from a meeting yesterday attended by rep bean

they (the dems in the house) talked to mcconnel about a version different from the republican written one in the senate

they came up w/something mcconnel agreed to, then, after he talked w/someone in the white house, came back and said we needed this, this, and that

the house dems had two options, pass their version (still unconstitutional, but less so) and then have the need for a reconciliation of the senate passed version (that would have held up the congress from going on vaca or wouldn’t be done till after) and that was unacceptable because of the very very scary scary threats to the congress building itself, and all 535 regional offices around the country, so the house leadership (read: the person who took the salt and pepper shakers off the table) put the republican senate version up for a vote instead, that’s what passed

the worst thing about this (aside from taking white-out to parts of the 4th amendment) is that the house dems were successfully lobbied by the terrorists who would NOT benefit from the bill, -er, were successfully lobbied by the republicans, who are disapproved of by a majority of the people of this country, to pass another rights restricting piece of legislation by succumbing to the fear as told to us by the administration, who we all know as honest and trustworthy

Have I missed something?

As of this time (here we are in the third week of August) I haven’t seen a glimmering of some big “take down” of any major terrorist operation anywhere in the world.

So exactly how effective has this “emergency law” really been in stopping this imminent operation?

Clearly the “chatter” was simply from the teeth of the Party of Fear.

N=1 == none of the above (= tackless?). My fear is that the Dems, recognizing they’ve made a huge blunder, will try to fix it by compromising with those who don’t care about the Constitution, and thus come up with a replacement bill that compromises us permanently. I’d rather the awful statute sunset without a replacement as long as Bush in President, and we can try to fix it under a new President. So I argue the Dems should not fear a “gap” in the meantime.

Doing it now, with Bush in office and the Dems behaving as though some of them don’t get it, is dangerous. It is not a comfortable position, but I can’t see a better one.

I don’t agree the Dems or their leadership are hopeless. They have good people and some rotten apples, and they would do better with a better President — so I try to distinguish.

I agree, they should just return to the old FISA law by revoking the “August” bill in September…with the narrowly drawn patch that allows ONLY foreign-to-foreign electronic communications to be surveilled with a FISC warrant. That will likely be vetoed…but then they should wait until it expires and tell Bush that they offered him the compromise to fill the gap in September and he vetoed it.

Everything W does is based on falling back on Article 2, or the abuse thereof.

Aldrich Ames was determined to be “an agent of a foreign government”. Clinton’s ability to search without a warrant WAS questioned…by the right wing, IIRC (perhaps even Kit Bond leaves a paper trail about “Clinton’s misuse”)…when the search was made. But Ames never challenged the search in Court, he plead guilty…largely because the evidence already obtained was pretty devastating.

The FISA Law was subsequently changed with regards to the Ames case and other issues…including transformations in cell-phone and eleectronic communication. The ability to apply for a search warrant “post hoc” was one of those changes.

It’s not an idle question, though, about why warrants are so onerous to this administration. The implementation of national security letters is a subset of this phenomenon, and the volume of those has been truly extraordinary. That suggests that the breadth of their indifference is extraordinary, as well.

M’self, I think we’re probably not going to find out the details of all this until long after I’m dead, but those details will show that this administration’s fanatical determination to keep Republicans in power forever also extended to using the intelligence services for domestic political purposes. The one thing these guys really learned from Nixon, Watergate and FISA is, “don’t get caught.”

I think that this is precisely the reason, as well as using the information for private financial advantages.

Warrants necessitate “justification” and exposing the rationale of “terrorism” to someone in the judicial branch. The only reason that I can see in not wanting to have warrants is that they don’t want to have to develop the “terrorism” rationale. Plus they don’t want any sort of statement of record that can be used to show they CONTRIVED a false affidavit in order to obtain OTHER information.

The Bushies have started to use the argument that the warrant procedure is “too onerous” requiring large dossiers of “up to 150 pages”. But I suspect that these are actually extraordinary situations…and were submitted willingly…just to document to the FISA Courts that they were going after “big cases”.

