fisa

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 [...]

Are there really any “lone wolves” engaging in dangerous terrorist liaisons? That’s what some opponents of section 6001(b) of the USA PATRIOT Act are asking.
Lots of Democrats now concede that Congress overreacted a bit after the 9/11 terrorist attacks to give sweeping authority to the FBI to conduct various kinds of sneaky searching and snooping [...]

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and committee members Christopher Dodd (D-Ct.), Russell Feingold (D-Wis.), and Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) are expected to introduced in the Senate today a bill that would repeal the immunity granted to telecommunications companies under the FISA Amendments Act (FAA) passed last year. The immunity provisions ensured the dismissal of [...]

Eight years after it was passed, the USA Patriot Act remains among the most controversial pieces of counterterrorism legislation in the so-called “war on terror.”

The explosive inspectors general report released on Friday makes one thing increasingly clear: the Bush White House knew that it was probably breaking the law.
From the report itself, John Yoo’s Office of Legal Counsel memo — and the lightning-fast reporting of Spencer Ackerman, Marc Ambinder and others on Friday — we now know that President [...]

Last year, the Democratic Congress enthusiastically acquiesced to President George W. Bush’s insistence on carving out individualized suspicion and other privacy protections from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The Democrats did so to preempt the charge of being weak on national security from the presidential campaign — didn’t work — and then-Sen. Barack Obama, who [...]

Pressed by Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) on his view of whether the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program was illegal, Attorney General Eric Holder said the program was “inconsistent” with the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, but repeatedly refused to say it was “illegal,” or that President Bush broke the law — despite previous statements [...]

A federal district court judge in California yesterday dismissed a slew of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies that allegedly helped the U.S. government engage in warrantless wiretapping.
Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco dismissed the cases because Congress explicitly gave the telecom companies immunity from civil suits in a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance [...]

One more thing about former Vice President Dick Cheney and torture, loosely connected to Ross Douthat’s New York Times column. If you’re Dick Cheney, right now, it’s got to feel like history is repeating itself. My copy of Bart Gellman’s Cheney biography, “Angler,” is at home right now, but if you go through it, you’ll [...]