What's In The Wheaties At The House Commissary?

First they create an independent ethics board, and rely on newest House member Bill Foster to cast the deciding vote in their favor. Then their entire membership of the Judiciary Committee, having reviewed Administration documents on their illegal wiretapping program, completely ruled out telecom immunity and made arrangements to bring their alternative bill to the floor tomorrow. This undercuts the "Mean Democrats aren't letting us vote to protect America, we're all going to die and it's their fault" rhetoric, and their bill is not only pretty strong on civil liberties but pretty ingenious from a tactical standpoint.

With regard to yesterday's FISA bill, more surprising than their defiance is their shrewdness. By including a provision that explicitly authorizes telecoms to submit to the court any exculpatory documents -- notwithstanding the assertion by the administration that those documents are subject to the "state secrets" privilege -- the House bill completely guts, in one fell swoop, the primary argument that, for months, has been made by telecoms and their allies as to why amnesty is necessary.

As Marcy Wheeler documented several months ago, the primary -- really the sole -- excuse given by the Senate Intelligence Committee as to why telecom amnesty was necessary was that the telecoms did nothing wrong but were being blocked by the administration from using the documents they have to prove it.

It's critical to emphasize ... that the telecoms already have immunity under existing statutes, even if they broke the law, as long as they obtained from the Attorney General certifications that the warrantless surveillance requests were legal. If the telecoms really did obtain those certifications -- and it's extremely unlikely that they did -- then all they ever had to do was just show them to the court and they would be immune. Their excuse up until now -- "we can't use the documents we have to defend ourselves because we aren't allowed to show them to the judge" -- is now completely eliminated by the House bill.

The Judiciary Committee statement really is a tour de force, and if we had a press interested in the rule of law instead of The Emperor's Club, it'd be front-page news. But the important thing here is that Administration bullying is coming up empty, House Democrats are making a reasoned and credible alternative course, and they are furthermore clearly trying to eliminate the scenario that has led us to a total national surveillance state:

I mean, when we warn about a "surveillance society," this is what we’re talking about. This is it, this is the ballgame. Mass data from a wide variety of sources – including the private sector – is being collected and scanned by a secretive military spy agency. This represents nothing less than a major change in American life – and unless stopped the consequences of this system for everybody will grow in magnitude along with the rivers of data that are collected about each of us – and that’s more and more every day.

The TIA program, you may recall, was a massive Pentagon plan (run by Admiral John Poindexter of Iran-Contra fame) to tap into as many databases containing personal information about Americans as possible (program materials listed "Financial, Education, Travel, Medical, Veterinary, Country Entry, Place/Event Entry, Transportation, Housing, Critical Resources, Government, Communications"). All that information would then be pulled together and scanned for "suspicious" patterns. Given the density of the "data trails" that we all create in our daily lives today and in the future, it was a recipe for the routine surveillance of Americans and their every move.

TIA was supposed to have been killed off by Congress in 2003 amid widespread objections to its sweeping Orwellian scope. There have been always been hints about a secret annex to the law that permitted some limited aspects of TIA to operate within the Pentagon’s black budget for intelligence and with respect to foreigners only. Now it appears that, like a vampire that can’t be killed except with a stake through its heart, TIA has arisen again from its coffin in full body with its voracious appetite for privacy of Americans and foreigners alike.

Congress needs to really look into the revelations from that Wall Street Journal report more closely. But for the moment, the House is doing the work of the people in rejecting telecom amnesty, which as we know is Bush amnesty, and refusing to give in to fear. There's a long way to go in this fight. The opposition effort could really collapse at any time and it wouldn't surprise a soul. But for now, the good behavior should be rewarded and given due credit.

P.S. If the government was truly, truly concerned about public safety and defeating radical terrorism, on no planet would they be engaged in this:

Be careful who you frag. Having eliminated all terrorism in the real world, the U.S. intelligence community is working to develop software that will detect violent extremists infiltrating World of Warcraft and other massive multiplayer games, according to a data-mining report from the Director of National Intelligence.

The Reynard project will begin by profiling online gaming behavior, then potentially move on to its ultimate goal of "automatically detecting suspicious behavior and actions in the virtual world."

This IS a joke, right? Right?