Humbled, I

Welcome Glenn Greenwald fans, and a big thanks to him for linking to my post from a couple days ago which compiled a series of Glenn Reynolds quotes from the immediate aftermath of September 11th and showed he was fairly concerned about civil liberties and warrantless spying THEN.

Glenn points out that the bill to which Reynolds was opposed back then was FAR less intrusive in terms of granting surveillance power to the federal government than Arlen Specter's White-House approved bill which passed the Judiciary Committee yesterday. It is incumbent upon us in the reality-based community to call outthis rank hypocrisy when we see it, but also to make sure the principles of American democracy, the separation of powers, and the Bill of Rights (particularly the Fourth Amendment) are upheld by not allowing this pernicious legislation to go forward. This New York Times story is completely frustrating. There is a competing bill proposed by Senator Feinstein that is completely reasonable, which would:

• Re-state that FISA is the exclusive means by which our government can conduct electronic surveillance of U.S. persons on U.S. soil for foreign intelligence purposes;

• Prohibit the use of federal funds for any future domestic electronic surveillance that does not fully comply with the law; and

• Expressly state that there is no such thing as an “implied” repeal of FISA laws. In other words, no future bill can be interpreted as authorizing an exemption from FISA unless it expressly makes an exception.

It also increases the period the NSA can surveil without a warrant from 72 hours to 7 days, streamlines the warrant process, and allows immediate warrantless eavesdropping without the AG's approval. So everything the White House has been saying about FISA, all the negatives to it, are fixed in the Feinstein-Specter bill, while still maintaining that FISA is the only way you can wiretap and eavesdrop. It's a completely reasonable compromise that maintains civil liberties while allowing the tools necessary to surveil terrorists. To quote Greenwald:

Thus, there is only one possible reason to oppose that bill -- namely, because what the President really wants is to eavesdrop on Americans in secret and with no judicial oversight. That is what the debate is about, not about whether the President can eavesdrop on terrorists. That is an easy argument to make, as Sen. Feinstein's own Release demonstrates, and as Sen. Leahy demonstrated with his defense of that legislation in David Stout's NYT article yesterday (Leahy: Feinstein-Specter bill "ensure(s) that the U.S. intelligence community can continue to operate and protect the nation with the necessary F.I.S.A. court oversight").

I often go to Greenwald for all of these issues, I actually just (finally) finished his book yesterday, and I'm completely humbled that he came to me to make a point.

Humbled.