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More than two and a half years after the disclosure of President’s Bush’s domestic eavesdropping program set off a furious national debate, the Senate gave final approval on Wednesday afternoon to broadening the government’s spy powers and providing legal immunity for the phone companies that took part in the wiretapping program. Read the entire article.
The bill to correct provisions in the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to reflect modern realities and the needs of the War on Terror passed with a super-majority in the Senate. (For more explanation of the changes, see here). The bill had been tabled for months by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi who refused to allow it to come to a vote. The bill as passed contain telecom immunity provisions previously the subject of an effort by Barack Obama to have stripped from the bill. Today, he voted for the bill with the telecom provisions intact. What changed between his prior vote and today? Certainly no relevant facts changed. All that changed was the weighing of the expediencies by the chameleon candidate.
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This from the NYT:
The plan, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, marked one of Mr. Bush’s most hard-won legislative victories in a Democratic-led Congress where he has had little success of late. And it represented a stinging defeat for opponents on the left who had urged Democratic leaders to stand firm against the White House after a months-long impasse.
. . . Supporters of the plan, which revised the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, said that the final vote reflected both political reality and legal practicality. Wiretapping orders approved by a secret court under the previous version of the surveillance law were set to begin expiring in August unless Congress acted, and many Democrats were wary of going into their political convention in Denver next month with the issue hanging over them—handing the Republicans a potent political weapon.
So instead, Congress approved what amounted to the biggest restructuring of federal surveillance law in 30 years, giving the government more latitude to eavesdrop on targets abroad and at home who are suspected of links to terrorism.
The issue put Senator Barack Obama of Illinois, the presumptive Democratic nominee, in a particularly precarious spot. After long opposing the idea of immunity for the phone companies in the wiretapping operation, he voted for the plan on Wednesday. His reversal last month angered many of his most ardent supporters, who organized an unsuccessful drive to get him to reverse his position once again. And it came to symbolize what civil liberties advocates saw as “capitulation” by Democratic leaders to political pressure from the White House in an election year.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York, who was Mr. Obama’s rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, voted against the bill.
The surveillance plan, which Mr. Bush is expected to sign into law quickly, was the product of months of negotiations between the White House and Democratic and Republican leaders, earning the grudging support of some key Democrats.
Senator John D. Rockefeller IV, the West Virginia Democrat who leads the intelligence committee and helped broker the deal, said modernizing the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was essential to protecting national security and giving intelligence officials the technology tools they need to deter another terrorist strike.
. . . The key stumbling block in the congressional negotiations was the insistence by the White House that any legislation include legal immunity for the phone companies that took part in the wiretapping program. The program itself ended in January 2007, when the White House agreed to bring it under the auspices of the special court set up by the earlier surveillance law, known as the F.I.S.A. court. Still, more than 40 lawsuits continued churning through federal courts, charging AT&T, Verizon and other major carriers with breaking the law and violating their customers’ privacy by agreeing to the White House’s requests to conduct wiretaps without a valid court order.
The deal approved on Wednesday, which passed the House on June 20, effectively ends those lawsuits. It includes a narrow review by a district court to determine whether in fact the companies being sued received formal requests or directives from the administration to take part in the program. The administration has already acknowledged that those directives exist. Once such a finding is made, the lawsuits “shall be promptly dismissed,” the bill says. Republican leaders say they regard the process as a formality in ensuring that the phone carriers are protected from any legal liability over their participation.
. . . The legislation also expands the government’s power to invoke emergency wiretapping procedures. While the National Security Agency would be allowed to seek court orders for broad groups of foreign targets, the law creates a new, 7-day period for targeting foreigners without a court order in “exigent” circumstances if government officials assert that important national security information would be lost otherwise. The law also expands from three to seven days the period in which the government can conduct emergency wiretaps without a court on Americans if the attorney general certifies that there is probable cause to believe the target is linked to terrorism.
Democrats pointed to some concessions they had won from the White House in the lengthy negotiations. The final bill includes a reaffirmation that the surveillance law is the “exclusive” means of conducting intelligence wiretaps — a provision that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats insisted would prevent Mr. Bush or any future president from evading court scrutiny in the way that the N.S.A. program did.
The measure will also require reviews by the inspectors general from several agencies to determine how the program was operated. Democrats said that the reviews should provide accountability that had been missing from the debate over the wiretaps.
Showing posts with label immunity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label immunity. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 9, 2008
The Senate - & The Chameleon Candidate - Finally Act
Sunday, March 16, 2008
Real Prostitution
I posted here on the intersection between the relatively benign solicitation of prostitution by "Client #9," Eliot Spitzer and the much more malignant variety practiced by Nancy Pelosi and the House Democrats involving FISA:
Spitzer got in bed with a prostitute and paid with his money. Our House Democratic leadership are far worse. They are in bed with trial lawyers and they are paying them with our money - and degrading our national security in the process.
This cartoon identifies Client #10.
Real prostitution . . . it is not a victimless crime.
(H/T Powerline)
Thursday, March 13, 2008
Spitzer, FISA And Our National Priorities
Spitzer got in bed with a prostitute and paid with his money. Our House Democratic leadership are far worse. They are in bed with trial lawyers and they are paying them with our money - and degrading our national security in the process.
