FISA 2008 Amendments Weakened Surveillance Safeguards Led to NSA "Over Collection" Spying On Americans Orgy
It's seems a constant; an inevitable process: the deliberate myopia of Congress controlled by corporate lobbyists who funnel money into senators and representatives' coffers, like the telecoms in this case, passing bad legislation over the warnings of progressives and others who see the danger, which is destined to and does wreak havoc by making criminal, anti-constitutional, anti-rule of law behavior a given...it's almost tiring, it's so predictable.
The latest example is the recent NSA spying scandal as excellently explained in an ACLU press release: "The National Security Agency (NSA) has been intercepting Americans’ emails and phone calls in recent months to an extent that exceeded even the overbroad limits permitted under the controversial spying legislation passed last summer. According to the New York Times, the NSA’s “overcollection” of American’ communications has been “significant and systemic.”
"The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA) was passed last July despite opposition from the American Civil Liberties Union and other privacy advocates. It effectively legalized the secret warrantless surveillance program President Bush approved in late 2001, but it also gave the government new spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans' international communications. The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit immediately after Congress passed the law challenging its constitutionality. The lawsuit is still pending.
“ 'Congress was repeatedly warned that this type of abuse would be the obvious outcome of passing the FISA Amendments Act,' said Caroline Fredrickson, Director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. 'Congressional leadership promised after this law’s passage that it would be reexamined along with the Patriot Act. It’s time to fulfill that promise and restore the checks and balances of our surveillance system. Warrantless surveillance has no place in an America we can be proud of. These revelations make it clear that Congress must now make a commitment to rein in government surveillance.'
"The ACLU is urging Congress to form a select committee to investigate whether laws were broken in the Bush administration’s efforts to fight terrorism. A select committee with subpoena power would be able to review past and present national security laws and activities, restore the rule of law and help adopt fair standards for the future. Ideally, reform legislation adopted as a consequence of the Select Committee investigation - not unlike the reforms that resulted from the Church Committee - would help ensure that future administrations follow the law and respect individual rights, regardless of the party in power.
“ 'These revelations are as alarming as they are predictable,' said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. 'The FAA set virtually no limits on the government’s eavesdropping authority, but it appears that the NSA has disregarded even what minimal limits existed. The new law should have ensured that the government’s surveillance powers would be subject to meaningful judicial oversight. Instead the new law allowed the NSA to operate without the safeguards that the Constitution requires. The Bush administration argued that the law was necessary to protect national security, but in fact the law implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind. The law was ill-advised, and today’s report only underscores that the law should be struck down as unconstitutional.'
"The ACLU’s lawsuit argues that the FAA violates Americans' rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution. The law permits the government to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and email addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it's conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing. Plaintiffs in the ACLU’s case include journalists, attorneys and human rights organizations who count on confidentiality to perform their jobs. They include:
This is what happens on Capitol Hill, even when Congress is in Democratic control...compromise, that is, selling out to corporate lobbyists; pragmatism, that is, selling out the American people and carrying out the orders of corporate lobbyists; and politics, that is, creating awful legislation that ignores and screws the common good and constituional rights and rewards wealthy corporations.
Ironically and hypocritically, Senator Diane Feinstein (D-CA), head of the Senate Intelligence Committee, who championed the ex post fact protection of warrantless wiretapping in last year's FISA amendments, now is "concerned" about the NSA revelations.
Well, isn't that surprise!
Glenn Greenwald comments at Salon: "Don't worry: current Senate Intelligence Chair Dianne Feinstein -- who, after Jay Rockefeller, did as much as any Senator to cause a loosening of eavesdropping safeguards -- said today that she takes these revelations oh-so-very-seriously and vows to look into them. Maybe next we can have Goldman Sachs lead an investigation into the causes of the financial collapse and what the best solutions are (actually, we somewhat have that already). The U.S. Government is increasingly hard to satirize.
"In The New York Times last night, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau -- the reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize for informing the nation in 2005 that the NSA was illegally spying on Americans on the orders of George Bush, a revelation that produced no consequences other than the 2008 Democratic Congress' legalizing most of those activities and retroactively protecting the wrongdoers -- passed on leaked revelations of brand new NSA domestic spying abuses, ones enabled by the 2008 FISA law. The article reports that the spying abuses are "significant and systemic"; involve improper interception of "significant amounts" of the emails and telephone calls of Americans, including purely domestic communications; and that, under Bush (prior to the new FISA law), the NSA tried to eavesdrop with no warrants on a member of Congress traveling to the Middle East. The sources for the article report that "the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers."
"These widespread eavesdropping abuses enabled by the 2008 FISA bill -- a bill passed with the support of Barack Obama along with the entire top Democratic leadership in the House, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, and substantial numbers of Democratic Senators -- aren't a bug in that bill, but rather, were one of the central features of it. Everyone knew that the FISA bill which Congressional Democrats passed -- and which George Bush and Dick Cheney celebrated -- would enable these surveillance abuses. That was the purpose of the law: to gut the safeguards in place since the 1978 passage of FISA, destroy the crux of the oversight regime over executive surveillance of Americans, and enable and empower unchecked government spying activities. This was not an unintended and unforeseeable consequence of that bill. To the contrary, it was crystal clear that by gutting FISA's safeguards, the Democratic Congress was making these abuses inevitable.
"Opponents of this bill were warning that exactly these abuses would occur if the bill was passed..."Abolishing eavesdropping safeguards was the central purpose of the FISA bill. It was why Dick Cheney and Michael McConnell were demanding its passage...
"But key Democrats [and, needless to say, the GOP minority, which (other than Ron Paul) unanimously supported the bill] ran around spouting pure propaganda, telling the public that they were supporting this new FISA bill because it would safeguard and even enhance civil liberties protections.
"Here is what was said about the bill by the Democrats' House Majority Leader -- who, along with Dick Cheney and Jay Rockefeller, was the key force behind its passage: "In an interview with Politico on Monday, [Steny] Hoyer called the FISA legislation a 'significant victory' for the Democratic Party — one that neutralized an issue Republicans might have been able to use against Democrats in November while still, in his view, protecting the civil liberties of American citizens."
"Hoyer's claims were echoed immediately by Barack Obama when he announced that he, too, would support the FISA "revisions.""Worst of all, Obama surrogates -- such as Cass Sunstein, Greg Craig and Nancy Soderberg -- were dispatched to tell people with a straight face that the FISA-gutting billstrengthened civil liberties protections and improved eavesdropping oversight. Needless to say, hordes of trusting Obama supporters immediately seized on that blatantly false assertion ("the bill Obama supports strengthens oversight!") and began reciting it in defense of their candidate. Now, a mere nine months later, TheNew York Times reports that the bill enabled and caused massive abuses of the NSA's eavesdropping powers. Imagine that: if you gut even the minimal oversight provisions designed to check presidential eavesdropping abuses, abuses will not (as Democrats and Obama surrogates claimed) decrease, but will actually increase substantially. Who could have guessed?"
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