[Infowarrior] - NSA Bill "Major Disaster, " Mainstream Civil Lib Group

[Richard Forno]

NSA Bill "Major Disaster," Mainstream Civil Lib Group
Posted by ryansingel at 12:07 PM PDT
http://blog.wired.com/27BStroke6/index.blog?entry_id=1556069

Center for Democracy and Technology's policy director Jim Dempsey, a
longtime expert on national security law who testified to the Judiciary
Committee on Senator Arlen Specter's NSA bill, described the bill's passage
out of committee a "major disaster."

Specter's bill was drafted in concert with the Vice President's office, and
Specter has championed the bill because the administration promised him that
it would submit its warrantless wiretapping program to a secret court for
review, though the bill makes that optional, and arguably makes the program
legal, due to changes to the law governing surveillance.

    What started out as Senator Specter wanting to rein in the president's
program has turned on its head and is now not just a legislative
ratification of the program, but an expansion of warrantless wiretapping of
Americans.

    It would allow the NSA to turn its vacuum cleaners on even domestic
phone calls and emails of citizens.

    And -- they do all of this in Alice-in-Wonderland fashion by defining
all kinds of categories of surveillance to be not surveillance.

    The bill is basically saying that any time you are targeting a
foreigner, even if you are collecting calls to us citizens, that's not
surveillance.

    And anytime you are targeting nobody, but scooping up vast quantities of
calls, that's not surveillance.

    This bill goes light years or miles beyond the Patriot Act.

    The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is such a complicated statute
and so much of the weight of it is borne by the definitions, that I'm not
sure the sponsors of these bills appreciate what they are doing.

    The people who drafted this bill knew what they were doing, and it's
been a very clever sell job.