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FISA fix from House Democrats
Leading House Democrats believe they have crafted a way to give intelligence agencies more surveillance powers without stepping all over civil liberties.
House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Silvestre Reyes, D-Texas., introduced a new bill today that would restore oversight of domestic wiretapping by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
The bill seeks to appease the Bush administration by granting the attorney general or the director of national intelligence the authority to apply to the secret court to conduct surveillance of foreign targets or groups of targets for up to one year.
“This bill provides what the director of national intelligence and assistant attorney general for National Security told us they needed—a means to acquire information from telecommunications companies about physical threats to the nation in which the target is overseas,” Conyers said. “They testified that they do not want warrantless access to spy on American businesses, hospitals and libraries, so we are taking them at their word and making it crystal clear that a FISA court order is required to access Americans’ communications.”
But wait just a second, says Caroline Fredrickson, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’ s Washington Office.
As drafted, the Conyers-Reyes bill would still allow for the federal government to collect phone calls and e-mails from Americans without an “individual warrant,” Fredrickson said.
And that, Fredrickson said, goes smack against the Fourth Amendment, which requires individual warrants if Americans are involved.
So called “program warrants’ are equivalent to the “21st century version of King George’s heavy-handed intrusions on individual privacy,” Fredrickson said.
“We would not tolerate allowing government agents to sit in our living rooms recording our personal conversations,” Fredrickson said. “We should not permit it simply because the government now has the capacity to monitor remotely and without our knowledge.”
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