Glenn Greenwald has two great posts on the ongoing FISA debate. First he does a roundup of the political maneuvering surrounding retroactive immunity for telecom companies. This is a great place to start for those of you wondering the implications amnesty would have on how the public - either through congressional oversight or the courts - would find out what is in the documents the White House is seeking to keep secret. He makes a very strong case for Congressional Democrats not trading access to these documents in exchange for retroactive immunity.
Greenwald also has a post on the legal processes in the cases the telecom companies are already part of and rebuts the argument that Congress should be concerned about the costs litigation pose to telecom companies. He closes his post with these lines:
In a civilized society that lives under "the rule of law," there is no such thing as a defense of: "I broke the law because I was told to." That has sort of been a basic tenet of justice in the Western World for quite some time now. In the United States, the President does not have the power to direct private actors to break the law.
Emptywheel at The Next Hurrah has a series of posts up today that all demand close reading by those following the FISA debate. Important to note, the problems with FISA reform legislation go beyond retroactive immunity and emptywheel brings up a number of key issues in the series of posts below of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence report on FISA.
- The FISA Report
- They're Using AUMF in Their Justification for Warrantless Wiretapping
- Shorter SSCI: The Immunity Is Really for Qwest
- Why Do They Need to Spy on Americans Overseas without a Warrant?
- Minimization, the Whitehouse Way
- The Dodge on Retroactive Immunity
Emptywheel explains one of the key issues of FISA, minimization:
Minimization is the process by which the government makes sure that any information on non-targeted US persons collected in the course of wiretapping someone else gets hidden and, eventually, destroyed. Minimization is actually something Republicans at least say they back. But it's one of the big things that [Director of National Intelligence] Mike McConnell found intolerable in the House version of FISA back in August.
Minimization is clearly a major issue we need to be concerned about in order to protect the privacy of American citizens and ensure that our civil liberties are not surrendered in the name of security. Again, I highly recommend you read all of emptywheel's posts linked here.
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