[privacy] Washington Post Editorial: Blank Check to Spy

["Fergie" <fergdawg () netzero net>]

Via The Washington Post.

[snip]

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.

[snip]

More here:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/07/25/AR2006072501408.html

- ferg


--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg(at)netzero.net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/

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