Eavesdropping Reforms Empower Spy Chief
By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer

Monday, August 6, 2007

(08-06) 16:41 PDT WASHINGTON (AP) --

For the first time in nearly four decades, a senior intelligence official — not a secretive federal court — will have a decisive voice in whether Americans' communications can be monitored when they talk to foreigners overseas.

The shift came over the weekend as Congress hustled through changes to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, known as FISA.

The bill provides new powers to the National Security Agency to monitor communications that enter the United States and involve foreigners who are the subjects of a national security investigation.

Apprehensive about what they were doing, Congress specified that the new provisions would expire after six months, unless renewed.

They would give National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell and Attorney General Alberto Gonzales joint authority to approve the monitoring of such calls and e-mails, rather than the 11-member Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

That means an intelligence official is now empowered to sort through the legalistic, secretive world of FISA, rather than a judge or the nation's highest law enforcement officer.

McConnell was added to the legal decision-making after lawmakers argued that the embattled attorney general shouldn't hold the power alone. The spy chief's experience is largely in military intelligence, not legal matters.

Civil liberties groups and some Democrats call the bill a vast expansion of government power. In the past several days, officials who work for McConnell, the Justice Department and the Republican congressional leadership have argued vehemently that that isn't so.

On Monday, White House spokeswoman Tony Fratto dismissed as "highly misleading" any suggestion that the changes broadly expanded the government's authority to eavesdrop on Americans' communications without court approval.

However, the law's wording — underscored by conversations with administration officials — shows the rules governing when and how Americans' calls and e-mails will be monitored have changed significantly.

Communications that can get caught up in intelligence collection require a spectrum of approvals, depending on the circumstances. Generally, such calls, e-mails, text messages and other electronic exchanges fall into three categories:

_ Purely foreign overseas communications. The NSA can monitor these calls and e-mails without any signoff from a judge or a senior government official.

_ Domestic conversations between two Americans. The Fourth Amendment's protection against unreasonable search and seizure requires that the government get approval from a court before eavesdropping on these exchanges.

_ Communications between an American and a foreigner, a more complex, gray area. If the American is the target of the investigation, then a court must approve the surveillance, the White House says. However, if the foreigner is the target, no court approval is necessary under the new law. Instead, Gonzales and McConnell will decide together whether to go ahead with the work.

It's this area — when an American is talking to a foreign suspect — where the Bush administration has acquired powers it didn't have before.

Under government regulations, agencies are supposed to minimize the collection, retention, and dissemination of any information about a U.S. citizen. Often that means names are blacked out, unless the identity is crucial to understanding the conversation.

Lisa Graves of the Center for National Security Studies, which advocates for civil liberties, said the new law will potentially allow the government to intercept millions of Americans' calls and e-mails without warrants — as long as the NSA and other authorities have a foreign suspect in their sights.

"This power that they have obtained is a dramatic expansion," she said.

The Bush administration also fixed an odd quirk of the surveillance law that it said had emerged with the rapid technological growth of the past two decades: The government had to get legal approval to listen in on foreign suspects who are located overseas but whose conversations cross into the extensive U.S. communications network, as millions of international calls and e-mails do each day.

While the law is in effect, that legal approval will no longer be required, officials acknowledged.

The power may last longer than some people expect, Graves noted, thanks to a little-noticed provision of the bill. While the law expires in February unless Congress acts to extend it, any surveillance orders that are in place when it sunsets can last up to a full year, she said.

Without a repeal, lawmakers "weren't just giving them the power for six months. They were giving it to them for the rest of the administration," Graves said.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/08/06/national/w150619D10.DTL

the House passed a bill which gave the White House that authority but no more - no authority to spy on Americans without a warrant.

if you are referring to friday night's vote on hr.3356. that's not what happened. it came to the floor under a suspension of the rules, which requires a 2/3 vote to pass. so while the vote was 218 - 207 in favor, the bill failed. and while this bill still had it's problems, it was far, far superior to what bush demanded.

then saturday night, the house voted on the administration bill, s.1972, under a rule which allowed for passage with a simple majority. it passed 227 - 183.

several commenters over at fdl are working to reconstruct the details of the parlimentary maneuvers used. pow wow will probably write a summary today, once we find out if the house rules committee met on saturday. i will post a link here when that happens.

i spent almost all of friday night and saturday glued to c-span, watching events on the house floor. a very frustrating experience.

to be movement progressives. While having a Democratic majority is nice, it is not the same thing as having a progressive majority. Take the list of people who voted against that, that is more or less the largest progressive caucus you can count on with the threats to cut off pork that were made to the TORPS (That Other Republican Party, the 41 who voted for this).

