No Luck for Senators Trying to Rein in FISA Powers
The Senate today harshly struck down an effort by the upper chamber’s civil libertarians to extend Fourth Amendment protections to electronic communications.
With the fiscal cliff just days away — but a deal nowhere in sight — the upper chamber took up the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. FISA came into being during the Jimmy Carter administration but was thrust into the spotlight after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, when FISA was amended with the Patriot Act in 2001 and subsequent domestic warrantless wiretapping was revealed.
Tea Party Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) introduced the Fourth Amendment Protection Act, which requires specific warrants granted through FISA courts to gain access to electronic communications.
In a floor speech in support of his amendment, Paul said Americans have become “lazy and haphazard in our vigilance” of the constitutional amendment protecting people against unreasonable searches and seizures.
“We allowed Congress and the courts to diminish our Fourth Amendment protections, particularly when we gave our papers to a third party. Once you gave information to an Internet provider or to a bank. Once we allowed our papers to be held by a third party, such as telephone companies or Internet providers, the courts determined that we no longer had a legally recognized expectation of privacy,” Paul said. “…Privacy and the Fourth Amendment have steadily lost ground over the past century.”
The senator noted that emails, text messages, and other electronic communications receive less protection than a phone call or snail mail.
His amendment, he said, would simply bring modern forms of communication and the Fourth Amendment into sync.
“Some may ask well, why go to such great lengths to protect records? Isn’t the government just interested in the records of bad people?” Paul said. “Well, to answer this question, you must imagine your Visa statement and imagine what information is on your Visa statement. From your Visa statement, the government may be able to ascertain what magazines you read, whether you drink and how much, whether you gamble and how much, whether you’re a conservative, a liberal, a libertarian, whom do you contribute to, who is your preferred political party, whether you attend a church, a synagogue or a mosque, whether you see a psychiatrist, what type of medication do you take.”
“If we have people who are accused of committing a crime, we go before a judge and get a warrant. It’s not that hard.”
Few of Paul’s colleagues agreed. The amendment failed 79-12.
Not that it wasn’t a day for a core group of senators to express widespread concern about FISA.
“Too often this body finds itself in the position of having to give rushed consideration to the extension of expiring surveillance authorities,” said Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.). “The intelligence community tells us these surveillance tools are indispensable to the fight against terrorism and foreign spies, just as they did during the PATRIOT Act reauthorization debate last year.”
“The Delawareans for whom I work, the nation for whom we work expects that the government cannot listen in on their phone calls or read their emails unless a judge has signed a warrant,” continued Coons, expressing his support for multiple amendments to require stricter guidelines for and reporting of FISA surveillance.
“If there is a reason why this requirement is not consistent with national security, then I say let the intelligence community make that case and allow us to debate that and consider it in public,” he said. “It is to me simply not acceptable for the intelligence community to ask us to surrender our civil liberties and then refuse to tell us with any specificity why we must do so, the context and the scale of the exercise of this surveillance authority. In my view, America’s first principles demand better.”
Other amendments included one from Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) to direct the administration to establish a framework for declassifying FISA court opinions, one from Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt.) that would sunset the provisions in three years instead of five, and one from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) to force the intelligence community to provide Congress and the public as appropriate with specifics on just how much domestic communication has been captured under current rules and what the intelligence community does with that information.
But Senate Intelligence Committee Chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) argued that supporting any of the amendments would give the upper hand to terrorists.
If the bill was amended, she noted, it would have to go back to the House — which doesn’t return until Sunday night — for reconsideration, forcing authorized surveillance to halt after the Dec. 31 FISA expiration.
“There is a view of some that this country no longer needs to fear attacks,” Feinstein said. “I don’t share that view.”
All amendments failed. A final vote on the reauthorization was delayed until Friday.
“We have examples in the past, in our own country, of abuses of government. During the civil rights era, the government snooped on activists. During the Vietnam era, the government snooped on antiwar protesters. In a digital age where computers can process billions of bits of information, do we want the government to have unfettered access to every detail of our lives? From your Visa statement, the government can determine what diseases you may or may not have, whether you’re I impotent, manic, depressed, whether you’re a gun owner, whether you buy ammunition, whether you’re an animal rights activist, whether you’re an environmental activist, what books you order, what blogs you read, what stores or Internet sites you look at. Do you really want your government to have free and unlimited access to everything you do on your computer?” Paul said.
“The Fourth Amendment was written in a different time and a different age, but its necessity and its truth are timeless.”
Sen. Paul isn’t the sharpest knife in the drawer. I don’t know what his reasons were for bringing this up during the last week of the year. But I’m sure that actually getting it passed was not among them.
Luckily, Paul is among the least effective elected officials. I expect he will keep up his record of not getting anything passed that he’s associated with.
What are you talking about? He has no say when this Fourth Amendment crushing bill is considered – that was up to Feinstein and Reid. Paul is only trying to minimize the damage to the Constitution.
