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EDITORIAL: Congress erred on FISA extension
Jan 06, 2013 (Daily Times-Call - McClatchy-Tribune Information Services via COMTEX) --
One of the last acts of Congress in 2012 was to take a bad law and extend it for five years.
The law is a provision of the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 that gives the government sweeping authority to eavesdrop without a warrant on emails and phone calls involving non-U.S. citizens in foreign countries. The law jeopardizes the privacy of U.S. citizens in America who communicate with foreigners.
That's bad enough. The scarier problem is that Americans are in effect barred from knowing what the law actually says. That's because the secret FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act) court has adopted interpretations of the law that to a great extent determine how it's implemented. But the interpretations are classified. So what does the law actually say The government won't tell us. How's that for a democracy.
One of the law's most vocal critics, Oregon Sen. Ron Wyden, was quoted by HuffPost Live as saying, "When the public finds out that these secret interpretations are so dramatically different than what the public law says, I think there's going to be extraordinary anger in the country."
Another senator who opposed the law was Colorado's own Mark Udall.
"I am concerned that Congress has chosen not to tighten privacy protections in this program now, while the FISA Amendments Act was up for reconsideration," he said. "A smart but tough approach to our national security does not require the government to snoop around in Americans' emails and phone calls without a warrant."
Even Udall, who sits on the Armed Services and Intelligence committees, has basic questions about how the law is being implemented. How many U.S. communications have been collected under the law
Have any communications from one person in the United States to another person in the United States been collected Has any intelligence agency ever conducted a warrantless search through communications collected under the law to find calls or emails from a specific American
That a senator on the Intelligence Committee has such basic questions is an indication of how opaque some government operations have become since Sept. 11, 2001. Unless Americans demand more transparency and insist on the maintenance of liberty in this country, it will be lost forever.
___ (c)2013 the Daily Times-Call (Longmont, Colo.) Visit the Daily Times-Call
(Longmont, Colo.) at www.timescall.com Distributed by MCT Information Services
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