This means that we are currently around 175. We need to flip 40 more seats to being progressives before we can move the key items of our agenda, including universal health care, restoration of constitutional liberties, rebuilding America and ending our carbon dependency. Now think on something, if the elections were held among people under 40, we'd be there already.

This means we have to keep the converts won, and continue to make new ones, both among the young and among older people seeing the light.

Progress, it is the only way to get to the future.

1. Using a little patented "Abu Gonzales legal reasoning," any email or electronic communication can be interpreted as "foreign," because of the nature of the intertubes. Your packets go all over the globe.
2a. Do you really believe that given their creative and colorful "respect" for the law, their interpretation of this bill will fall on the side of the Constitution? Or, when has Bush et al ever shown the slightest hesistation to break a law when they want to, for who has presumed to stop them?
2b. I'm tired of being Charlie Brown/Lucy with the football re: the Dems. Six months from now they'll pass this crap, probably with enhanced powers for the executive, permanently.

...for lying in the run-up to the Iraq invasion, Bush has perfected his technique. He tells the lies only to the House & Senate Intelligence Committees which are, of course, sworn to such dire levels of Addington devised secrecy rules that expressing skepticism or asking impertinent questions lands you in Gitmo. When other Dems see the committee members looking ashen and terrified, they think the threat must be serious. Which it is, but it's a completely different threat.

Evidence from reliable sources suggests that spying on American citizens has and continues to exceed the parameters allowed by law. Democrats, perhaps unwittingly, just became co-conspirators. Once compromised, they'll be less likely to raise hell in the future.

I've said it before and I say it again. Every phone call, every stroke on a computer in the United States of America is subject to surveillance without warrant, probable cause or judge's order.

Being against war is now a crime in the eyes of those in power.

I did inhale.

Sit down and read the bill. There are some real nuggets that leave you scratching your head. Here's one:

`(c) If the court concludes that the determination is not clearly erroneous, it shall enter an order approving the continued use of such procedures. If the court concludes that the determination is clearly erroneous, it shall issue an order directing the Government to submit new procedures within 30 days or cease any acquisitions under section 105B that are implicated by the court's order.

Nowhere does the bill state what's to be done with the erroneously-acquired intelligence. As in "Oh, let's do it anyway; if the court gives a thumbs-down, we've already got what we want."

Any use of this bill that does not provide for destruction of erroneously-obtained information is a joke. Intelligence is power, as J. Edgar Hoover demonstrated. Just because ill-gotten intelligence can't be used in criminal proceeding means nothing. Blackmail is always a possibility.

Further, there are no criminal penalties for abuse of this law. Why not? Where are the provisions for criminal prosecution for "leaking" or otherwise abusing information obtained under this statute?

Which, most people agree, provided for a bill far less intrusive and with more oversight than the POS that "President Bush" got through. Odds are that - yet again - we have the OVP and Bigtime all over this, as the Gellman-Becker series last month in the WaPo make clear, Cheney pressed for warrantless surveillance early after 9-11, and it's been his baby ever since.
And, why did Congress allow a bill allegedly aimed at "terrorists" to in fact include all "foreign intelligence matters" as material fit for warrantless surveillance? If I (living in the States) email someone running a website out of Beirut that is virulently opposed to the Siniora regime in order to congratulate him on a piece he wrote, it appears likely that I may become "a person of interest" to the NSA in time. I may even stand accused of "intimidating the Lebanese government" and risk prosecution under a recent Executive Order enjoining such actions. Or, at the very least, be hauled out of a boarding line on a domestic or international flight for "additional enquiries regarding security issues", or something to that effect. Paranoic...well, with "oversight" left with Abu Gonzo and Mike McConnell, wouldn't YOU be?