Protecting America from the PAA

The ill-named Protect America Act of 2007, which justifies the warrantless interception of any international communications by U.S. persons without any restriction on the subsequent review and data mining of the metadata concerning those calls or the content of the communications themselves, is being considered for review by the Judiciary and Intelligence Committees to once again delve into the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and reinsert much needed privacy protections that were lacking in the last iteration.

Groups like the ACLU, People for the American Way, and the Bill of Rights Defense Committee have sent a letter requestint the following to Majority Leaders Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid.

1) No amendments to FISA should be made permanent until Congress and the public receive answers about what surveillance activities have been conducted over the last six years and the legal basis for those programs.

2) Any further legislation must reiterate that FISA is the exclusive means of intelligence gathering on U.S. soil, and the legislation must include automatic consequences for violating this exclusivity.

3) Interceptions of U.S. persons’ communications within the United States should continue to be included within, and, therefore, be protected by the definition of “electronic surveillance.”

4) Collection and isolation of the particular communications sought by the government should be conducted by the telecommunications industry itself – the government should not be given direct and unfettered access to telecommunications infrastructure.

5) The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) must play a meaningful role in ensuring compliance with the law. First and foremost, interception of communications to and from the US should be authorized by the FISC. The Court must also have regular access to information about how many U.S. communications are being collected.

6) Under any new amendment to FISA established in your legislation, when the government intercepts a communication to which a person in the U.S. is a party, there should be a presumption requiring the NSA to immediately destroy that communication except in narrowly defined circumstances providing for judicial oversight.

7) Once the government has reason to believe that there is a substantial likelihood that a specific account, person or facility will have contact with someone in the United States, the government should be required to return to the FISC to obtain a court order for continued surveillance of that account, person or facility. Reliance on the FISC will help ensure the privacy of U.S. persons’ communications.

Go here to read the full letter.

Freedom Lost: 227-183

"By a vote of 227 to 183, American's saw their rights eroded further at the hands of their elected officials." This is not the headline you will see in any newspaper or on CNN or any network. Congress passed another ill-named law-- Protect America Act--yesterday while Iowans were enjoying tax free back-to-school shopping. With the exception of Dave Loebsack and Bruce Braley who voted against the bill, the Iowa delegation let it happen.

So what did we lose? The government can solicit our phone records records from any telecom without a seeking a warrant, legally.

The administration legislation would allow the NSA warrantless access to virtually all international communications of Americans with anyone outside the US, so long as the government declared that the surveillance was directed at people, which includes foreigners and citizens, reasonably believed to be located outside the US, a definition that covers billions of people.

The only saving grace about the bill sunsets in six months unless acted on by Congress. However, the sunset has an exception that would allow any directives by Attorney General Gonzales and Director of National Intelligence McConnell that commandeer access to US telephone and internet companies to remain in effect until their expiration (which is likely to be until the end of the administration since the directives can be issued for up to one year, so could be issued to last for the next six months and then reissued on the eve of the sunset, in January 2008, to remain in effect until this administration is finally over in January 2009).

For more about the details of the PAA, see this document from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee