The Bush Administration has been pushing hard for changes to the nation's eavesdropping laws, despite the ongoing controversy over the its decision to secretly bypass that law with its warrantless wiretapping and data-mining of Americans' phone calls and internet usage. While Democrats originally seemed to have been swayed by Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell's arguments that the laws are too complicated, the House Intelligence Committee canceled today's planned hearing on changes to the law.
That means the Administration-backed changes to the nation's spying laws won't be acted on until after the August recess, according to The Hill.
What do McConnell and the Administration want?
They want a simplification of the definition of surveillance. Now, if the NSA is listening in on a foreign-to-foreign call and hears that call as it passes through the United States, the NSA needs to get a warrant under the current law. They argue, persuasively, that it too burdensome a standard to spy on foreigners. They argue, unpersuasively, that the nation's spying laws are completely outdated – in fact they been constantly loosened, most notably in the Patriot Act and the Patriot Act reauthorization. The reason they haven't been updated in the way the Administration now wants is because they didn't want to tell Congress or the American people about how the government had embedded itself into the nation's communication networks.
But Democrats have balked at the Administration's push to retroactively free the nation's telecoms (and in turn, its own behavior) from the lawsuits targeted at the companies for participating in the program. The most recent proposal from McConnell seemed to have removed the provision, but then arguably sneaked it back in. The bill (.pdf) would have given the Attorney General the right to order third parties to help with the nation's spying without fear of being sued in the future. Then at the very end of the bill, the current wiretapping program got grandfathered in, and presumably the companies involved in that program would also have been immunized.
Additionally, the proposed bill would have changed the nation's spying rules so that American citizens could be spied on overseas without restriction (or even when the government thinks you might be overseas_.
Currently, Americans enjoy their Constitutional rights regardless of the terra firma from which they call or text message. If the NSA gets your communications and they then suspect you are American, they have to black it out.
And finally the proposed bill largely hews to the troublesome distinction highlighted by David Kris,a former Administration lawyer, who notes that the administration is attempting to define surveillance as only activities that are targeted at a "specific, known" person. Dragnet surveillance, data-mining, or computerized evaluation of Americans' emails or phone calls: not surveillance.
Photo: Mellowbox
