Legal News

Senate Gives Proxy Vote for Bush Wiretapping Program

By Dan Slater

How to balance the civil liberties of Americans against the need to protect the country against terrorism? It’s the kind of thing we ask ourselves when watching “24.” But lately, the same polarizing question has recaptured center-stage in the Senate.

Yesterday, in a 68 to 29 Senate vote, lawmakers pushed the teeter-totter toward protection as they approved a measure that, according to reports here and here, amounts to a proxy vote in support of the Bush administration’s wiretapping program. The bill reauthorizes a law that would give government greater powers to eavesdrop in terrorism cases without obtaining court warrants, and approves immunity from lawsuits for telecoms that cooperated with the government in domestic spying following the Sept. 11 attacks.

According to the WaPo, the bills revise the 30-year-old Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which established a secret court to issue warrants for domestic spying on terrorism suspects. The National Security Agency, however, bypassed the court for years as it obtained information from telecommunication companies, until media reports revealed the arrangement.

Among other changes, the Senate also voted to expand the government’s authority to intercept — without a court order — the phone calls and e-mails of people in the United States communicating with others overseas. U.S. intelligence agencies previously had broad leeway to monitor the communications of foreign terrorism suspects but needed warrants to monitor calls intercepted in the United States, regardless of where they originated.

“This is the right way to go, in terms of the security of the nation,” said Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV (D-W.Va.), chairman of the intelligence committee, which wrote the Senate bill.

“This is a dramatic restructuring” of surveillance law, said Michael Sussmann, a former DOJ intelligence lawyer who represents telecoms. “And the thing that’s so dramatic about this is that you’ve removed the court review. There may be some checks after the fact, but the administration is picking the targets.”

Full post as published by Law Blog - WSJ.com on February 13, 2008 (boomark / email).