Spying and FISA: Sweeping It Under The Rug (Pt. 2)

Want to know just how bad the warrantless surveillance program Congress approved is?

No longer do surveillance okays have to go through the independent FISA court (which processes pesky things called 'warrants'), they now need only be rubberstamped-- in secret-- by Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General. Yes, the same Attorney General now being investigated for using the Justice Department as a political/electoral arm of the Republican Party and for subsequent perjury to Congress.

How fun that our Constitution is in the hands of Attorney General Amnesia himself. Yay!

Beyond that, and even beyond the freedom from warrants (FISA, of course, already allowed for warrants to be applied for retroactively), the lines between domestic/international surveillance are greatly blurred. What defines a 'terrorist' and what defines 'domestic' and 'international' communications is now solely up to the discretion of the Bush administration.

Not satisfied with being one of the rare Presidents to have his illegal actions legislatively okayed by the Congress, the President intends to go further. When Congress reconvenes, he will ask for legislation giving the telecom companies, who gave their customers' records and data (warrant-free) to the government, liability from legal action.

Furthermore, the Bush administration still intends to make an example out of prosecute the person(s) who leaked the warrantless program to the NY Times in mid-2004 (the Times, of course, waited a year after Bush's reelection to finally publish the piece). From Newsweek-

[A] team of FBI agents, armed with a classified search warrant, raided the suburban Washington home of a former Justice Department lawyer. The lawyer, Thomas M. Tamm, previously worked in Justice's Office of Intelligence Policy and Review (OIPR)—the supersecret unit that oversees surveillance of terrorist and espionage targets... [T]wo legal sources who asked not to be identified talking about an ongoing case told NEWSWEEK the raid was related to a Justice criminal probe into who leaked details of the warrantless eavesdropping program to the news media...

...A veteran federal prosecutor who left DOJ last year, Tamm worked at OIPR during a critical period in 2004 when senior Justice officials first strongly objected to the surveillance program. Those protests led to a crisis that March when, according to recent Senate testimony, then A.G. John Ashcroft, FBI Director Robert Mueller and others threatened to resign, prompting Bush to scale the program back...

...James X. Dempsey of the Center for Democracy and Technology said the raid was "amazing" and shows the administration's misplaced priorities: using FBI agents to track down leakers instead of processing intel warrants to close the gaps...

Plugging the leaks? Silencing and intimidating whistleblowers? Finally these guys are rolling up their sleeves and really giving it the old Nixon try. Democracy is on the march, folks.

[PS- Looking for a good summary of all this confusion? A new Slate podcast boils it down.]