The Surveillance Bill That Should NEVER Have Been Written Meets With Resistance

Do I sound indignant? You bet. As should ALL citizens.

And it should meet with far more than the resistance outlined by this piece in the Washington Post; this is the same disastrous NSA Surveillance bill Arlen Specter brokered to make legal all the illegal NSA wiretapping the Bush Administration has been doing against citizens of the U.S. In brokering it (and broker is a polite term for Specter's complete and utter capitulation to Bush and Cheney), the Senate essentially "punishes" the Bushies' unconstitutional conduct by giving them even vaster access to information they cannot prove they need, ending all concept of privacy in communications.

No privacy. No checks and balances. No accountability. Nothing but increasing presidential powers for a duo - Bush and Cheney - who have done nothing but abuse what powers they have while often not fulfilling the jobs they are supposed to do.

From the piece:

A Senate surveillance bill personally negotiated by President Bush and Vice President Cheney ran into immediate trouble this week, as Democrats and other critics attacked the proposal while key GOP leaders in the House endorsed a different bill on the same topic.

The Senate legislation, drafted during negotiations between the White House and Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), would allow the administration to submit the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program to a secret intelligence court for review of its legality.

The proposal was billed as a rare and noteworthy compromise by the administration when unveiled last week. But the legislation quickly came under attack from Democrats and many national security experts, who said it would actually give the government greater powers to spy on Americans without court oversight.

...Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, canceled a markup session for his proposal that had been scheduled for yesterday. He announced instead plans instead for a full committee hearing Wednesday on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), the 1978 statute at the center of the debate.
The developments add to the uncertainty surrounding the eavesdropping program, which allows the NSA to intercept telephone calls and e-mails between the United States and locations overseas without court approval if one of the parties is suspected of links to terrorism.

The program -- secretly ordered by Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks but not revealed publicly until media reports in December -- has been the focus of fierce congressional debate. The Justice Department has spent much of its time fending off a flurry of legal challenges to the program in the courts, including a class-action lawsuit that was allowed to proceed yesterday by a federal judge in California.

Specter's proposal would, among other things, allow the transfer of all pending lawsuits to a secret FISA appeals court that could throw the cases out for "any reason." The bill would also allow -- but not require -- the administration to seek legal approval for the NSA program from another secret court that administers FISA.

The legislation also would lengthen the amount of time the government could spy on alleged terrorism suspects before receiving warrants, and would explicitly affirm the president's "constitutional authority" to conduct spying programs on his own.

Specter defended the proposal during a committee hearing on Tuesday, calling the agreement with Bush "a major breakthrough" that included necessary but acceptable compromises. [Ed. note: Acceptable to WHOM? Necessary for WHAT?]

...But critics say the proposal would effectively gut the FISA law and give the government too much leeway in clandestine surveillance. Opponents also say the bill would allow the FISA court to approve surveillance programs as a whole, rather than reviewing warrants for specific cases as it does now.

Other GOP proposals -- including bills proposed by Wilson and Sen. Mike DeWine (Ohio) -- are opposed by Democrats and civil liberties groups because they formally authorize the NSA program. But the scope of the Wilson bill, for example, is more limited than Specter's, and requires the executive branch to brief all members of the House and Senate intelligence committees.

Rep. Jane Harman (Calif.), ranking Democrat on the House intelligence committee, said she opposes all the GOP's proposals dealing with the NSA issue, calling them "solutions in search of a problem."

Wilson is a complete nitwit and DeWine, beholden to the Abramoffs of the world, is too busy doctoring 9/11 footage for his campaign to pay attention to bits of fluff like the U.S. Constitution or the Bill of Rights.