FISA 2.0 Called 'Atrocious' Privacy Violation

Monisha Bansal
CNSNews.com
Wednesday January 23, 2008

With Congress working on legislation to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) before the sunset provision in the Protect America Act expires on Feb. 1, privacy advocates say the proposal being offered by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is "atrocious."

In August, Congress passed and the president signed the Protect America Act, which allows the attorney general and the director of national intelligence (DNI) to "authorize the acquisition of foreign intelligence information" without the approval of the special court established by FISA.

According to the liberal American Civil Liberties Union, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is likely to bring an amendment to the floor this week written by the Intelligence Committee.

"We're back pretty much where we were in August," said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, during a conference call with reporters.

"Sen. Reid is about to move a bill to the floor that looks an awful lot like the Protect America Act, except with one additional very bad provision, and that's the provision that provides immunity to those telecommunications carriers that - in violation of the law -turned over their customer data to the NSA," she said. (NSA is the National Security Agency and Central Security Service of the U.S. government.)

Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, CEO of the Mellman Group, noted that according to a survey he conducted last week, "Americans surely want to protect the country from terrorism, but they also insist on protecting our constitutional rights."

"To that end, Americans vigorously oppose warrant-less wiretaps. They strongly support the notion that the government should have to get a warrant before wiretapping the conversations that U.S. citizens have with people abroad by 63 to 33 percent - almost a two-to-one margin," he said, noting that the numbers cut across party lines and ideology.

Fifty-seven percent of voters also rejected immunity for phone companies that may have violated the law by selling customers' private information to the government, preferring to let courts decide the outcome of any cases.

Brian Darling, director of Senate relations at the conservative Heritage Foundation, however, said, "I don't think Americans want to punish companies for good faith actions to help the federal government in capturing and investigating terrorists."

Darling added that "the Protect America Act restored the capability of our intelligence gathering federal officials to collect communications intelligence about al Qaeda by using cutting edge technology that enables us to collect data on terrorists."

"The Bush administration has asserted that this law has helped the United States develop a greater understanding al Qaeda networks," he told Cybercast News Service. "Al Qaeda continues to be a national security threat, and any effort to restrict the Protect America Act may have some unintended consequences that will slow the intelligence-gathering aspect of the global war on terror."

P.J. Crowley, director of homeland security at the liberal Center for American Progress (CAP), added that, while FISA is outdated, how it is updated matters.

Full article here.