U.S. Capitol.(AFP
Photo / Win McNamee)
Source: Russia Today
http://rt.com/usa/news/congress-surveillance-act-fisa-980/
The House of Representatives
voted Wednesday to extend the government’s power to warrantlessly wiretap
Americans for another five years by reauthorizing the 2008 amendments to the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Lawmakers in the House agreed from
Washington, DC on Wednesday afternoon to reauthorize the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act’s Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), a polarizing legislation that
has been challenged by privacy advocates and civil liberties organizations
alike around the country. The extension was approved by a vote of 301 to 118.
The Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act was first signed into law in 1978 by President Jimmy Carter,
but amendments added two decades later under the George W Bush administration
provide for the government to conduct widespread and blanketing snooping of
emails and phone calls of Americans. The FISA Amendments added in 2008,
specifically section 702, specify that the government can eavesdrop on emails
and phone calls sent from US citizens to persons reasonably suspected to be
located abroad without ever requiring intelligence officials to receive a court
order.
If the US Senate echoes the
House’s extension of the act, the FAA will carry through for another five years
until 2017, ensuring the federal intelligence community that they will be able
to conduct surveillance on the correspondence of the country’s own citizens
well into the future. If no action is taken, the FAA is slated to expire at the
end of 2012.
Earlier this year, a plea from
two US senators to see how many times the FAA has been used was refused by the
National Security Administration. Last month, San Francisco’s Electronic
Frontier Foundation filed a lawsuit against
the US Justice Department for failing to adhere to Freedom of Information Act
requests for documents pertaining to the program.
“The
FISA Amendments Act (FAA) of 2008 gave the NSA expansive power to spy on
Americans' international email and telephone calls,” the EFF explained in an official statement made
after the suit was filed. “However, last month, in a letter to Senator Ron
Wyden, a government official publicly disclosed that the NSA's surveillance had
gone even further than what the law permits, with the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Court (FISC) issuing at least one ruling calling the NSA's actions
unconstitutional.”
Sen. Wyden, a Democratic lawmaker
from Oregon who has also sit on the Senate intelligence committee for several
years, originally asked for Senate to place a hold on the vote this past June.
This week, Sen. Wyden tells Reuters, "My hold is on and it will
stay on," although
that plea does not apply to the House, however, where lawmakers appeared eager
on Wednesday to power through the vote.
So determined were some lawmakers
to proceed, in fact, that the rules of the debates preceding Wednesday’s vote
called for no more than one hour of discussion before ballots were cast.
Several congressmen, including lawmakers that planned to vote yes on the FAA
extension regardless, proposed a two year extension as a compromise, but no new
amendments were allowed to be tacked on before Wednesday’s vote.
Despite opposition on and off the
Hill, the FAA has received praise from some of Washington’s most elite members
of the government, including Attorney General Eric Holder and long-standing
lawmaker Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), the sponsor of the FAA renewal who also
infamously urged Congress to approve the since-defeated Stop Online Piracy Act,
or SOPA, a broad and dangerous Internet legislation that threatened to reshape
the Web as we know it.
In his address at Northwestern
University School of Law this past March, Mr. Holder said section 702
of the FAA “ensures that the government has the flexibility and agility it needs to
identify and to respond to terrorist and other foreign threats to our
security,” but
emphasized the fact that only persons thought to be outside the US — not
Americans — can be targeted. When Sens. Wyden and Udall asked to know how often
that snooping involved Americans at all, however, they were told by the NSA’s
Inspector General that a “review of the sort suggested would itself violate
the privacy of US persons.”
On his part, Sen. Wyden has
written, “that if no one has even estimated how many Americans have had their
communications collected under the FISA Amendments Act . . . Then it is
possible that this number could be quite large.”
“Since
all of the communications collected by the government under section 702 are
collected without individual warrants, I believe that there should be clear
rules prohibiting the government from searching through these communications in
an effort to find the phone calls or emails of a particular American, unless
the government has obtained a warrant or emergency authorization permitting
surveillance of that American,” the lawmaker wrote in an
official press release earlier this year.
Rep. Smith, the sponsor of both
this bill and SOPA, has said, “We have a duty to ensure the intelligence community
can gather the intelligence they need to protect our country.”
On
Thursday, Rep. Smith claimed, “Foreign nations continue to spy on America to
plot cyber-attacks and attempt to steal sensitive information from our military
and private sector industries,” and that Congress has “a solemn responsibility to ensure that the
intelligence community can gather the information” necessary to hinder these attempts.
Rep. Dan Lungren (R-California)
added on Wednesday from the Hill that reauthorizing the FAA is “critical to
the protection of the American people,” claiming that the United States, “as a nation had
not done enough to connect the dots to warn us sufficiently to protect” against another terrorist attack on par
with the ones that devastated America on September 11, 2001.
Rep. Trey Gowdy, a Republican
congressman from South Carolina, also used the attack on the Twin Towers to
justify the necessity of extending the FAA.
“If
we could come together to remember 9/11, surely we can come together to prevent
another one,”
said Rep. Gowdy.
Opponents of the act, however,
say that the attempts to do as such come at a cost too great for civil
liberties.
“We’ve
been told that we can’t even tell how many people are being subjected to this
process located in the United States, and that we don’t know and they can’t
tell us,” Rep. John
Conyers (D-Michigan ) pleaded earlier this year in opposition to the act. “I think we can
get a little bit closer. There can be some reasonableness. It’s this kind of
vagueness that creates in those of us in the Congress, suspicions that are
negative rather than suspicions that are positive.”
“Why
can't we know how many people are affected by FISA amendment act in the US?” Rep Conyers asked. “This kind of
vagueness creates suspicions.”
Former
Democratic presidential hopeful Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) said on his own part that those suspicions
are even more validated since the Justice Department has declined to adhere to
a Freedom of Information Act request for information on the FAA, explaining on
Wednesday, “Everyone becomes suspect when big brother is listening.”
Rep Hank Johnson (D-GA) also
threw his weight behind efforts to reject the act on Wednesday, saying it the
FISA amendments allow for “illegal surveillance of an untold number of
American citizens” with
absolutely no oversight.
“Not
even the NSA knows the extent to which FISA amendment acts have potentially
been approved,” Rep Earl
Blumenhauser (D-Oregon) added from the House floor before the vote.
The American Civil Liberties
Union reports that, every day, the NSA intercepts and stores around 1.7 billion
emails, phone calls, text and other electronic communications thanks to laws
like FISA. To put it into perspective, they add, “that’s equivalent to 138
million books, every 24 hours.”
“After
four years, you’d hope that some basic information or parameters of such a
massive spying program would be divulged to the public, or at least your
rank-and-file member of Congress, but they haven’t,” says Michelle
Richardson, a counsel at the ACLU’s Washington Legislative Office. “Only a small
handful of members have either personally attended classified briefings or have
staff with high enough clearances to attend for them.Sen. Ron Wyden — who has
been on the Senate Intelligence Committee for years—has even been stonewalled
by the Obama administration for a year and a half in his attempts to learn
basic information about the program, such as the number of Americans who have
had their communications intercepted under the FAA.”
“Can
you believe that 435 members of Congress who have sworn to uphold the
Constitution are about to vote on a sweeping intelligence gathering law without
this basic information?” she asks.
Posts
a.jpg)
a.jpg)
