FISA update

Here's In These Times with my round up of the administration's latest FISA shenanigans. The president will veto any legislation that includes any of the following:

1. A Feingold amendment providing that “no communication shall be acquired… if the Government knows before or at the time of acquisition that the communication is to or from a person reasonably believed to be located in the United States.”
2. A Feingold amendment requiring the FISC to authorize surveillance of a foreign target if a “significant purpose” of that surveillance is to acquire information about somebody in the United States. This is the ‘reverse targeting’ amendment.
3. A Feingold amendment to prevent the government from collecting any communication if the government has not certified that the acquisition “is limited to communications to which any party is a specific individual target… who is reasonably believed to be outside the United States”.
4. A Feingold amendment that hands discretion over the use of illegally obtained information to the FISC.
5. A Feingold amendment prohibiting reverse targeting.
6. A Dodd-Feingold amnesty stripping amendment.
7. A Whitehouse-Specter amendment which makes the U.S. government the plaintiff in any case against a telecommunications company ruled by the FISC to have engaged in warrantless wiretapping activities in good faith.
8. A Feinstein amendment to allow the FISC to certify that the Attorney General’s declaration of teleco good faith is indeed valid.

I write:

It’s an odd piece of legislation that’s so crucial to our national security that it can not be delayed, but also so optional that it can be vetoed if it doesn’t provide a number of unconstitutional provisions granting the executive branch the power to break the law.

But it's more than that. Think about what it means when the president says he will veto a bill that includes a). any amendment that specifically blocks the acquisition of data when the government knows that it's spying on Americans and b). any amendment that puts the court in charge of setting the policy for the handling of illegally obtained data. What sort of program fits the contours of such a law? Read this from Ryan Singel. It's chilling for all the obvious reasons. And it's a formula for the sort of abuse that's already happened, that will happen again (just as it's always happened), and that Jay Rockefeller and all the supporters of his bill will respond to by feigning disappointment in much the same way that Chuck Schumer and Diane Feinstein are now terribly disappointed in Michael Mukasey for his "surprising" support of torture.

If the Senate passes none of its important amendments, and the House caves on its bill, then suddenly, for what will almost certainly be the full six-year-term of the legislation, and possibly more, we'll be in Total Information Awareness territory. Turn on C-SPAN2 right now, if you'd like, and watch this all happen before your very eyes.