.
As for compromise, it's sounds like you've just bought into the McCain image. The fact is that being senselessly antagonistic doesn't make one a maverick, and flip-flopping for political expediency isn't compromising. You can take almost every issue McCain is campaigning on and make him debate his past positions. He was against the Bush tax cuts and now he's for them. He supported comprehensive immigration reform and now he's against it. He supported campaign finance reform after his Keating Five scandal, and now he's running a primary campaign in violation of finance laws and has established state funds allowing donations of up to $60k per contributor. He claims to be environmentally conscious but has a lifetime score of zero from the LCV and just flip-flopped on offshore drilling. I could continue, but frankly I'm getting bored.
Look, maybe in the future you should be less focused on your candidate's hype and pay a little more attention to the substance.
I used the word "most," not "every," because it's the accurate term. To be clear, there are 48 blue dogs in the House (http://www.house.gov/ross/BlueDogs/Member%20Page.html) not counting the unofficial blue dogs. They all voted overwhelmingly in favor of the amendment. You also have about 31 House Democrats up for competitive elections in swing districts, and they voted 3 to 1 for the amendment (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/large-majority-of-swing-district.html). Given that there's about 25% overlap between those two groups, that leaves you with at least 60 House Democrats meeting the criteria I listed, which is the majority of the 105 votes.
Back to the main point, the telecom immunity is certainly an important issue, along with a few other provisions in the amendment. However, just because they don't have the votes to fix the bill does not mean the issue is dead. The whole point of withholding immunity is to keep a leverage for later investigations. However, the immunity provision is civil, not criminal. So, later investigations can still use the threat of criminal prosecution as a leverage. Further, the existing FISA bill can always be amended later when it's not being used as a political football. It may not be the best compromise, but the fact is that it's not capitulation--certainly not if the majority of Democrats voting yea are genuinely in favor of the legislation.
I admit that I'm not happy with the FISA bill but I don't see what Obama can do right now if he can't get nearly every Democratic Senator on board with his position. The Republicans have 50 guaranteed votes (including Leibermann). As I've already stated, they can break a filibuster by getting just 10 of the 50 remaining Democrats and Independents to side with them. A version of the bill with immunity already made it through the Senate once, so we can reasonably expect that the Republicans have the vote.
To sum up, Obama has a path to fix the this legislation after the fact if needed. He's also trying to win an election and maintain strong majorities in the House and Senate. Finally, he needs to maintain a good working relationship with Congress, the majority of whom appear to support this bill. So, I really don't see where exactly he's deficient in leadership here. It sounds more like you're going off half cocked on something you know very little about.
If you look at the House vote it's pretty apparent that most of the Democrats who voted for the FISA amendment were either blue dogs, up for a tough reelection in a swing state, or both. There's a lot more than ten Senate Democrats fitting that same criteria, and many of them probably view this as voting the will of their constituencies, which is part of what they're elected to do.
So, you can take this as an opportunity to try and slam Obama, but all it shows is that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. The whole point of this "change" mantra is to create a working majority and seek compromises that are in the best interests of everyone. Of course there will be imperfect compromises, and mistakes will be made. But it's a much better solution than one-party control or partisan deadlock, which is where we are now.
Don't dismiss something as rhetoric if you know nothing about it. Obama actually has a very impressive legislative record. In less than four years the US Senate he's gotten three major pieces of legislation passed:
Google For Government (earmark and government spending transparency) Counter Weapons Proliferation (loose nukes, etc.) Ethics and Lobbying Reform (banned a lot of the lobbyist perks)
If you go back to the Illinois Senate the list gets much longer, so it's easier to point to his death penalty legislation as his biggest achievement. The outgoing Governor put a moratorium on the death penalty because of too many questionable convictions. So, the issue spent about a decade treated as a political hot potato on both sides. Working groups were formed and dissolved, but nothing got resolved.
