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Obama Supports Revised FISA Bill Today
2008-07-09 20:09:00 Upsetting Presumptive Republican Presidential Nominee Senator John McCain, who has to reach for the tired "flip-flop" strategy, Senator and Presumptive Democratic Presidential Nominee Barack Obama backed the passage of "FISA", The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, in the Senate today.Developing story.
Time Running Out On FISA
2008-07-08 17:31:00 The New York Times thus sayeth the following today...Congress has been far too compliant as President Bush undermined the Bill of Rights and the balance of powers. It now has a chance to undo some of that damage ? if it has the courage and good sense to stand up to the White House and for the Constitution.The Senate should reject a bill this week that would needlessly expand the government?s ability to spy on Americans and ensure that the country never learns the full extent of President Bush?s unlawful wiretapping.The bill dangerously weakens the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA. Adopted after the abuses of the Watergate and Vietnam eras, the law requires the government to get a warrant to intercept communications between anyone in this country and anyone outside it ? and show that it is investigating a foreign power, or the agent of a foreign power, that plans to harm America.The FISA law created a court to issue those warrants quickly, and over 30 years, the co...
Another Reason To Stand Tall on FISA
2008-07-03 16:02:00 Last November (as noted here) a federal appeals court ruled that a branch of the al-Haramain Islamic charity in Oregon could not use a call log that it had accidentally received from the Treasury Department as evidence in a lawsuit that it had been illegally wiretapped by our government (al-Haramain had been officially designated as a terrorist organization with links to al Qaeda). The ?state secrets? privilege was used as a Bushco defense at the time.Even though this ruling basically torpedoed the case of the charity against our government, al-Haramain challenged the so-called ?state secrets? privilege, and the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals asked U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker to determine the technical question of whether the state secrets privilege conflicts with FISA (noted here).Well today, we have our answer (here)?WASHINGTON ? A federal judge in California said Wednesday that the wiretapping law established by Congress was the ?exclusive? means for the president to ea...
Patrick Murphy Responds On FISA
2008-07-02 22:30:00 (Trying to clean out my ?in? bin in time for the 4th ? posting may be light to normal tomorrow before it trickles out just about entirely for the holiday weekend.)A friend of mine who shares a sense of outrage over Patrick?s recent FISA vote communicated with our congressman and received the following response (emphasis is from Patrick's response, not me)?Thank you for writing to me regarding amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). Please know how much I appreciate you sharing your views with me as I make the decisions that affect our community and our nation.My decision to support this legislation was not an easy one nor one I took lightly. This bill deals with the most serious of Congressional debates: How to protect our nation while preserving our constitutional rights. As you know, this bill resulted from a compromise and as with any compromise it is not perfect. Still, I decided to support the final legislation because I believe it strikes an appropriat...
Non-FISA Sunday Stuff
2008-06-22 22:33:00 Don't blame the people working at the Quickie Mart for the high price of gas, OK? Blame the Repugs who have fought funding for alternative energy (through H.R. 6049) and repeal of tax breaks for the Chevrons and ExxonMobils of the world, OK?...Update 6/23/08: I should have noted that I learned about H.R. 6049 from Tom Friedman's column today in the NYT....and The Onion catalogues another "failure of big government."
How A Real Democrat Stands Up On FISA
2008-06-22 09:04:00 I received the following correspondence from NY State U.S. House Rep John Hall last Friday evening...Dear Friends,Today the House of Representatives voted on H.R. 6304, the FISA Amendments Act of 2008.I have consistently supported modernizing the existing FISA law to give our intelligence community the tools it needs to identify and defeat terrorists in today's high-tech world, while at the same time preserving the freedoms and rights that define America. Three times I voted to pass legislation that would strengthen and modernize FISA and reaffirm the rule of law. Although today's bill made some improvements over previous attempts to update FISA, H.R. 6304 regrettably fell short of achieving that critical balance. The rule of law lies at the core of America's founding principles, and the language in this bill was too weak to ensure that any breach of our laws that may have occurred under the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping program will be fully addressed. It is wro...
