Spying’s slippery slope

The Senate Intelligence Committee has two very good reasons to resist the Bush administration’s latest request for broader spying powers. One is President Bush himself, whose record for respecting the privacy rights of Americans has been nothing short of deplorable. The other is Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, who has become Mr. Bush’s enabler by producing legal opinions that attempt to justify White House claims the President has been invested with sweeping surveillance powers by the Constitution and Congress.

In truth, the White House is required to observe the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which regulates government eavesdropping on phone calls, e-mails and other correspondence of fellow Americans and legal residents. That law requires the government to seek a warrant from a secret tribunal, known as the FISA Court, every time it wants to monitor a citizen’s conversations and correspondence.

The White House has been ignoring that provision for years, on the grounds that Congress gave it the power to conduct warrantless surveillance after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. It also claims that the Constitution provides such powers during time of war. Nonetheless, a judge has ruled that the president does not have unlimited surveillance authority, and now the White House has returned to Congress to amend the FISA law to what it says are the changing needs of the times.

The administration’s argument goes like this: The war on terror has presented challenges unlike any other age, as has the rapid change in phone and other communication technologies. Therefore, the government needs to act in an instant when it suspects an American citizen might be in contact with terrorists. To wait too long could imperil national security.

But that argument has been rejected by critics, including this page, as disingenuous. The FISA law already allows government agents to act on a moment’s notice when they have reason to believe a terrorist connection has been made. They can seek a warrant from the FISA court retroactively. The court almost always complies.

One reason the White House is turning to Congress now appears to be to gain immunity from prosecution for the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the warrantless spying program in the past. But that could sacrifice the right of Americans to seek court redress if their rights were violated.

Just as troubling, the White House’s proposed bill would weaken FISA standards, and some critics say it would even gut the law. Sen. Diane Feinstein, D-Calif., says there is nothing in the White House bill that “confines the President to work within” the FISA law in the future. Which means there is nothing in the bill that warrants congressional approval.

Capital Newspapers

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