Obama took on the issue and got a compromise bill passed by an overwhelming majority. The only way he could do that was to get the police unions and civil rights groups to agree on a fair set of procedures for things like interrogations in death penalty cases. Just imagine what kind of skill it takes to get agreement between cops and the ACLU.
Anyway, those are just a few highlights. I really have neither the time nor inclination to list all of the major legislation he's sponsored or cosponsored. But that should give you a sense of some things he's devoted his time to.
Then again he skipped a LOT of votes in Illinois as a State Senator, probably for similar political reasons.
That's a load of crap and should be downmodded to oblivion. Obama had an exceptional attendance record in the Illinois Senate, where he cast over 4000 votes in eight years.
Perhaps you're instead referring to his "present" votes, of which he cast about 130 total. Of course, if you knew anything at all about the Illinois legislature you'd know that his use of the "present" vote is entirely normal. And if you tracked his votes you'd see that it falls in line with his policy of using "present" to identify bills that either require further refinement, are unconstitutional at their face, or as part of a larger policy strategy (such as with Planned Parenthood). That's why in Illinois the "present" vote is called a "'no' with an explanation."
It's a cloture vote, so if he's not there it can be taken with his public statements as support of the filibuster. However, we don't know at this time if Obama is actually providing any support in rounding up the necessary votes.
Dick Cheney was part of Nixon's administration during Watergate. He's said before that it taught him to never write anything down if he could avoid it. Hence his famous quote "I learned early on that if you donâ(TM)t want your memos to get you in trouble some day, just donâ(TM)t write any."
Look at the date, bill, and vote roll. It's the right list. If you can prove otherwise, then please provide a link to a reliable source. Otherwise, take your trolling elsewhere.
Sorry, but you cannot dispute a simple provable fact. Paul was not present on the House roll call that day and did not vote on the FISA bill. I provided the link to the official House records for proof.
The real value of FISA warrants is more reactive than proactive. FISA judges show pretty broad discretion in what they will approve, but they do so with the understanding that the warrant creates a paper trail of justification and accountability. Without that paper trail, it's almost impossible to conduct a real investigation and hold people responsible for any abuses.
Personally, I consider the original FISA requirements to be reasonable in the context of an intelligence collection mission (not traditional law enforcement). However, what Bush did to FISA is an abuse of Executive power specifically because it removes not only the weaker proactive checks, but also the stronger retroactive balances of an investigative trail.
Slashdot Mirror
The NSA performs SIGINT, which includes the collection of foreign broadcasts and communications over electronic media. Intercepting physical packages constitutes HUMINT and would fall under the authority of an organization like the CIA. It's important to understand that there are title authorities that provide strict legal definitions for who can do what, along with more ambiguous guidelines on how. I'd recommend you read the charters of both the NSA and CIA if you're genuinely curious about this.
Now, to clear up any confusion, allow me to explain the ambiguity: consider a phone call between non U.S. citizens originating and terminating outside the U.S. According to USSID 18 the NSA has full authority to intercept that phone call if it falls within their tasking. Now, consider that the phone call passes through a switch in the U.S. and cannot be reasonably intercepted anywhere else. The targets still fit the USSID 18 criteria, but the necessity of collection occurring inside the U.S. creates an ambiguity. This is the situation that wasn't anticipated by the original FISA bill because it was unheard of in 1978 when the NSA's bread and butter was standard RF and nascent satellite collection. The problem is that it has now become a very common occurrence, particularly in packet switched networks.
Why do you assume people won't be held accountable. To be clear, the cases against the telecoms were never about holding them accountable. It was always about the trail leading back to the administration. The goal was to get proof that the administration misrepresented itself or falsely provided indemnification, which everyone's almost certain they did. In such a case, you can't really prove the telecoms liable for anything, but you can hold the administration accountable. That's the purpose of the IG inspections. And while I generally have faith in an impartial and honorable IG, getting the Republicans out of power will make me feel even more comfortable about that.
So, accountability may not be immediate or certain, but the door is just as open as before. All that's been lost at this point is the public's opportunity to press the case themselves. While I agree that is not a negligible loss, it's not the end of the world that the net crowd seems to be claiming it is.