Steny Chickens Out On FISA
2008-06-19 12:49:00 Echo chamber time ? here are the details from The Daily Kos.Call (202) 225-4131 and tell Hoyer to ?grow a pair? (and to communicate similar sentiments to Nancy, her number is 202-225-3130).Cowards.Update: Kudos to Leahy and Feingold here.Update 6/20/08: Yep, good one from Daily Kos diarist clammyc (h/t profmarcus).
WaPo Finds McCain?s FISA Flip-Flop
2008-05-30 00:26:00 Today’s Washington Post asks, For McCain, A Switch on Telecom Immunity?, shocked that McCain would flip-flop on a key issue. A top lawyer for Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign said telecommunications companies should be forced to explain their role in the Bush administration’s warrantless surveillance program as a condition for legal immunity for past wiretapping, a ...
FISA Fight: Mixed Signals from the Republicans
2008-05-13 21:15:00 Yesterday, Think Progress noted that one of the Republican’s pundit mouthpieces was floating the idea that they were going to attempt to get the Cheney/Rockefeller FISA bill past the House by attaching to a media shield bill that has strong bipartisan support. That effort would mean some procedural hurdles for the minority that hopefully leadership ...
FISA Fight: Where Exactly is Hoyer?
2008-05-02 02:23:00 The Hill today says “Blue Dogs on Hoyer’s FISA leash”: “Our hope is to pass the bipartisan Senate-passed FISA bill,” said Michael Steel, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio). Steel said that would happen if Republicans collected 218 signatures on the petition or came close enough to put pressure on Democratic leaders to act. Republicans will ...
FISA Fight: The Real Force Behind Jello Jay
2008-05-01 20:23:00 Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball report on the coordination between the telcos and the administration on amnesty. The Bush administration is refusing to disclose internal e-mails, letters and notes showing contacts with major telecommunications companies over how to persuade Congress to back a controversial surveillance bill, according to recently disclosed court documents. The existence of these ...
FISA Fight: Chilling Effect
2008-04-29 02:08:00 Add this to the growing list of reasons for Congress to not cave to the Bush administration on FISA and telco amnesty. Across the country, and especially here in Oregon, it seems, lawyers who represent suspects in terrorism-related investigations complain that their ability to do their jobs is being hindered by the suspicion that the government ...
No FISA? No Problem...
2008-04-24 23:29:00 As a follow-up and partial rebuttal to Dennis Lormel's post on the need for a new Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), I invite readers to review recent public statements and testimony by leading counter-terrorism officials in the Bush Administration. Review the public remarks by Deputy NSC Advisor for Combating Terrorism Juan Zarate yesterday at the Washington Institute ; review the testimony by Deputy Assistant Secretary for Terrorist Financing and Financial Crimes Daniel Glaser last week...(read more)
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA)…Out of Sight, Out of Mind
2008-04-24 21:55:00 In February, The House of Representatives failed to follow the Senates lead and vote to pass FISA legislation. Instead, they chose to allow this valuable intelligence collection tool to expire. In so doing, they made the intelligence collection capability of U.S. intelligence and law enforcement agencies more difficult and time consuming. In this context, time is the enemy of the government and the ally of terrorists. However you assess this situation, it is an impediment to national security. Terrorists...(read more)
FISA Fight: Republicans Losing Steam?
2008-04-12 01:54:00 THe Hill is reporting that House Republicans are looking for a new issue to obstruct: Minority Leader John Boehner (R-Ohio) is expected to announce Thursday that the House GOP floor emphasis will transition away from passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and earmark reform to “stop the tax hike.” House Republican leaders will make their case ...
FISA Fight: What happend to Jello Jay?
2008-04-06 01:29:00 Note: Eric Lichtblau will be joining us for a live blogging session tomorrow at 7:00 p.m. EDT, to talk about his book, NSA wiretapping, and whatever you want to ask him.–mcjoan In January of 2003, Senator Jay Rockefeller received his first briefing as a member of the Gang of Eight, the House and Senate leaders for ...
