Fergie's Tech Blog

Washington Post Editorial: Blank Check to Spy

Via The Washington Post.

Today the Senate Judiciary Committee will hold a hearing on modernizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the 1978 law that regulates domestic wiretapping and searches. The hearing is an effort on the part of committee Chairman Arlen Specter to move along his very dangerous bill -- negotiated with the White House -- to put the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance program before the federal courts. In an op-ed in these pages Monday, Mr. Specter described his proposal as a compromise with President Bush to ensure judicial review of the NSA program, which he called "a festering sore on our body politic." Yet his legislation would essentially respond to this festering sore by shooting the patient.

No matter how adamantly Mr. Specter denies that his bill would give Congress's blessing to domestic spying outside of FISA's strictures, it does so explicitly and unambiguously. It adds the following language to a statute that now provides the sole legal means for the government to spy on Americans in national security cases: "Nothing in this Act shall be construed to limit the constitutional authority of the President to collect intelligence with respect to foreign powers and agents of foreign powers." Mr. Specter argues that the bill doesn't accept the president's assertions of unilateral power but merely acknowledges them. But this is incorrect.

posted by Fergie @ 7/26/2006 09:23:00 AM