The Coming National Surveillance State

Yesterday's Republican filibuster of the stimulus package had a second effect; it continued to hold up passage of any FISA bill to push Democrats up against the wall and raise the booga-booga factor to get them to submit to the will of Lord 24% George Bush.

Legislation to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act remained stalled in the Senate Tuesday, held hostage by a partisan clash over procedures for consideration of an unrelated economic stimulus package.

A frustrated Majority Leader Harry Reid , D-Nev., complained that Republicans were blocking his efforts to schedule votes on proposed amendments to the bill (S 2248). He questioned Minority Leader Mitch McConnell ’s commitment to the legislation, saying Republicans have declined to allow FISA to move forward.

“The Orwellian Bush administration has now slopped over into the Senate, and now the Republican leader is now becoming Orwellian himself,” Reid said. “They want to stall the FISA legislation as long as they can, and they’ve done a pretty good job, because they want this legislation to be completed at the last minute, to give the House and the Senate conferees little time to work on this.”

That lurch forward is still lurching, however, and yesterday we saw Ben Cardin's amendment to sunset the bill in 4 years instead of 5 go down to defeat, even though it had majority support in the chamber. Due to the pre-arranged rules, it needed 60 votes. It received 49 (to 46 no votes). And we'll keep seeing that, as every amendment to the bad Intelligence Committee bill, which includes amnesty for the phone companies, will be unable to make it over the bar set by Senate rules. As if to certify this, the President sent a little whiny note over to the Senate yesterday, warning that he would veto any effort to change the Intelligence Committee bill.

As emptywheel points out, the opposition to any and all amnesty amendments is a give, but particularly telling is the administration's focus on Feingold's amendments that limit the way the government uses this "foreign surveillance" to spy on Americans. None of these amendments (3979, 3913, 3915) would restrict collection of data of foreign persons--they each protect the privacy of people in the U.S. They are hellbent on spying on us. Emptywheel:

"We've been talking about this FISA stuff for almost a year now. All this time, the Administration has claimed that it was only interested in wiretapping foreign circuits that transited the US. But that's obviously just the start of what they insist on doing with this law.

They want to be able to spy on communications between the US and other countries without having to protect US person data through minimization or adequate targeting procedures. George Bush is basically trying to legalize his illegal spying program, all with the willing assistance of the US Congress."

It's really worse than that, and you have to look on this with a real sense of dread. Jay Rockefeller, in a series of statements on the floor of the Senate, is essentially advocating for the illegal spying of Americans, and worse, is intimating that drift nets will be legalized.

Rockefeller makes clear that the impending changes to the law aren't about making it easier for the National Security Agency to listen in on a particular terrorism suspect's phone calls. Instead, the changes are about letting the nation's spooks secretly and unilaterally install filters inside America's phone and internet infrastructure.
Rockefeller, the chief Democratic architect of the changes, explains:

"Unlike traditional [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] application orders which involve collection on one individual target, the new FISA provisions create a system of collection. The courts role in this system of collection is not to consider probable cause on individual targets but to ensure that procedures used to collect intelligence are adequate. The courts' determination of the adequacy of procedures therefore impacts all electronic communications gathered under the new mechanisms, even if it involves thousands of targets."

In short, the changes legalize Room 641A, the secret spying room inside AT&T's San Francisco internet switching center that was outed by former AT&T employee Mark Klein. That room sits at the center of a lawsuit against AT&T for its alleged illegal participation in the government's secret, warrantless spying program.

This bulk data collection by the nation's spy agencies would have almost no oversight and no checks. This is a surveillance state that these clowns are attempting to legalize, a manifestation of Big Brother.

Progressives are vowing to oppose any and all efforts at telecom immunity, but the other surveillance techniques in the bill are almost worse. And there is a deliberate attempt to give as little time as possible to their consideration.

This is disgusting.