FISA Fight: Watch Mukasey Spin
2008-04-05 01:27:00 That Mukasey has been trying to exploit 9/11 in order to make a case for a bad FISA bill, including retractive amnesty, seems to be no longer in question. But now he, and his DoJ staff, seem to be digging an ever deeper hole. A brief recap: in remarks to the Commwealth Club last week, Mukasey ...
FISA: Conyers Says Mukasey?s Statement ?Very Disturbing?
2008-04-04 02:02:00 By- Suzie-Q @ 5:00 PM MST Conyers Questions Mukasey on FISA Claim By Paul Kiel - April 3, 2008, 5:45PM It’s gotten to be something of a pattern with administration figures of late: making sweeping claims about national security matters that do not stand up to scrutiny. Just Monday, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-WI) complained ...
By: Suzie-Q
Another day, another bit of proof: There?s no compromising on FISA.
2008-04-04 01:18:00 EFF notes (h/t to diarist skisb) a troubling footnote in the newly released John Yoo memo: … our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations. See Memorandum for Alberto R. Gonzales, Counsel to the President, and William J. Haynes, II, General Counsel, Department of Defense, from John C. ...
FISA Fight: Hoyer, proceed with caution
2008-04-02 19:16:00 Here’s a warning to Steny Hoyer, who continues to tout a possible compromise with the White House on FISA. While the White House has been supposedely reaching out to Dems, look at what the administration’s tag team of Mukasey and McConnell have been up to in the past week. We’ve seen Michael Mukasey’s despicable performance trying ...
Harman: She Had No Clue That ?The Administration Was Violating FISA?
2008-04-02 01:30:00 By- Suzie-Q @ 4:30 PM MST Harman: I Didn’t Know Surveillance Program Broke The Law By Paul Kiel - March 31, 2008, 6:03PM Earlier this month, we published an excerpt from Eric Lichtblau’s new book, Bush’s Law, in which Lichtblau wrote that when he’d approached Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA), then the ranking member of the ...
By: Suzie-Q
FISA Fight: Crocodile Tears
2008-03-30 00:06:00 Via Think Progress, Mukasey turned on the waterworks in a speech this week in San Francisco. The New York Sun reports that “Mukasey grimaced, swallowed hard, and seemed to tear up as he reflected on the weaknesses in America’s anti-terrorism strategy prior to the 2001 attacks. ‘We got three thousand. … We’ve got three thousand people ...
FISA Fight: When Blue Dogs lie
2008-03-20 23:32:00 It’s bad enough when a Democrat abandons the party to do something like support Bush and the Protect AT&T Act, but it’s really bad when he lies to his constituents about his vote and the legislation. To wit, an e-mail from Rep. Jim Cooper to Kossack jnhobbs. Here’s the full text of the e-mail: Dear [jnhobbs]: Thank you ...
FISA Fight: Stalemate?
2008-03-19 23:27:00 On the heels of the House victory in passing solid FISA legislation in defiance of Bush and AT&T, the picture for the legislation looks murky. If you can believe Politico (and sometimes that is a admittedly a stretch), there might not be further action on the bill this year. After months of debate on a controversial ...
Nancy Boyda (D-KS) Bravely Stands Up To Repub FISA Smears
2008-03-15 20:48:00 Nancy Boyda, a democratic Congresswoman from Kansas explains why she refused republicans calls for retroactive amnesty on illegal spying.1 Vote(s)
By: JeQQ it
FISA: Sounds good to me
2008-03-15 05:07:00 The Washington Post writes about House vote, “Ignoring Bush Demands.” But that’s not the good part. This is: The House’s action ensures that Bush will not receive surveillance legislation for several weeks. But some lawmakers from both parties said the impasse is now so deep that the issue may not be resolved until a new president ...
House Passes FISA Bill with No Immunity for Telecom Companies
2008-03-15 02:23:00 Today the House of the Representatives passed a Democratic bill that would set the rules for the surveillance of the emails and phone calls of people within the United States. The bill was passed among mostly partisan lines, 213-197. President Bush is certain to veto the bill because it does not provide the telecommunications companies with immunity against lawsuits stemming from their cooperation with the Bush administration?s secret domestic spying program which began after the September 11 terrorist attacks.