I think you have the argument backwards. The question should be: Are their any Americans who understand what FISA is and are against it? My knowledge of FISA happens to go back over a decade, and that understanding is why I support this bill. You can look at my comments on this topic for more background:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=609723&cid=24135973
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=609723&cid=24136391
As I've commented elsewhere, the original FISA bill was written 30 years ago in the days before large global networks. As such, there has been a growing ambiguity as to whether the law dictates the manner of collection on systems inside the U.S. or just the parties targeted. The intelligence community has spent nearly 20 years trying to get clarification on this issue. Now they have it, along with additional oversight measures to prevent abuses.
Judicial review hasn't been removed, so the USSID 18 targeting criteria remain as strong as ever. Further, a warrant is still required to collect on any U.S. citizen or person located inside the U.S. While the emergency period has been extended past the PATRIOT Act's 72 hours to a full 7 days, a warrant still must be applied for and approved within that window regardless of the duration of collection.
On balance, it's a reasonable bill with reasonable protections. The telecom provision is bunk, but not a deal-breaker because oversight is expanded and criminal liability still exists. Of course, the effectiveness of the oversight will need to be assessed over time. But I don't understand why anyone who's read the different FISA bills and is familiar with title authority would be freaking out over this.
I'm sorry, but what exactly makes you an authority on terrorist's methods and effective counter-terrorism efforts?
The original FISA bill was written before we had interconnected global networks. While NSA's charter in USSID 18 gives authority to collect on non U.S. persons (non-citizens located outside the U.S.), it does not address collection from systems located inside the U.S. (such as phone switches and routers). This ambiguity has been a serious problem for nearly 20 years. The amendment resolves that ambiguity, clarifies the intent of the targeting criteria with respect to collection methods, and provides additional oversight from all three branches of government. It does nothing to remove the explicit requirement for a warrant to collect on any U.S. person; it actually reinforces it (although arguably unnecessarily).
I agree that the telecom immunity was a garbage rider, but you cannot argue that this amendment did not address a valid need for reform. Moreover, your ambiguous statements and sweeping proclamations show that you either do not understand the bill or are being intentionally dishonest.
He wasn't a major contributor to the swift boaters. He was by far the major contributor, and he has a history of playing the media and greasing politicians to his personal benefit. So, yeah, I'll be keeping a suspicious eye on this one.
Though I might have stated it a bit differently, I'm glad that someone else pointed this out. Pickens is pure slime, and emphatically not to be trusted. Hopefully this is a real effort, but I'll withhold judgment until I see some real follow through.
The only upheaval was committee control. The Blue Dogs and Lieberman actually make Congress vote as a Republican on anything related to Iraq or national security. The moral is that you need to pay attention to who your politicians are, not just what party they're affiliated with.
Acid3 is a dumb test. Acid1 and Acid2 tested against a number of dependencies and special cases to ensure broad compliance with the standard. That's what made them useful tests.
In contrast, Acid3 is a hodgepodge of features from different standards that are broken or unimplemented in different browsers. It lacks the coherence of the earlier tests. That means you can game it pretty easily by implementing one small part of a standard while not having a genuinely useful implementation. In fact, that's what several browser vendors are doing.
Instead of randomly picking features from HTML, CSS, SVG JavaScript, and SMIL, Hixie should have done an Acid-style test for each standard. That would make it a lot more useful, like the previous Acid tests.
I'm going to give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you just didn't take the time to read all six sentences of my comment. I would also encourage you to go back and reread my original comment, or just do a little research on the Illinois State Legislature if you're actually curious about how the "present" vote is used. Either way, please stop pretending to speak authoritatively on subjects you know nothing about. It just makes you look like an ass for getting it so wrong.