I’m amazed how indifferent people are to the erosion of their rights.
In your post, you, a wooden spoon, comment on the relative sharpness of knives. The merits of the amendments and their arguments are of no concern to you. I suspect you are among the “lazy and haphazard.”
Nice one, left/libtards… we shouldn’t have a 4th Amendment, nor 2nd Amendment, nor 1st Amendment, apparently.
Left/libtards ?? Funny in that the author quotes four Democrat senators trying to amend the bill to soften it. And let’s all remember that the Patriot Act came from a supposedly conservative Republican administration. There is plenty of blame to go around.
***support Senator Rand Paul’s (R-KY) call to audit the Pentagon***
There is no doubt that an out of control leadership is one which should have LESS powers, rather than more. And the Congress, as a whole, is less concerned about the citizens than at any time in history.
This is because when the fish stinks from the head up all manner of invasions are okey dokey.
For if catching ‘bad’ people is the intended target, surely the invasion of everyone’s privacy is hardly needed. But when tracking the citizens IS the goal, then this is the way a Thug-in-Chief’s reps behave, RINO’s too – http://adinakutnicki.com/2012/10/07/when-authentic-revolutionaries-hold-the-reins-of-american-power-centers-via-the-most-radical-regime-in-u-s-history-commentary-by-adina-kutnicki/
America has become a shadow of itself, and this is intolerable.
These sorts of unConstitutional outrages are now daily occurences and unsurprising in their frequency. The Constitutional Republic of old is truly dead and gone. There is no doubt that we now live under a tyrannical dictatorship of malevolent elitists from both parties. It is deeply depressing to consider what has become of this country. And to realize that this is happening in my lifetime is so sad…
“Paul said Americans have become “lazy and haphazard in our vigilance” of the constitutional amendment protecting people against unreasonable searches and seizures”
I would change that to “lazy and ignorant”, and reference the entire Constitution, not just the Fourth Amendment.
“Paul said Americans have become “lazy and haphazard in our vigilance” of the constitutional amendment protecting people against unreasonable searches and seizures.”
Is that the problem, or is the problem our representatives, who took an oath to support and defend the Constitution, but pay it only lip service?
I read an article not long ago, that stated, the NSA was collecting the electronic communications of every American, and storing them for later perusal. They were running out of storage space, thus, they are building a huge server complex in Utah. I have read that there are so many laws on the books, that Americans are unaware of, that we all, unknowingly commit three felonies a day. If that is the case, doesn’t collecting all our electronic communications, open up the possibility of political prosecutions by government?
“If that is the case, doesn’t collecting all our electronic communications, open up the possibility of political prosecutions by government?” *** No. It makes it a certainty.
Hello all… Here’s a scary one. New law HR 347. What is even scarier is that this bill was supported by both sides.
http://www.youtube.com/watch_popup?v=7SGWH3kirzg&vq=medium
Dear Senator Paul (and Bridget)
The american people aren’t being lazy about the fourht amendment, they are being confused. Ever since Mr. Justice Blackmun converted the Right of Property to the vague Privacy Rights that allows a woman to have abortions we have blured that lines about what Property and Property Rights are.
If you have a Right to Property, why then, regardless of where you store your records, and in what form, the records are your property and therefore subject to the limitations placed on access to the Federal Government by the Fourth Amendment.
But if you only have Privacy Rights, they extend no farther than your home, or even no farther than your body.
So while we somehow have this fundemental right to abort babies, we no longer have the right to build on our property because an eagle my be disturbed, and we no longer have the right to feel secure in our electronic papers.
SteveB/Colorado, yes the patriot act was passed by GWB. It was actually written by Joe Biden in response to Oklahoma bombing in 1996. Sadly the blame is on us, we have given away our liberty for almost no net gain in safety. If we really had a major terror problem in this country, shootings by jihadists would out number shootings by young white men.
Terrorists exist, but the threat is not nearly as bad as the loss of liberty. My mother is almost a communist, she hated Bush. I defended almost everything GWB wanted. Now I have almost no moral authority to argue against the liberty destroying government. Who has no issues doing cavity searches on the roadside in multiple states. Who serves search warrants in the middles of the night with swat teams. Killing family dogs for daring to bark at invaders.
This country has gone off the rails and become as bad as any despot nation. Printing money without thought and searching the young and the old without thinking. Millions and millions of people have their civil liberties violated and the shootings keep happening. I was I was an illegal alien, at least they seem to have some rights when stopped by law enforcement. Everything I get stopped they search my car, every time. My only crime is having long hair and tattoo’s.
Sorry for the ranting, the finger banging cops in Texas has me so pissed off. combine that with the Chicago cops that killed a dog in its yard. As they searched for an escaped convict has pushed me to my breaking point. But it does me no good, since so few others care. So I will sit at home and bitch to my wife.