Rare Closed Session Changes Few Minds On FISA
2008-03-14 18:01:00 A rare closed session of the House to discuss electronic surveillance legislation failed to change many minds Thursday night, as many lawmakers emerged from the closed-door meeting entrenched in their positions on the controversial measure. While House Republicans ? who called for the session to discuss classified information related to the program ? said to grant retroactive immunity to telecom companies" href="http://www.cbsnews.com/st-ories/2008/03/14/politics/polit-ico/thecrypt/main3938347.shtml"->the meeting provided a clear picture of the terrorist threat and the need to grant retroactive immunity to telecom companies, many Democrats said they did not hear anything new. ?I did not hear any new information tonight that dissuades me from my very strong belief that the FISA bill House Democrats have produced ... is a reasonable, thoughtful, appropriate piece of legislation that will ensure that the intelligence community has all the tools it needs to protect our nation," said House...
H.R. 3773 - FISA Amendments Act of 2008, by US Rep. Ron Paul
2008-03-14 06:00:00 Mr Speaker, I rise in opposition to this latest attempt to undermine our personal liberties and violate the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution. This bill will allow the federal government to engage in the bulk collection of American citizens? communications. In effect, it means that any American may have his electronic communications monitored without a search warrant. As such, the bill clearly violates the Fourth Amendment read more
FISA fight: Leadership maneuvers you?ll actually like
2008-03-14 04:58:00 FISA fight got you down? Fed up with the Congressional Democratic leadership? Tired of watching Dems cave, and Republicans use the rules to run roughshod over them? Perhaps you’ve heard about how House Republicans have used the motion to recommit to trip up various versions of the FISA bill that don’t give retroactive amnesty to the ...
FISA Fight: House vote update
2008-03-14 04:58:00 The House is still wrangling with the budget bill, now on the Republican substitute. When they finish up work on the budget, the House will recess for a few hours for a sweep of the chamber in preparation for a secret session requested by minority whip Roy Blunt so that Republicans can “present information about ...
President Bush Discusses FISA VIDEO PODCAST
2008-03-14 00:46:00 President Bush Discusses FISA FULL STREAMING VIDEO South Lawn Fact Sheet: Protect America Alert: House Foreign Surveillance Bill Undermines Our National Security 9:20 A.M. EST. PODCAST OF THIS ARTICLETHE PRESIDENT: Last month House leaders declared that they needed 21 additional days to pass legislation giving our intelligence professionals the tools they need to protect America. That deadline passed last Saturday without any action from the House.This week House leaders are finally bringing legislation to the floor. Unfortunately, instead of holding a vote on the good bipartisan bill that passed the United States Senate, they introduced a partisan bill that would undermine America's security. This bill is unwise. The House leaders know that the Senate will not pass it. And even if the Senate did pass it, they know I will veto it.Yesterday the Attorney General and the Director of National Intelligence sent a leader [sic] to the Speaker explaining why the bill is dangerous to our na...
More Thursday FISA Follies
2008-03-13 16:19:00 This from Bloomberg News via the Philadelphia Inquirer today…WASHINGTON - House Democrats stuck by their refusal to end lawsuits against telecommunications companies for cooperating in the Bush administration's surveillance of terror suspects without court warrants.Atrios is so right…zombie lies never die.That is hardly the reason for the lawsuits. Check out this Daily Kos link once more to a post about journalist Peter Y. Sussman, who tells us…I am a plaintiff in one of two lawsuits brought by the American Civil Liberties Union against phone companies – in my case, AT&T – for illegally sharing private customer calling records with the federal government. My co-plaintiffs include other journalists and attorneys, psychiatrists, doctors, ministers and a former Republican member of Congress.…I and my fellow plaintiffs don't stand to win any money through our lawsuit, much less billions of dollars, but we do hope to assure governmental accountability, to open to public...
FISA Fight: Whither the Blue Dogs?
