Bush wants permanent warrantless wiretap law
In a testimony before Congress on Thursday, J. Michael McConnell, director
of national intelligence, said public discussion of wiretapping policies
costs American lives.
By Tom A. Peter
from the September 22, 2007 edition
Politicians are once again debating the legality of the controversial
"Protect America Act," which amended the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance
Act (FISA) to allow for warrantless wiretapping. The law's Feb. 1, 2008
expiration date is approaching. President George Bush and his supporters
are pushing to make the law permanent. Meanwhile, opponents are raising
familiar concerns about the protection of civil liberties. On Thursday, J.
Michael McConnell, director of national intelligence, testified before
Congress that not only was the law a necessity, but that public debate
about it will cost American lives by exposing American surveillance
methods to the nation's enemies. Opponents in Congress were critical of
Mr. McConnell's remarks.
On Wednesday, Bush visited the National Security Agency and called for
support to make the Protect America Act a permanent law, reports the
E-Commerce Times. The temporary act was rushed into law last month and
allows US intelligence agencies to monitor phone conversations between US
citizens calling suspected terrorists overseas.
"The threat from Al-Qaeda is not going to expire in 135 days," Bush
warned during a Wednesday visit to the National Security Agency (NSA) in
Fort Meade, Md.
"Unless the FISA reforms in the act are made permanent, our national
security professionals will lose critical tools they need to protect our
country," he said. "Without these tools, it'll be harder to figure out
what our enemies are doing to train, recruit and infiltrate operatives in
our country. Without these tools our country will be much more vulnerable
to attack."
During his testimony to congress McConnell told representatives that
"intelligence business is conducted in secret," and that public
examination of these laws had compromised their effectiveness by exposing
their inner-workings, reports the Los Angeles Times.
"It's conducted in secret for a reason," McConnell told the House
Intelligence Committee. "You compromise sources and methods, and what this
debate has allowed those who wish us harm to do is to understand
significantly more about how we were targeting their communications."
Asked by Rep. Anna G. Eshoo (D-Calif.) if he thought that congressional
questioning of the administration's intelligence program would lead to the
killing of Americans, McConnell said, "Yes, ma'am, I do."
Eshoo called his assessment "a stretch."
Democrats also expressed that they want to give the administration the
necessary tools to monitor foreign targets, they also want to ensure that
checks and balances are maintained, reports the Congressional Quarterly.
They also expressed particular concern about the portion of the law that
allows for electronic surveillance of foreign terror suspects that results
in warrantless wiretapping of US citizens within the country.
Panel Republicans and McConnell then tried to turn the tables on
Democrats. They highlighted a case where they said spying restrictions in
place prior to passage of the temporary six-month legislation had delayed
for 12 hours an attempt to rescue U.S. soldiers captured by insurgents in
Iraq.
The tense hearing demonstrated the frayed relations between
congressional Democrats and McConnell going into the high-stakes
negotiations about permanent changes to the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act (FISA, PL 95-511).
Responding to McConnell's anecdote about the 12-hour delay, Rep. Silvestre
Reyes (D- Texas) said that it is "unclear if the new law would help,"
reports the Scripps Howard Foundation Wire. McConnell alleges that recent
changes in telecommunications make it necessary to obtain more warrants
than in the past.
"It gets back to the bureaucracy and the failure to recognize that
American lives are at stake," he said. "I don't want to leave the
perception that people were standing around because of the FISA."
A warrant had to be obtained to listen to Iraqi communications because
they were being routed through communication systems in the United States,
making the Fourth Amendment applicable, McConnell said.
In a press release, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) contended
that many of the reasons being used to justify the need for the
warrantless wiretapping law are mere myths. The ACLU attacked two key
justifications, among others, for warrantless wiretapping: that American
will not be affected by the law and that FISA needed to be expanded
because of new technologies. The ACLU also challenged McConnell's
contention that without the law, bureaucracy made the wiretapping process
ineffectually slow.
Myth: McConnell said that it takes 200 "man" hours to get a court order
to access a telephone number.
Reality: The math, courtesy of Wired.com. "In 2006, the government filed
2,181 such applications with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance court.
The court approved 2,176 2006 FISA Warrant Applications. That means
government employees spent 436,200 hours writing out foreign intelligence
wiretaps in 2006. That's 53,275 workdays." The numbers have been greatly
exaggerated. Also, in a June 2007 article in the Washington Post, Royce C.
Lamberth, the presiding judge of FISC on 9-11 said he approved FISA
warrants in minutes with only an oral briefing.
Even if it is merely a resource issue, there were and are bipartisan
bills that would streamline the application process and grant more
resources.
Besides, there is no "too-much-paperwork" exception to the Fourth
Amendment.
Under the new law, private telecommunications firms that worked with the
government to enable wiretapping and other surveillance methods are freed
from any legal liability, reports CNET. Bush hopes to make this law a
retroactive policy.
"It's particularly important for Congress to provide meaningful
liability protection to those companies now facing multibillion-dollar
lawsuits only because they are believed to have assisted in efforts to
defend our nation, following the 9/11 attacks," Bush said.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which has sued AT&T over its
allegedly illegal cooperation with the government, says references to the
crippling liability posed by such suits suggest that the scope of the
wiretapping is "massive."
"The statutory penalties for warrantless wiretapping are relatively
small per person--even if AT&T was ordered to pay the maximum penalty, a
few hundred illegal wiretaps would amount to less than a rounding error in
the phone company's quarterly statements," EFF attorney Kurt Opsahl wrote
in a recent blog entry. "If the NSA was truly limiting its spying to
suspected terrorists, the potential liability would be like an annoying
gnat on an elephant. So why are the companies so worried?"
http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0921/p99s01-duts.html
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