Watching FISA Fizzle

from the the-political-circus dept

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-CT) appears to be the blogosphere's favorite son this week, with calls for him to replace Harry Reid (D-NV) as Majority Leader in the wake of his successful attempt to block passage of the White House–approved version of reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. While perhaps most controversial for a provision granting retroactive immunity from civil suit to telecom providers who participated in the National Security Agency's program of extrajudicial wiretaps, the legislation was also loathed by civil libertarians for granting the Attorney General broad, minimally supervised power to eavesdrop on Americans' communications with foreign intelligence targets. Dodd, for his part, returns the love, thanking the netroots for making it all possible on—where else?—YouTube.

Reid, meanwhile, has said he'll move to extend the stopgap Protect America Act passed in August rather than attempt to reach a vote on a more permanent replacement in the brief time between the start of the next Senate session in mid-January and the law's scheduled sunset on February 1. This holds out at least some hope that the next serious overhaul of American intel law will, for once, not be rushed through Congress in a quasi-panic.

Major media reactions have been more or less predictable across the board, and yet I still managed to be a bit surprised by an utterly unsurprising Wall Street Journal editorial, just for the sheer chutzpah displayed in recycling talking points so far past their sell-by date:

FISA allows the government to tap communications outside the U.S. without judicial approval. But these days, many international calls pass through America en route from one international point to another. Unless Congress acts by February 1, when a temporary law expires, intelligence agents will be unable to monitor these calls without asking a judge for permission.
That may be fine with some Democrats, who have always been more comfortable treating terrorism as a law-enforcement problem rather than a real war. But it's a tough political sell to say that America should respect the "civil liberties" of al Qaeda terrorists overseas.
As I need not tell Techdirt readers, this is either clueless or disingenuous. First, and most obviously, because all of the proposed amendments to FISA allow surveillance of foreign-to-foreign traffic routed through U.S. switches, and none of them evince the slightest concern for "the 'civil liberties of al Qaeda terrorists overseas." Second (and only slightly less obviously if you're moderately familiar with FISA), because the now-familiar narrative about why reform is needed has been transparently bollocks from the get go. The probability that the FISA Court handed down a ruling simply applying a warrant requirement to domestically intercepted foreign wire traffic is, to a first approximation, zero. If you've got a few minutes and a healthy sense of Schadenfreude, watch the contortions this poor Congressional Research Service attorney goes through (pdf) trying to find some way some such implication could conceivably be read into the statute's language. Then contemplate that the administration does not appear to have sought an appeal of this putatively crippling ruling. We can't know the real substance of the Court's problems with the way wiretaps were being handled, but we can be relatively certain of two things: They are more complicated than has been publicly suggested, and they provided a convenient means of persuading a cowed Congress to loose the judicial fetters entirely.
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Filed Under: chris dodd, congress, domestic wiretapping, fisa, immunity, wiretapping


Reader Comments

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  1. identicon
    vin, 19 Dec 2007 @ 3:41pm

    um...what?

    yeah that made sense

    link to this | view in thread ]

  2. identicon
    Alfred E. Neuman, 19 Dec 2007 @ 4:12pm

    s/disingenous/disingenuous/

    there, fixed that

    link to this | view in thread ]

  3. identicon
    Sceptical Cynic, 19 Dec 2007 @ 4:31pm

    Whatever, dumbass

    link to this | view in thread ]

  4. identicon
    Confused, 19 Dec 2007 @ 6:12pm

    Huh?

    Could you translate that into English, Julian?

    I mean ... "simply applying a warrant requirement to domestically intercepted foreign wire traffic " is as unintelligible as the law itself ...

    link to this | view in thread ]

  5. identicon
    Julian Sanchez, 19 Dec 2007 @ 7:33pm

    Was it really that confusing? Ok, how about: "requiring that intelligence agencies obtain a FISA warrant in order to intercept purely foreign-to-foreign communications, when such interception is done at facilities within the United States"

    link to this | view in thread ]

  6. identicon
    Anonymous Coward, 20 Dec 2007 @ 6:48am

    yeah, ummm, not getting any better. Maybe you should go apply to write for the New Yorker.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  7. identicon
    Frank, 20 Dec 2007 @ 7:49am

    Sorry Julian

    Have to agree with the others. It's not the language in and of itself, but rather that your own stance on all this is completely lost in there. I can't tell if you're for or against loosening the wiretap rules.

    link to this | view in thread ]

  8. identicon
    Yamanin, 24 Dec 2007 @ 12:39am

    Wall St. Journal

    No reason to be surprised by the WSJ's stance -- while the Journal has excellent reporters, their editorials make the Moonie-owned Washington Times look positively moderate and reasonable, and that's even before Murdoch purchased the paper. Hopefully the firewall between the editorial and reportorial functions will hold, and the Journal won't be transformed into the Fox News Business Daily.

    link to this | view in thread ]


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