2008-03-13 04:46:00 The House will be voting on their updated FISA legislation (H.R. 3773) tomorrow. This is the legislation justified today in Chairman Conyers’ strong rebuke of retroactive amnesty. House leadership is confident that the bill will pass: “I feel very confident,” said House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn , D-S.C., who added that he has spoken to many ...
FISA Fight: House Judiciary members reject amnesty
2008-03-13 04:46:00 John Conyers and 19 members of the House Judiciary Committee have rejected the Bush administration case for retroactive amnesty for the telecoms. The following Members joined Chairman Conyers in signing on to the statement: Representatives Howard L. Berman (D-CA), Rick Boucher (D-VA), Jerrold Nadler (D-NY), Robert C. Scott (D-VA), Melvin L. Watt (D-NC), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), ...
Hoover, FISA and Warrantless Wiretapping
2008-03-12 19:25:00 A timely reminder. I am halfway through Gentry's Hoover biography, while simultaneously reading the 1976 biography of the Rockefeller family, Fellers. They make fascinating tag team reading companions.Ignorance of history, doomed to repeat it... how quickly we forget. J. EDGAR HOOVER: THE MAN AND THE SECRETS, BY CURT GENTRYA review by Piers Brendon for the Columbia Journalism Review, 1992.No citizen has ever posed a more serious threat to American liberties than J. Edgar Hoover. This is not to say that he was, as a congressman asserted in 1972, "the American Beria." Nor was the Federal Bureau of Investigation, which he directed for so long, "a Cheka," an "American OGPU," or a kind of "Gestapo," as other critics charged. Hoover never shot people or put them in concentration camps on the orders of a dictator in the White House. But hisbureau did become, as the Congress which authorized its establishment in 1908 had feared, a federal secret police. It evaded public scrutiny and invad...
By: NO Exit...
FISA Fight: Chertoff on NSA Wiretaps
2008-03-11 04:37:00 In the last few weeks we’ve had Bush’s executive order which gutted the Intelligence Oversight Board, bring all “oversight” functions under the executive. We’ve had the the revelations from whistle-blower Babak Pasdar, Wikileaks published a purported letter from Cablevision Systems Corp. to the FBI showing that “the FBI using the Patriot Act to obtain information ...
FISA Fight: The driftnet exposed
2008-03-10 22:34:00 Every member of Congress–but particularly the chairs of the intelligence committees–needs to read today’s explosive Wall Street Journal article before considering moving forward on any FISA legislation. Five years ago, Congress killed an experimental Pentagon antiterrorism program meant to vacuum up electronic data about people in the U.S. to search for suspicious patterns. Opponents called it ...
Foster and FISA
2008-03-10 22:34:00 Kagro mentioned this earlier today, but it bears reinforcing: Bill Foster won in Dennis Hastert’s solidly Republican districts by running against retroactive immunity for telecoms who illegally spied on US citizens. The Republicans tried to make an issue out of it: [W]ould Foster have sided with Nancy Pelosi and the trial lawyers who provide the financial underpinnings of ...
FISA Fight: The Math
2008-03-10 16:34:00 Dear Congressional Democrats, Let’s do the math together. Bill Foster just won the special election in IL-14 — former GOP Speaker of the House Denny Foster’s seat, and birthplace of Ronald Reagan. Running as he did in what was until Saturday, a deeply red and thoroughly Republican district, what’s Foster’s view on the new FISA bill and ...
Not everyone in the Obama camp agrees with him on FISA and Telecoms
2008-03-08 08:41:00 Interesting... Check it out Quote: In a new interview with National Journal magazine, an intelligence adviser to Barack Obama's presidential campaign broke with his candidate’s position opposing retroactive legal protection for telecommunications companies being sued for cooperating with a dubious U.S. government domestic surveillance program. "I do believe strongly that [telecoms] should be granted that immunity," former CIA official John Brennan told National Journal reporter Shane Harris in the interview. "They were told to [cooperate] by the appropriate authorities that were operating in a legal context." "I know people are concerned about that, but I do believe that's the right thing to do," added Brennan, who is an intelligence and foreign policy adviser to Obama. That wasn't just a personal opinion, Brennan made clear to Harris. "My advice, to whoever is coming in [to the White House], is they need to spen...
