New Specter NSA Bill

[Sidepocket]

The outgoing chairman of the Senate Judiciary committee, Senator Arlen Specter (R-Pa.), introduced a new spying bill on Tuesday that would increase the number of personnel involved in issuing warrants, makes minor expansions to the number of legislators told about warrantless surveillance and transfer lawsuits challenging the warrantless wiretapping program to the Supreme Court. In September, a Specter-written bill that dramatically loosened the nation's surveillance laws passed out of committee but was never voted on by the full Senate.

The American Civil Liberties Union immediately blasted the bill as an last minute attempt to legalize the government's warrantless wiretapping program, despite the fact that the new bill has no such language. The ACLU sees the bill as a Trojan Horse that could be approved by the Senate and then sent to a committee to be reconciled with an already-passed House bill written by Heather Wilson. That bill immunizes telecoms such as AT&T from pending lawsuits, allows the government to engage in wide-spread warrantless surveillance without getting warrants, and legalizes snooping on Americans' communications with anyone outside the country by redefining the term "electronic surveillance."

Despite the Administration's arguments that a wartime president's powers are not bound by Congress, President Bush has emphasized that he wants the lame duck Congress to explicitly legalize the program that intercepts communications from a person in the United States to someone outside the United States, when one of the parties is suspected of having some nexus to terrorism.

http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2006/11/new_specter_nsa.html#comment-25448612


.....

Fuck. 

[hosh_spicer]

America is going to hell...