— unpredictable thoughts

Obama’s support for FISA

THEN:
from Barack Obama back in in Sep­tem­ber:
[ I willl ] sup­port a fil­i­buster of any bill that includes retroac­tive immu­nity for telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions companies.

Is this not a defin­ing issue of this cam­paign? What hap­pened to sup­port­ing the Con­sti­tu­tion? This bill legal­izes the con­tin­ued use of unrea­son­able tac­tics that sub­vert Con­sti­tu­tional rights. Here are the open­ing lines from Obama’s state­ment sup­port­ing the Bill.

NOW

Given the threats we face? Sounds a lot like George Bush and his ratio­nal­iza­tions. This is a seri­ous moment for Mr Obama. Are we sup­posed to say this is ok? Trust him? I think not. I’m with Russ Feingold.

from Salon:
The ACLU specif­i­cally iden­ti­fies the ways in which this bill destroys mean­ing­ful lim­its on the President’s power to spy on our inter­na­tional calls and emails. Sen. Russ Fein­gold con­demned the bill on the ground that it “fails to pro­tect the pri­vacy of law-abiding Amer­i­cans at home” because “the gov­ern­ment can still sweep up and keep the inter­na­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tions of inno­cent Amer­i­cans in the U.S. with no con­nec­tion to sus­pected ter­ror­ists, with very few safe­guards to pro­tect against abuse of this power.” Rep. Rush Holt — who was actu­ally denied time to speak by bill-supporter Sil­vestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Cony­ers — con­demned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the “bad guys” in the very peo­ple who do the spying.

H.R. 6304, THE FISA AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2008

The ACLU rec­om­mends a no vote on H.R. 6304, which grants sweep­ing wire­tap­ping author­ity to the gov­ern­ment with lit­tle court over­sight and ensures the dis­missal of all pend­ing cases against the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­nies. Most importantly:

• H.R. 6304 per­mits the gov­ern­ment to con­duct mass, untar­geted sur­veil­lance of all com­mu­ni­ca­tions com­ing into and out of the United States, with­out any indi­vid­u­al­ized review, and with­out any find­ing of wrongdoing.

• H.R. 6304 per­mits only min­i­mal court over­sight. The For­eign Intel­li­gence Sur­veil­lance Court (FISA Court) only reviews gen­eral pro­ce­dures for tar­get­ing and min­i­miz­ing the use of infor­ma­tion that is col­lected. The court may not know who, what or where will actu­ally be tapped.

• H.R. 6304 con­tains a gen­eral ban on reverse tar­get­ing. How­ever, it lacks stronger lan­guage that was con­tained in prior House bills that included clear statu­tory direc­tives about when the gov­ern­ment should return to the FISA court and obtain an indi­vid­u­al­ized order if it wants to con­tinue lis­ten­ing to a US person’s communications.

• H.R.6304 con­tains an “exi­gent” cir­cum­stance loop­hole that thwarts the prior judi­cial review require­ment. The bill per­mits the gov­ern­ment to start a spy­ing pro­gram and wait to go to court for up to 7 days every time “intel­li­gence impor­tant to the national secu­rity of the US may be lost or not timely acquired.” By def­i­n­i­tion, court appli­ca­tions take time and will delay the col­lec­tion of infor­ma­tion. It is highly unlikely there is a sit­u­a­tion where this excep­tion doesn’t swal­low the rule.

• H.R. 6304 fur­ther triv­i­al­izes court review by explic­itly per­mit­ting the gov­ern­ment to con­tinue sur­veil­lance pro­grams even if the appli­ca­tion is denied by the court. The gov­ern­ment has the author­ity to wire­tap through the entire appeals process, and then keep and use what­ever it gath­ered in the meantime.

• H.R. 6304 ensures the dis­missal of all cases pend­ing against the telecom­mu­ni­ca­tion com­pa­nies that facil­i­tated the war­rant­less wire­tap­ping pro­grams over the last 7 years. The test in the bill is not whether the gov­ern­ment cer­ti­fi­ca­tions were actu­ally legal – only whether they were issued. Because it is pub­lic knowl­edge that they were, all the cases seek­ing to find out what these com­pa­nies and the gov­ern­ment did with our com­mu­ni­ca­tions will be killed.

• Mem­bers of Con­gress not on Judi­ciary or Intel­li­gence Com­mit­tees are NOT guar­an­teed access to reports from the Attor­ney Gen­eral, Direc­tor of National Intel­li­gence, and Inspec­tor General.

There is no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for sup­port of this Bill.

Tags: FISA, Obama, pol­i­tics, Constitution