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Senate Democrats seek to regroup quickly on surveillance law rewrite |
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By Helen Fessenden
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Posted: 09/11/07 06:43 PM [ET] |
Democrats on the Senate Intelligence Committee aim to have a new foreign-intelligence surveillance bill ready by early October, or at least early enough that the Bush administration will not be able to use the pre-recess ticking clock as a pressuring tactic this time around.
Panel Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) told The Hill on Friday that he expects a stand-alone bill that would seek to restore the role of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court in authorizing warrants for foreign-intelligence gathering on U.S. persons. A draft will be written “over the next two weeks” with the input of Vice Chairman Kit Bond (R-Mo.) and other Republicans, he added.
Democrats have come under fire from civil liberties groups since Congress hastily passed a White House-backed bill shortly before the August recess that broadly expanded the administration’s foreign-intelligence surveillance powers on anyone within U.S. borders without a court warrant. The bill passed due to solid GOP backing as well as some Democratic defections.
Democratic leaders of both chambers since have pledged to revisit the legislation, which expires under a six-month sunset. The Intelligence and Judiciary panels started holding hearings last week. The House Intelligence panel is also drafting a bill, and the judiciary committees must also review the legislation before it comes to a floor vote.
“I’m still very upset about [how] the whole thing transpired, because the administration slow-walked the process for two months while we wanted a bill,” Rockefeller said. “Everything boiled down to three days at the end.”
“It was a hothouse environment,” panel member Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said. “The debate came down to this idea that there was only the White House proposal and ours, which didn’t get any attention.”
Wyden added that Bond, who co-sponsored the GOP bill and complained at the time that he had been left out of consultations, has been in extensive discussions with him as well.
“The situation is fluid, but two themes have emerged,” said Wyden, who added that he wasn’t speaking for Bond. “We need to bring back the court’s oversight, and we need an independent audit by the Justice Department’s inspector general [of the surveillance program].”
In an e-mail to The Hill on Monday, Bond stated that he has emphasized to Rockefeller “the importance of bringing in key officials from the Department of Justice, the DNI [director of national intelligence] and other government experts before the committee so we can hear their perspective on proposed language.”
He also indicated that one priority, among others, for him in any permanent overhaul would be granting liability to telecommunications firms that have cooperated with the government’s warrantless surveillance program. Democrats strongly oppose granting retroactive immunity, while the White House, DNI Mike McConnell, and most Republicans support it.
The new law allows the director of national intelligence and the attorney general to authorize warrantless eavesdropping on national security grounds as long as the subject of surveillance is “reasonably believed” to be abroad. And in a major departure from the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) that established the court, the panel does not issue individual warrants; rather, it grants programmatic approval only after the spying is authorized. There is no independent audit.
Democrats continue to smart over what they see as an unexpected turnaround by McConnell in the waning days of pre-recess negotiations. Rockefeller and others say that McConnell had signaled he accepted most aspects of the Democratic alternative bill, only to come back after discussions with the White House and reject it. Democrats say there was widespread agreement initially to write a bill that would allow warrantless foreign-to-foreign surveillance of communications routed through the U.S., but that the White House sought to go much further.
Meanwhile, McConnell defended the new FISA legislation Monday when he testified with three other senior officials before the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, urging Congress to make the August fix permanent. Like Bond, he also made a plea for liability protections for telecommunications firms.
“If we could get retroactive liability protection in the current time frame, it would put us in a very good position going forward,” said McConnell. He also warned that if the new bill is not extended beyond its sunset, “we will lose, [by] my estimate, 50 percent of our ability to track, understand and know about these terrorists.” |
