Top Five Things Senator Specter Won't Tell You About the Cheney-Specter Bill to Allow Warrantless Spying on Americans (8/14/2006)
1. The Cheney-Specter bill makes following the protections in the Foreign
Intelligence Surveillance Act totally optional
The bill would change the law so
that foreign intelligence surveillance of Americans could be conducted without
following FISA's requirement of individualized judicial review of wiretaps. The
bill would change the law to allow the p resident to ignore FISA's protections
and unilaterally decide which Americans to wiretap, indefinitely and without any
mandatory check to protect individual rights. The bill also gives P resident
Bush support for his currently untenable argument that FISA does not apply in
wartime by deleting the provisions saying FISA does apply in wartime. If the
bill passes, p resident s will have multiple avenues to circumvent the statute,
rendering moot its protections for Americans' civil liberties.
2. The Cheney-Specter bill does not require President Bush to get a warrant
for every wiretap of every American currently subject to the NSA's illegal
warrantless wiretapping
President Bush's so-called “concession” to submit a
“program” to the FISA court to approve is not required by the bill—it's
conditional. Only if the bill passes exactly as it was written by the White
House – or with additional White House changes –has President Bush “promised”
that he will submit one of his secret surveillance programs to the FISA Court.
Nothing in the bill requires him to do so, and the Cheney-Specter bill has
stacked the deck so that the court will hear only the administration's arguments
and is directed to approve surveillance without ever knowing the name of every
American wiretapped and any facts supporting such surveillance. Nothing in the
bill requires any future president to get approval of programs of surveillance
let alone actual warrants based on evidence a particular American is conspiring
with al Qaeda.
3. The Cheney-Specter bill legalizes President Bush's illegal spying although
Congress doesn't really know all that he has directed the NSA to do regarding
people in the US
The bill rewrites FISA to legalize the surveillance President
Bush is currently conducting in defiance of the law. Yet, the administration has
stonewalled congressional attempts to learn the true scope and nature of all of
the illegal surveillance the administration has secretly authorized. Specter,
himself, has called President Bush's NSA program illegal “on its face,” yet his
bill provides statutory power to do more than the president has admitted and it
expands the NSA's power to search Americans' calls, e-mails, and homes without
any warrant under FISA.
4. The Cheney-Specter bill allows law enforcement to enter Americans' homes
and offices without a warrant
Landlords, custodians and "other people" would be
required to let law enforcement officers to access Americans' computers and
telephones, and no warrant is required, simply government say-so—under the
expanded powers in the bill. This measure flies in the face of the Fourth
Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure.
5. The Specter bill does not enforce the Fourth Amendment's requirement that
no warrant shall issue but upon probable cause stating with particularity the
things to be searched and seized
Specter's bill so broadly redefines whom can
be spied on without a warrant that countless Americans would be subject to
secret NSA surveillance. All international phone calls and emails would be
subject to warrantless surveillance under the bill's changes to the law. Plus,
emails and other Internet traffic would be subject to monitoring if the
government did not know the physical location of every recipient of an
American's email. Furthermore, the bill creates a new type of generalized
surveillance power, which, while it requires court approval, does not require
the government to identify each target in the US, the basis for such
surveillance or the method of monitoring each American—wiretaps, bugging or
other devices. Under this exceedingly low threshold, the NSA could win approval
for conducting surveillance of countless Americans while keeping secret from the
courts and Congress who is being monitored and even whether the spying approved
actually helps protect against terrorism.
Make a Call: Fight Frist's Combined Spying, Tribunals Bill
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