Sorry but this issue doesn't resonate anywhere near as well as the Slashdot crowd may think it does. I'm against the immunity, and a few other parts of the amendment. However, I completely understand why it will probably pass. A good leader would see that as well, and weigh the costs of fighting this battle now versus tabling it. Fortunately, the amendment doesn't provide criminal immunity and the provisions can be amended later when the issue is less of a political football. So, the smart strategy might be to retreat on this front for now.
You really need to learn how to use thomas.loc.gov properly. Although, if the best you've got is to knitpick an ad, then it's no wonder you don't understand how to use a simple website. Honestly, the biggest complaint in that FactCheck page is that he's touting his accomplishments in the Illinois Senate. They debunked nothing; they just took issue with him claiming to have "passed" legislation (as is their policy) and not noting the Illinois Senate legislation separately.
Now, I do have to admit that I was mistaken on the Feingold-Obama Ethics Reform Bill (S.230)--it hasn't been passed yet. However, here are three major pieces of Obama's legislation passed into law:
Coburn-Obama Google For Government (S.2590)
Global Poverty Act (S.2433)
Lugar-Obama Nonproliferation Legislation (S.1949)
It's funny really, for all McCain's constant bluster on earmarks it turns out that Obama's the one who's actually enacted legislation to help fix the system (S.2590). Of course, McCain was supposed to be involved in the Obama-Feingold Ethics Reform Act too, but he turned the first attempt into a very public, partisan car wreck. The resulting bill ended up being a watered down mess. Fortunately Obama and Feingold had the dedication to revisit the issue and revive the legislation.
As for compromise, it's sounds like you've just bought into the McCain image. The fact is that being senselessly antagonistic doesn't make one a maverick, and flip-flopping for political expediency isn't compromising. You can take almost every issue McCain is campaigning on and make him debate his past positions. He was against the Bush tax cuts and now he's for them. He supported comprehensive immigration reform and now he's against it. He supported campaign finance reform after his Keating Five scandal, and now he's running a primary campaign in violation of finance laws and has established state funds allowing donations of up to $60k per contributor. He claims to be environmentally conscious but has a lifetime score of zero from the LCV and just flip-flopped on offshore drilling. I could continue, but frankly I'm getting bored.
Look, maybe in the future you should be less focused on your candidate's hype and pay a little more attention to the substance.
I used the word "most," not "every," because it's the accurate term. To be clear, there are 48 blue dogs in the House (http://www.house.gov/ross/BlueDogs/Member%20Page.html) not counting the unofficial blue dogs. They all voted overwhelmingly in favor of the amendment. You also have about 31 House Democrats up for competitive elections in swing districts, and they voted 3 to 1 for the amendment (http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/large-majority-of-swing-district.html). Given that there's about 25% overlap between those two groups, that leaves you with at least 60 House Democrats meeting the criteria I listed, which is the majority of the 105 votes.
Back to the main point, the telecom immunity is certainly an important issue, along with a few other provisions in the amendment. However, just because they don't have the votes to fix the bill does not mean the issue is dead. The whole point of withholding immunity is to keep a leverage for later investigations. However, the immunity provision is civil, not criminal. So, later investigations can still use the threat of criminal prosecution as a leverage. Further, the existing FISA bill can always be amended later when it's not being used as a political football. It may not be the best compromise, but the fact is that it's not capitulation--certainly not if the majority of Democrats voting yea are genuinely in favor of the legislation.
I admit that I'm not happy with the FISA bill but I don't see what Obama can do right now if he can't get nearly every Democratic Senator on board with his position. The Republicans have 50 guaranteed votes (including Leibermann). As I've already stated, they can break a filibuster by getting just 10 of the 50 remaining Democrats and Independents to side with them. A version of the bill with immunity already made it through the Senate once, so we can reasonably expect that the Republicans have the vote.
To sum up, Obama has a path to fix the this legislation after the fact if needed. He's also trying to win an election and maintain strong majorities in the House and Senate. Finally, he needs to maintain a good working relationship with Congress, the majority of whom appear to support this bill. So, I really don't see where exactly he's deficient in leadership here. It sounds more like you're going off half cocked on something you know very little about.
