Telecom and IT

The Senate today passed the House's Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) overhaul, voting 69 to 28 in favor of the bill.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) praised the bill's passage. "Today the Senate ensured that our national security officials have the tools they need to help protect our country from future terrorist attacks.

Blue America PAC, a liberal online group, has raised more than $310,000 to oppose the rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and to target House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.).

"After [former Rep.] Dick [Gephardt] (D-Mo.), former Democratic House Leader, betrayed the majority of House Democrats and plotted with [President] Bush, [Vice President] Cheney and some Blue Dogs to thwart the will of the majority and rubber stamp Bush

Members of MoveOn.org are calling on Barack Obama to block the rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) since it includes immunity for telecom companies who took part in the White House's domestic warrantless wiretapping program.

In a letter sent out to members Saturday, MoveOn leaders urged the group's members to call Obama's office to help remind him that he has opposed immunity in the past.

"Last year, after phone calls from MoveOn members and others, Obama went so far as to vow to 'support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies,'" MoveOn's Political Action Team wrote in the letter. "We need him to honor that promise."

Obama has said that he supports the deal on FISA, reached between House Democrats and the White House. But Obama has also said that he'll fight to strip the immunity.

Read more of MoveOn's letter below.

Dear MoveOn member,

On Friday, House Democrats caved to the Bush administration and passed a bill giving a get-out-of-jail-free card to phone companies that helped Bush illegally spy on innocent Americans.

This Monday, the fight moves to the Senate. Senator Russ Feingold says the "deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation." Barack Obama announced his partial support for the bill, but said, "It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses."

Last year, after phone calls from MoveOn members and others, Obama went so far as to vow to "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."⁴ We need him to honor that promise.
Can you call Senator Obama today and tell him you're counting on him to keep his word? Ask him to block any compromise that includes immunity for phone companies that helped Bush break the law.

...These companies helped the Bush Administration illegally spy on the emails and phone calls of innocent Americans. By giving "immunity" to these companies, all lawsuits brought against them by civil liberties groups would be thrown out of court. That means we may never find out how far Bush went in breaking the law. And once it's done, it can't be undone. That's why we need Obama to promise to block any bill that has immunity.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) explained that she supported the rewrite of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) because it provided civil liberties protections and a constraint on executive power, not because of the retroactive immunity it will give to telecom companies.

Pelosi said in a speech on the House floor Friday that the changes will help with gathering intelligence that's needed to keep troops safe and able to do their job.

"Good intelligence is necessary for us to know the plans of the terrorist and to defeat those plans," she said. "So we can't go without a bill. That's just simply not an option. But to have a bill we must have a bill that does not violate the Constitution of the United States and this bill does not. "

She also added that the bill increases congressional oversight and transparency of intelligence gathering and makes clear that a president does not have the constitutional authority to alter FISA requirements. President Bush had argued he had the constitutional right to conduct his domestic warrantless wiretapping program.

"[W]hat this bill reaffirms is that the FISA law is the authority for collecting foreign intelligence," Pelosi said. "There is no inherent authority of the president to do whatever he wants. This is a democracy; it is not a monarchy."

The bill passed the House, 293 to 193. The Senate is expected to take up the bill next week.

Pelosi and House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) are taking criticism from liberal activists, who have said that the White House got the better end of the deal. The critics had hoped that the Democratic leadership would not grant the companies immunity from lawsuits for participating in President Bush's domestic warrantless wiretapping program.

Pelosi said in her speech that she disagreed with the immunity provisions in the bill. Under the legislation, companies who participated in the wiretapping program will be exempt from lawsuits if a federal district judge determines that the Bush administration gave written directives to the companies authorizing them to engage in the wiretaps.

"Those companies have not lived up to the standards expected by the American people," she said. "I don't think today is any cause of celebration for them. They come out of this with a taint."

She added, however, that she didn't believe the lawsuits would have achieved their aim, "which is to learn the truth about the President's Terrorist Surveillance Program and give us the information we need to make sure that never happens again."

Instead, she believes a report on the program by the inspector general will uncover that information.