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The telecommunications industry cooperated with the requests of our intelligence agencies in the wake of 9-11. For their trouble, they received no money. Instead, they have been served with class action lawsuits asking for $40 billion in damages. What makes this matter worse is that our intelligence agencies must, in any case, work closely with our telecommunications industry in order to effectively pursue intelligence. It goes without saying that such cooperation will not come willingly if the industry must pay out $40 billion. And our national intelligence leadership are adamant that such cooperation is necessary.
And let's be realistic about this. The costs of litigation are not simply eaten by a corporation. They are a business cost and, ultimately, they get paid by every one of us that uses those services. Meanwhile, in class action law suits, the only people that get any substantive money are the lawyers.
So what do you think of elected representatives who would screw our intelligence collection capabilities and screw we, the consumers, in order to pay one of their discrete special interests. Give me Spitzer any day. At least he only screwed a prostitute and paid for it with his own money. What adds insult to injury is that there is sufficient bipartisan support in both the Senate and the House to pass the FISA reform bill to return our intelligence collection capabilities to what they should be and to grant immunity to the telecom entities that cooperated with our intelligence agencies.
Read the whole sordid story here. Then if you want to read something more family oriented and wholesome, you can go back to reading about Spitzer.
Saturday, March 8, 2008
Obama's Intelligence Advisor Calls Obama Wrong On FISA
In a new interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position opposing retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies being sued for cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic surveillance program. Read the entire article. This has not been a good week for Obama. Yesterday was Susan Rice of Obama's foreign policy team asserting that he was unprepared to "answer the phone at 3 a.m." And the day before that was a NAFTA moment as his other adviser Samantha Power in what can only be described as a brutal BBC interview about Obama and his foreign policies, said Obama really didn't intend to withdraw from Iraq and had no plan in place to do so.
Obama's intelligence advisor has gone public, stating that Obama is wrong for voting against immunity for telecommunications companies that voluntarilly assisted the government to collect intelligence after 9-11.
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You can find the background on FISA and Obama's vote to strip out the telecom immunity provision here. This yesterday from The Blotter at ABC News:
"I do believe strongly that [telecoms] should be granted that immunity," former CIA official John Brennan told National Journal reporter Shane Harris in the interview. "They were told to [cooperate] by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context."
"I know people are concerned about that, but I do believe that's the right thing to do," added Brennan, who is an intelligence and foreign policy adviser to Obama.
. . . Before leaving government to join the private sector, Brennan was the head of the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC), a joint office operated by the CIA, FBI and other government agencies.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
The Protect America Act & Obama
The intelligence community cannot go it alone. Those in the private sector who stand by us in times of national security emergencies deserve thanks, not lawsuits. I share the view of the Senate Intelligence Committee, which, after a year of study, concluded that “without retroactive immunity, the private sector might be unwilling to cooperate with lawful government requests in the future,” . . . There is bi-partisan support in the Senate for the Protect America Act, including in it the grant of retroactive immunity. The bill, which has been under consideration for months, passed the Senate yesterday, with 17 Democrats joining with Republicans in a 68-29 vote. The Senate also voted down an amendment submitted by Senator Dodd and supported by Obama that would have stripped the immunity provision. Now and then sanity prevails, even in Washington. So it did yesterday as the Senate passed a warrantless wiretap bill for overseas terrorists while killing most of the Lilliputian attempts to tie down our war fighters. Read the entire article. The only possible motivations I can see to contest this legislation are to satisfy the hard left ACLU wing who seem to believe the war on terror is a figment of the imagination and the ABA who see a gold mine in suing the telecommunications companies for a vioation of privacy. Obama will probably not admit to those motivations, but he stands firmly in that camp. And once again, the actions of the man who would "reach across the divide" and "unite all Americans" speak far louder than his words.
A major piece of anti-terror legislation was passed by the Senate with large bi-partisan support. One of the people voting against it was Barack Obama.
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There is legislation before Congress to correct provisions in FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA, a law originally passed in 1978 in the era before modern communications, today produces the anomaly of requiring warrants for our intelligence personnel to spy on communications between two foreign parties, both on foreign soil. This anamoly was corrected with passage of the Protect America Act, but that had a sunset provision which ran out some time ago. The legislation before Congress would make permanent this correction to FISA and it includes a grant of immunity to those private companies that assissted in intelligence collection in the wake of 9-11 and at the request of the government.
On this latter issue, our nation's spy Chief, Mike McConnell, wrote in December:
The WSJ comments in an Op-Ed today:
"We lost every single battle we had on this bill," conceded Chris Dodd, which ought to tell the Connecticut Senator something about the logic of what he was proposing. His own amendment -- to deny immunity from lawsuits to telecom companies that cooperated with the government after 9/11 -- didn't even get a third of the Senate. It lost 67-31, though notably among the 31 was possible Democratic Presidential nominee Barack Obama. (Hillary Clinton was absent, while John McCain voted in favor.)
It says something about his national security world view, or his callowness, that Mr. Obama would vote to punish private companies that even the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee said had "acted in good faith." Had Senator Obama prevailed, a President Obama might well have been told "no way" when he asked private Americans to help his Administration fight terrorists. Mr. Obama also voted against the overall bill, putting him in MoveOn.org territory.
. . . This is a fight Senator McCain should want to have right up through Election Day, with Democrats having to explain why they want to hamstring the best weapon -- real-time surveillance -- we have against al Qaeda.
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