By: Political Byline
FISA Fight: A bad strategy
2008-03-08 05:18:00 Yesterday Politico reported House Democrats are preparing to send back to the Senate a modified FISA bill that reflects their best hope of a compromise on President Bush’s terrorist surveillance program. After weeks of negotiations and no final settlement, Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) signaled Thursday night that she is ready to fall back on the strategy of ...
Exclusive capitulation report: House Democratic leadership circulates FISA
2008-03-08 03:59:00 (updated below - Update II - Update III) As has been expected for a week now, the House Democratic leadership has prepared and is now currently circulating (while trying very hard to keep it confidential) their so-called "compromise" FISA
By: mini wisdom
FISA vote pushed back: are we winning?
2008-03-06 23:12:00 (Promoted by Susan.) The Poltico is reporting that the House will not vote on an electronic surveillance bill this week, and that telcom amnesty is a major sticking point: House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer said Wednesday the House will not take up an electronic surveillance measure this week, further delaying any decisions on the controversial measure. Hoyer ...
FISA Fight: Supporting the good guys
2008-03-06 05:04:00 The “Defense of Democracies” group, those great patriots who are trying to shred the Constitution by running deceptive, fear-mongering ads against Democrats, have just placed another ad buy. They’ve also been using robocalls and push polling to try to define this debate. Their target continues to be the group of freshman who who they consider to ...
FISA fight: All about the e-mails?
2008-03-05 22:58:00 Wired’s Ryan Singel explains: In the end, it turns out it’s all about the emails. The fight in Congress and the big push for expanded wiretapping powers has nothing to do with intercepting foreign-to-foreign phone calls inside the United States without a court order. In fact, it turns out that the nation’s secret wiretapping court is ...
DHS Secretary Chertoff Addresses Cybersecurity, FISA in Special Roundtable
2008-03-03 22:06:00 DHS Secretary Michael Chertoff welcomed a small group of blog editors to take our questions on a number of topics. I asked him for his response to Congressional criticisms of a new Bush Administration Cyber Initiative, as voiced most recently in a hearing last week, and the overall state of planning within DHS to enhance cybersecurity nationwide. He acknowledged that cybersecurity is "the one area where we're behind were I'd like to be" and that DHS has been "nibbling at the edges" until recently....(read more)
More Bad Inky Spin On The FISA Follies
2008-03-03 18:03:00 This editorial on the latest with the FISA law appeared yesterday in the Philadelphia Inquirer, stating as follows?If President Bush wants to assign blame for the lapse of the nation's antiterror surveillance law, then he must also point to himself.Instead, the president wants to make House Democrats the villains. Not once but twice last week, Bush tried to cast the majority party as the bad guys for their refusal to renew the law exactly according to his terms.Trouble is, the president has been downplaying his complicity in the legislative standoff because of his own refusal to entertain a key compromise.Yes, the editorial gets off to a good start, but it will go downhill shortly?Bush has been trumpeting the threat of terror attacks without the rules, contending al-Qaeda agents and their ilk will be able to talk to their co-conspirators without being detected by authorities.Bush said Thursday that it's "dangerous, just dangerous" to go much longer without renewing the surveillanc...
Pressing for FISA changes: What’s Bush Trying To Do?
2008-03-01 20:45:00 Bush is drawing a line in the sand between McCain and Obama. Current FISA allows electronic surveillance on foreign soil, allows surveillance on Americans calling Foreigners for three days before warrant, allows for “emergency” situations. Why do we need telecom immunity now? Bush Administration trying to protect itself. read more | digg story
By: What's Going On
FISA Deal In The Works?
2008-03-01 17:41:00 Via Protein Wisdom, through an upset Lefty blog To break an impasse over legislation overhauling the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, House Democratic leaders are considering the option of taking up a Senate-passed FISA bill in stages, congressional sources said today. Under the plan, the House would vote separately on the first title of the bill, which ...
By: Pirate's Cove
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