President Bush on Friday praised a deal reached in the Democratic-led House to update the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the House's approval of funding for military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Bush said the FISA update will both help intelligence agencies monitor terror activities and protect civil liberties. The compromise, reached Thursday, includes a way for telecom companies who took part in the president's domestic wiretapping program to obtain immunity from lawsuits. Most Democrats had opposed retroactive immunity.

"My Director of National Intelligence and the Attorney General tells me that this is a good bill," Bush said. "It will help our intelligence professionals learn our enemies' plans for new attacks. It ensures that those companies whose assistance is necessary to protect the country will themselves be protected from liability for past or future cooperation with the government."

The House is scheduled to vote on the measure Friday.

The House also approved a $162 billion war funding bill on Thursday. Bush called it a "responsible" bill that will provide "vital resources" to those on the front lines.

"This legislation gives our troops the funds they need to prevail without tying the hands of our commanders in the field or imposing artificial timetables for withdrawal," he said.

The bill also guarantees money for troops to attend a public university, a measure that was championed by Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.). Bush and Republican presidential candidate John McCain had offered their own education benefits package, but Webb's proposal gained more bipartisan support.

Senate Democrats slammed the compromise reached by House Democratic leaders and the White House over an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).

The deal provides an opportunity for telecom companies who participated in Bush administration's domestic warrantless wiretapping program to earn immunity from lawsuits.

Here's Sen. Russ Feingold's (D-Wis.) statement:

The proposed FISA deal is not a compromise; it is a capitulation. The House and Senate should not be taking up this bill, which effectively guarantees immunity for telecom companies alleged to have participated in the Presidents illegal program, and which fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home. Allowing courts to review the question of immunity is meaningless when the same legislation essentially requires the court to grant immunity. And under this bill, the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power. Instead of cutting bad deals on both FISA and funding for the war in Iraq, Democrats should be standing up to the flawed and dangerous policies of this administration.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) and Assistant Majority Leader Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) said they were unhappy with the immunity provisions, but they added that the bill is likely to pass the Senate.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) also knocked the deal, calling it a "thinly-veiled giveaway to major campaign donors." It reserved special criticism for House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.), who was key in negotiations with Republicans who were calling for telecom immunity.

"The Hoyer/Bush surveillance deal was clearly written with the telephone companies and internet providers at the table and for their benefit," said Caroline Frederickson, director ACLU's Washington Legislative Office. "They wanted immunity, and this bill gives it to them."

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee want Attorney General Michael Mukasey to clarify his claim that the the government failed to act on a phone call about the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Mukasey said last month in San Francisco that the government failed to wiretap a phone call from an Afghanistan "safe house" to somebody in the United States prior to the September 11th strike. Mukasey made the claim while arguing that that Congress should renew a 2007 expansion of government surveillance capabilities.

On Monday, House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers (D-Mich.), Rep. Robert "Bobby" Scott (D-Va.) and Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) sent a letter to Mukasey asking what he was referring to. Mukasey's statement, they wrote, was "very disturbing" because it was the first time someone had referred "to a call from a known terrorist safe house in Afghanistan to the United States which, if it had been intercepted, could have helped prevented the terrorist attacks.

They added: "If such calls were known about and not intercepted, serious additional concerns would be raised about the government's failure to take appropriate action before 9/11."

Here's Mukasey's quote under scrutiny, as reported by the New York Sun:

Officials "shouldn't need a warrant when somebody picks up the phone in Iraq and calls somebody in the United States because that's the call that we may really want to know about. And before 9/11, that's the call that we didn't know about. We knew that there has been a call from someplace that was known to be a safe house in Afghanistan and we knew that it came to the United States. We didn't know precisely where it went."

Mukasey made the claim while calling on Congress swiftly renew an amendment to the Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act (FISA) that had allowed for expanded surveillance activities.

House Democrats have bucked the Bush administration's request, passing their own FISA update last month that does not include retroactive legal immunity for telecom companies that participated in the government's domestic warrantless wiretapping program. President Bush has said he would veto any FISA bill that lacks immunity for the companies.

Read the Democrats' letter to Mukasey here (.pdf).

President Bush set out an agenda for Congress this morning: reform FISA, modernize the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), and approve his Colombia free trade agreement.

Congress returns today from two weeks of recess, and Bush spoke this morning as he departed from the White House for NATO's summit in Bucharest, which will begin Wednesday. Read more...