Bush Fights for Warrantless Love On The Telephone

pO157.

Posted to Legal on Tue Jan 29, 2008 at 06:58:40 AM EST (promoted by port1080). RSS.

Monday, Tuesday, three days and more
Pretty soon you don't have illegal wiretaps anymore
Friday, the sixth day, Saturday seems late
Don't know how much longer Bush/Cheney can wait.

The American Civil Liberties Union recently released a statement denouncing expected "Shenanigans"  in the Senate involving the Protect America Act which faces a sunset on February 1st. This law, which was passed in August of 2007, provides legality to the warrantless wiretapping program began by the National Security Administration and Bush administration in 2001. The aim of the program is to allow intelligence services to monitor suspected terrorists and criminals without needing to utilize the FISA court -- a panel of judges available on call in a non-adversarial manner to approve warrants for terrorism related requests. Since 1979 the court has accepted over 18,000 warrant requests and only rejected five.

The Protect America Act allows the government to monitor conversations and data transfers that they believe include a parties "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" and requires the Attorney General to report every 6 months the number of times the provisions were utilized as well as to self-report any violations of the law (surveillance of Americans inside the United States, etc).

The provisions of the renewal are also extremely controversial due to language giving telecommunications companies retroactive immunity against civil lawsuits for being a party to the violation of their customers civil rights. These companies currently face dozens of lawsuits for their support of the warrantless wiretapping program. This has been a key campaign plank for one failed Presidential Candidate who announced his continued opposition today,

I am vehemently opposed to that. I would utilize whatever vehicles are available to a senator here to stop that from becoming law with retroactive immunity in it.

Senator Bill Nelson (D-FL) argued that telecommunications companies should not need to face civil lawsuits for complying with governmental requests.

"At the end of the day we have to have the cooperation of the telecommunications companies, and they should not have the threat of a spurious lawsuits hanging over their heads."

Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) argues that additional civil liberties protections such as requiring a court to review surveillance requests are unhelpful in the fight against terrorists.

"This is unworkable, and would create untenable gaps in our intelligence coverage without significantly improving the privacy of Americans."

The bill appears likely to pass, given Senate Majority leader Harry Reid's statement that while he personally opposes the retroactive immunity and other portions of the bill he is allowing them to be used as a "starting point" for debate in the Senate, thus requiring at least 60 votes to get them removed -- something the few democrats who disagree with the bill say they cannot get. As of the time of this story's posting, however Republicans have not been able to get enough votes to close debate on the bill and move it to an up or down vote. Senate Democrats are proposing a short 30 day extension as a compromise, but President Bush has signaled he will veto any bill that does not offer a more permanent extension and immunity for telecom companies.

The House has already passed a bill without provisions for retroactive immunity and demands more oversight of the process. The two would need to be reconciled if the Senate passes a renewal bill. Perhaps the whole situation is immaterial since the government can't get it together enough to pay for the warrantless wiretaps in the first place.