If they seriously thought the record-keeping provision was too onerous they could have asked for a streamlined warrant process, requiring less paperwork…a summary of evidence that would be subsequently provided to the Court who could then TERMINATE the warrant if it failed to be sufficient to support the summary. This way they could get the warrant and meet the bulk of the evidentiary requirements later.

And there would be a paper trail of cases where they basically BS’d their way to to an illegal search.

THAT I suspect is why they oppose the warrants process altogether!

Under this new “law” they don’t even have to provide the records to the FISA Courts…its only required that the Atty General and the head of the NSA “concur”.

BTW…Can anyone think of a rationale for the FISA Court existence anymore if Bush can simply examine any electronic communication, anytime without requiring warrants?

What I find genuinely curious is that, in the case of strictly foreign intelligence, the standards for obtaining a warrant are much lower than for domestic criminal warrants (and this would seem to be borne out by overwhelming tendency of the FISA court to approve government warrants in the last thirty years).

So, why, ultimately, does it matter that foreign communications are routed through a U.S. switch, when the warrant process enables taps?

What the hell was Congress thinking in the first place? FISA is pretty much wide open in this regard, and the time limits to apply for warrants after the fact has been extended in other legislation, as I recall.

It seems quite clear that the administration has been determined to do away with the FISA warrant process entirely, and that means, quite simply, they are up to no good at all. Given all the extra storage and retrieval capacity that NSA has been adding over the last couple of years, it seems obvious that what they really want to do is just snag everything in the pipes and sort it out later.

First, aren’t these the same characters that were in the Nixon admin. They have just learned how to do things so they won’t get caught. I really believe they are spying on the opponents, just like Nixon was doing.

Plus, with that many more people able to see the cases that the DoJ is working on, they can either steer their ‘talking’ to fit the cases that are on going, or steer their lawyers to get what they want to happen.

Plus, most of those senators are lawyers, they KNOW what is going on. They know where the loopholes are, and they use them for their benefit. They are paid $160,000 , the founding fathers didn’t get that, and look what they did for us. Lot’s more than these guys.

Could anyone tell me if the Citizens Rule book is pertinent today yet. It is, or was, a way that the jury could get rid of a bad law.

Reading some of the legal things, it’s almost like they are still trying to figure out the meaning of the word “IS”. That’s what lawyers do today, some of them anyway.

Just as U.S. spy satellites were never meant to spy on American citizens, a practice that was expressly forbidden in the past, but based on an article I read the other day, is now okey-dokey.

A lot can happen in six months.

Football season will begin.
The leaves will turn.

And maybe Bush and Cheney will launch an attack against IRAN, shortly after the hot days of August pass and the milder Middle Eastern winter begins.

After which, IRAN will retaliate and somehow strike inside the United States.

Which will lead to Bush and Cheney declaring martial law, locking down our democracy, with their assuming absolute power.

Yes, a lot can happen in six months.

And the gutting of FISA, with the White House writing-in even more expansive domestic spying powers into the recently passed rushed-through law, could be another piece to add to this martial law puzzle.

Oh, and have you heard, DHS is organizing pastors into “Clergy Response Teams” to allay and quell citizen unrest…just…in…case…martial law ever is declared.

Where Bush and Cheney are concerned, always think the worst…which obviously some Democrats and even some Republicans have yet to grasp.

sangemon @ 59

The bill may expire, but as I understand it the targets of the surveillance brought in under this iteration of the the bill will not expire.

Anyone have anything on this?

Marcy has said that one of the provisions allows Gonzales to authorize surveillance for up to a year. It this is correct, arguably some surveillance could start the day before the statute expires, and continue after that for some time, under the expired bill’s authority.

As I understand it, with the AG’s authorization, or sanction, or whatever they call it in the amendment, the one-year time frame would extend the surveillance in question through the Bush presidency. Just barely.
How ’bout that.