Saturday, May 27, 2006
Philadelphia Inquirer: Congressional leaders have shown little backbone in response to President Bush's warrantless wiretapping. Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., has been an exception.
Specter has insisted that the wiretapping of e-mail and phone calls to overseas destinations be done only with oversight by the special Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
He's badgered the White House for a full explanation of the National Security Agency's antiterror spying -- even telling Bush personally that "the president doesn't have a blank check" on domestic wiretapping.
Two weeks ago, Specter came up with his best idea yet: Yank the funding for the NSA spy program unless the Bush administration comes clean. That's playing hardball.
So it's troubling to hear about a bill being readied by Specter's committee staff. The proposal caves on many of the key civil liberties concerns raised by the secret snooping of mysterious scope.
Future wiretapping
The legislation does too little to assure that the NSA spying program would get meaningful oversight. In a concession designed to win passage, the measure also leaves the president free to conduct future wiretapping without court approval. Why give this, or any, administration such wide latitude to end-run the Fourth Amendment?
Rather than requiring oversight of domestic spying by the secret federal court set up by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the measure would make such a review optional. The court's jurisdiction needed clarification in an age where technology creates possiblities unimagined in 1978, when the law was passed. But this proposal clarifies by minimizing.
One piece of the bill makes sense: extending from three days to a week the grace period to apply for a warrant after emergency surveillance.
Defenders of the program say no evidence has emerged that any ordinary, innocent Americans had their privacy infringed by the NSA's data mining and surveillance. How could it, given the secrecy shrouding the whole program?
It's equally true that there's no evidence that the Bush administration really needed the blanket spying powers it arrogated post-9/11.