Fear, frenzy and FISA
Reason
by Julian Sanchez
Like Bill Murray’s hapless weatherman in Groundhog Day, America is locked in a perpetual September 12, 2001. How else to explain this weekend’s frenzied passage of a sweeping amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), effectively authorizing the program of extrajudicial wiretaps first approved in secret by President George W. Bush shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001? How else to make sense of a Democratic Congress capitulating to the demands of a wildly unpopular executive for yet another expansion of government surveillance powers, mere months after the disclosure of the rampant abuses that followed the last such expansion? The hasty passage of the massive USA PATRIOT Act, a scant 45 days after those attacks, was ill-considered but understandable. Six years later, however, the administration has grown comfortable with the prerogatives panic affords. And, perversely, it has learned that it can continue to wield those prerogatives even under a Democratic majority, provided it insists on regarding Congress always and only as a last resort...
http://www.reason.com/news/show/121797.html
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=FISA
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=surveillance
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Julian+Sanchez
by Julian Sanchez
Like Bill Murray’s hapless weatherman in Groundhog Day, America is locked in a perpetual September 12, 2001. How else to explain this weekend’s frenzied passage of a sweeping amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), effectively authorizing the program of extrajudicial wiretaps first approved in secret by President George W. Bush shortly after the terrorist attacks of 2001? How else to make sense of a Democratic Congress capitulating to the demands of a wildly unpopular executive for yet another expansion of government surveillance powers, mere months after the disclosure of the rampant abuses that followed the last such expansion? The hasty passage of the massive USA PATRIOT Act, a scant 45 days after those attacks, was ill-considered but understandable. Six years later, however, the administration has grown comfortable with the prerogatives panic affords. And, perversely, it has learned that it can continue to wield those prerogatives even under a Democratic majority, provided it insists on regarding Congress always and only as a last resort...
http://www.reason.com/news/show/121797.html
Informant: Thomas L. Knapp
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=FISA
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=surveillance
http://freepage.twoday.net/search?q=Julian+Sanchez
rudkla - 9. Aug, 13:38