If you look at the House vote it's pretty apparent that most of the Democrats who voted for the FISA amendment were either blue dogs, up for a tough reelection in a swing state, or both. There's a lot more than ten Senate Democrats fitting that same criteria, and many of them probably view this as voting the will of their constituencies, which is part of what they're elected to do.
So, you can take this as an opportunity to try and slam Obama, but all it shows is that you don't know what the hell you're talking about. The whole point of this "change" mantra is to create a working majority and seek compromises that are in the best interests of everyone. Of course there will be imperfect compromises, and mistakes will be made. But it's a much better solution than one-party control or partisan deadlock, which is where we are now.
Don't dismiss something as rhetoric if you know nothing about it. Obama actually has a very impressive legislative record. In less than four years the US Senate he's gotten three major pieces of legislation passed:
Google For Government (earmark and government spending transparency)
Counter Weapons Proliferation (loose nukes, etc.)
Ethics and Lobbying Reform (banned a lot of the lobbyist perks)
If you go back to the Illinois Senate the list gets much longer, so it's easier to point to his death penalty legislation as his biggest achievement. The outgoing Governor put a moratorium on the death penalty because of too many questionable convictions. So, the issue spent about a decade treated as a political hot potato on both sides. Working groups were formed and dissolved, but nothing got resolved.
Obama took on the issue and got a compromise bill passed by an overwhelming majority. The only way he could do that was to get the police unions and civil rights groups to agree on a fair set of procedures for things like interrogations in death penalty cases. Just imagine what kind of skill it takes to get agreement between cops and the ACLU.
Anyway, those are just a few highlights. I really have neither the time nor inclination to list all of the major legislation he's sponsored or cosponsored. But that should give you a sense of some things he's devoted his time to.
Then again he skipped a LOT of votes in Illinois as a State Senator, probably for similar political reasons.
That's a load of crap and should be downmodded to oblivion. Obama had an exceptional attendance record in the Illinois Senate, where he cast over 4000 votes in eight years.
Perhaps you're instead referring to his "present" votes, of which he cast about 130 total. Of course, if you knew anything at all about the Illinois legislature you'd know that his use of the "present" vote is entirely normal. And if you tracked his votes you'd see that it falls in line with his policy of using "present" to identify bills that either require further refinement, are unconstitutional at their face, or as part of a larger policy strategy (such as with Planned Parenthood). That's why in Illinois the "present" vote is called a "'no' with an explanation."
It's a cloture vote, so if he's not there it can be taken with his public statements as support of the filibuster. However, we don't know at this time if Obama is actually providing any support in rounding up the necessary votes.
Dick Cheney was part of Nixon's administration during Watergate. He's said before that it taught him to never write anything down if he could avoid it. Hence his famous quote "I learned early on that if you donâ(TM)t want your memos to get you in trouble some day, just donâ(TM)t write any."
Oh, and as I mentioned in another reply, Paul is the Representative for the Texas 14th district. He is most certainly not a Senator.
Look at the date, bill, and vote roll. It's the right list. If you can prove otherwise, then please provide a link to a reliable source. Otherwise, take your trolling elsewhere.
Sorry, but you cannot dispute a simple provable fact. Paul was not present on the House roll call that day and did not vote on the FISA bill. I provided the link to the official House records for proof.
Paul is the Representative for the Teas 14 district. Look it up.
He didn't show up: http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2008/roll437.xml
The real value of FISA warrants is more reactive than proactive. FISA judges show pretty broad discretion in what they will approve, but they do so with the understanding that the warrant creates a paper trail of justification and accountability. Without that paper trail, it's almost impossible to conduct a real investigation and hold people responsible for any abuses.
Personally, I consider the original FISA requirements to be reasonable in the context of an intelligence collection mission (not traditional law enforcement). However, what Bush did to FISA is an abuse of Executive power specifically because it removes not only the weaker proactive checks, but also the stronger retroactive balances of an investigative trail.