Checks And Balances, We Hardly Knew YeLawyer: FISA 'reform' the final nail in privacy casket...
(
old news - 10:28AM Tuesday Aug 07 2007)
tags: legal · legislation · privacyCongress over the weekend voted to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978. Dubbed the
"Protect America Act," the bill was pitched by the Bush Administration as a shoring up of FISA to better help intelligence agencies adapt information gathering in the age of Internet communications.
Lawyer Patrick Radden Keefe pens a piece for
Slate that says the law didn't fix FISA -- it obliterated it. And it removed whatever functional checks and balances remained when it comes to domestic surveillance and your electronic privacy:
"To secure access to the telecommunications switches inside the United States, which the NSA had simply asked for in the past, the new law obliges phone and Internet companies to create back doors for eavesdroppers; if they don't comply, they can be held in contempt. And best of all, there's no longer an audit of abuses by the DoJ's inspector general. Instead, Congress will receive an update on that twice a year from none other than the attorney general—the very individual who, even as this legislation was being prepared, was exposed as having denied, under oath, the existence of surveillance abuses by the FBI."
Here's a list of who voted to approve this law in both the
House and
Senate. Some additional conversation can be found in our
security forum.
