feinstein

I just spoke to Kevin Bankston, the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s senior attorney specializing in free speech and privacy law, about his reaction to today’s Senate Judiciary Committee markup session on the Patriot Act, which resulted in passage of the Leahy-Feinstein bill, with a few amendments. Bankston, who’s been following this debate closely, was not pleased.
“We’re [...]

The Leahy-Feinstein substitute bill I discussed in my piece this morning about the USA PATRIOT Act was just approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee 13-8, with only minor word changes.
Amendments proposed by Sen. Richard Durbin (D-Ill.) that would have required that the target of a National Security Letter have some alleged connection to terrorism, and [...]

Most of the senators on the Judiciary Committee today seem to be bending over backwards to give the FBI and Justice Department every benefit of the doubt when it comes to the tools they say they need to fight terrorism. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) just warned of all the people out there “that are trying [...]

An amendment to the Patriot Act provision authorizing National Security Letters that would have required the letters to target only people with some connection to a foreign power or the activities of a foreign power, so as to ensure that the NSL is actually issued to investigate terrorism rather than, say, fishing expeditions, was just [...]

Republicans and Democrats have been sniping about the USA Patriot Act ever since Congress passed the law in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks to try to forestall another such disaster.

Though the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing last week included lots of expressed concern that the USA Patriot Act compromises civil liberties, the version of the bill being debated in that committee today fails to adequately address the problems, argues Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) and  the American Civil Liberties Union.
According to the ACLU, the committee substituted [...]

With information only on the first $69 million of the $1 billion spent on a taxpayer-sponsored voucher program, some lawmakers and environmentalists are calling on Congress to hold off on shelling out $2 billion more.

I hate to say it, but, I told you so…
Just the other day, when I was writing about the case of Jewel v. NSA (and responding to the Columbia Journalism Review’s criticism that no one was covering this important case about warrantless wiretapping), I remarked that while everyone’s been up in arms about the Obama [...]

As TWI’s lightning-fast national security reporter Spencer Ackerman just wrote, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence just formally announced what we’ve known and been reporting on for weeks now: it will review the CIA’s detention and interrogation program during the Bush years.
That’s welcome news for all of us who’ve been eager to learn more about [...]

Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) started her line of questioning with the recent report on the politicization of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division and asked Eric Holder his thoughts on it.
Holder replied that it’s “antithetical to everything the Justice Department stands for” and added that this wasn’t something he’d allow if he was attorney general.