ACLU Thank House of Representatives for Letting FISA Law Expire

Posted on February 16, 2008

The ACLU are actually sending their praises to House Democrats!

Today the American Civil Liberties Union and Common Cause thanked the House of Representatives for standing up to President Bush and refusing to be railroaded into considering the Senateâ€™s controversial FISA bill. The president had demanded the House rush through a just-passed Senate bill, which would allow the government to spy on the overseas phone calls and emails of innocent Americans without a warrant â€“ in violation of the Fourth Amendment. The bill would also give retroactive immunity to telecommunications companies that gave the government private information about American citizens.

The President demanded that the House “rush” through the bill? The President has been urging Congress to pass something for six months and even signed a two week extension! Surely the ACLU can at least lie better.

“The House leadership has shown real courage by standing up to the president in the face of misleading attacks and intimidation, and they must be commended,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. “Everybody â€“ including the president â€“ knows America will still be safe once the Protect America Act expires: thatâ€™s why he was willing to veto an extension. We hope the leadership ensures that any future FISA bill protects Americansâ€™ privacy rights and does not give immunity to the telecoms that broke the law.”

Funny how the ACLU gets cowardice and pandering confused with courage.

Most of the ACLU’s talking points get unravelled in this piece by Andy McCarthy:

Can you see whatâ€™s happening here? The whole reason Congress enacted the PAA in the first place is because FISA was never meant to apply to foreigners outside the U.S. communicating with other foreigners outside the U.S. We are not supposed to need court authorization for that. We are not supposed to have to write affidavits, approved by the attorney general and others, demonstrating probable cause that such people are agents of foreign powers â€” as well as demonstrating that other alternative investigative techniques would not yield the same intelligence.

Those are protections afforded by the FISA statute. Foreigners outside the U.S. are supposed to be outside the protection of the FISA statute, just as they are outside the protection of the Constitution. Saying the government can go to the FISA court is no answer: Government is not supposed to have to go to the FISA court. These people are not supposed to have FISA rights. They are not supposed to have Fourth Amendment rights.

We are talking about thousands upon thousands of communications, totally outside the U.S. (in the sense that no person inside our country is a participant) which the intelligence community used to be able to intercept and sift through without any burdensome judicial procedures whatsoever. That is how FISA was written, and that is how FISA was understood for almost 30 years. Then last year, a secret FISA-court ruling attempted to bring all those communications under FISA-court control â€” apparently on the theory that, because some digital bits of these conversations may zoom through U.S. hubs in global telecommunications networks, somehow a conversation between a guy in Pakistan and a guy in Afghanistan should now be considered a U.S. wire communication.

But FISA was not intended to protect Pakistanis and Afghans. It was intended to protect people inside the U.S. from being subjected to national-security surveillance absent probable cause that they were acting as foreign agents.

Requiring FISA compliance for foreign-to-foreign communications does not protect anyone inside the U.S. It protects non-Americans, some of whom will be terrorists and none of whom is entitled to any protection under American law. It makes it impossible for the intelligence community to monitor all the foreign-to-foreign communications that we used to monitor because we will never be able to show, for every target, probable cause that he is an agent of a foreign power â€” as FISA requires. The PAA did not call for that; it simply required a certification that we were monitoring people believed to be outside the United States.

The claim that the expiration of the PAA will not open a huge gap in surveillance coverage is laughable. Right now, we are permitted to collect foreign-to-foreign communications absent probable cause that the target is an agent of a foreign power. As of 12:00 A.M., we will no longer be permitted to do that. It is absurd to suggest that this huge drop-off in collection will have no impact on our security.

Michelle Malkin has the President’s radio address on this, and a roundup of reactions.

The White House has their breakdown of fact vs. myth as well.

» Filed Under 1st Amendment, ACLU, News, Politics As Usual, War On Terror

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2 Responses to “ACLU Thank House of Representatives for Letting FISA Law Expire”

Tim Sumner on February 16th, 2008 5:20 pm

Those are not just lawsuits against the telecomm companies; they are billion dollar, exploratory class-action lawsuits by al Qaeda’s lawyers. In one suit, the plaintiffs are a group of lawyers from the Guantanamo Bay Bar Association and family members of detainees held at Gitmo alleging without merit their communications may have been intercepted, they have no evidence that their communications were gathered yet the judge is letting the suit proceed nonetheless.

In the Senate, on Tuesday, all six amendments to water down the bill were supported by Barack Obama and opposed by John McCain. While Obama left town that day before the final vote, 68 - 29, to pass the bill there, Hillary Clinton was ‘not present’ yet has repeatedly railed against the administration on this. She’s “come along way, baby,” since she voted for the original Patriot Act in November 2001; two months before, more than 1,700 of her constituents (including my brother-in-law) died on 9/11.
Mike on February 16th, 2008 9:20 pm

Well we can thank the ACLU and the Liberal Democrats AGAIN if we get attacked just as they did while Bill The Murder Clinton did on 9/11. He knew about it and did not even have the balls to tell the Bush administration because why. Bill Clinton was and still is doing what they call Business with the Bin Ladin Family. Ask him that question and watch how red his face will get. It is a shame this country we all live in together have Liberals who are more like the terorist and in fact they help them, As this is one way they help the terrorists carry out there attacks on Are country because the Liberal Democrats hate this country so much. And now we have a Muslim running for president of the United states. And he and others can say he is not until there blue in the face but the facts and truth are there as he refuses to where any American Flag and turns his back on the pledge to the flag. He belongs to a racist church who hates whites and jews. I can see it now being sworn in with his hand on the Koran. I also fine it fascinating that Obama has said nothing about what he will do if he was president but the same ole speech from his lips ( Change we need change) Someone give the man a dollar.