The Senate’s Agreement On Debating The FISA Bill

  You should know by now that I am not going away on this particular subject because this is an important piece of legislation that has to come out in you and I's favor.

   Here's a statement from Sen. R. Feingold concerning debate over this FISA legislation.

Statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold
On the Senate’s Agreement on Debating the FISA Legislation

February 1, 2008

“I am pleased that Republicans have finally backed down from their efforts to ram a deeply flawed FISA bill through the Senate without votes on amendments. We all agree that FISA needs to be updated so our government can go after the foreign communications of suspected terrorists. But we must not provide overly broad and unnecessary powers that infringe on the rights and privacy of law-abiding Americans, especially to an administration that has proven it cannot be trusted. Next week, we have an opportunity to fix this bill, but only if senators stand up to the administration’s attempted power grab and support my and other amendments to put in place checks and balances. If the final bill produced by the Senate doesn’t protect the privacy of law abiding Americans or if it includes immunity for telecom companies, I will strongly oppose it and will vote against cutting off debate on it.”

As a result of the agreement, several of Senator Feingold’s proposed amendments, critical to improving this deeply flawed bill will be considered and voted on:

• Dodd-Feingold Amendment Stripping Retroactive Immunity
  Along with Senator Chris Dodd, Senator Feingold will offer an amendment to strike Title II of the Intelligence Committee bill, which provides immunity to telecommunications companies that allegedly cooperated with the President’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

• Feingold-Webb-Tester Amendment to Provide Protections for Americans
  Senator Feingold intends to offer an amendment along with Senators Jim Webb and Jon Tester to allow the government to get the information it needs about terrorists and purely foreign communications, while providing additional checks and balances for communications involving Americans. Under the Intelligence Committee bill, many law-abiding Americans who communicate with completely innocent people overseas will have their communications swept up, with virtually no judicial involvement or oversight.

• Prohibiting "Bulk Collection"
  Senator Feingold successfully offered this amendment in the Senate Judiciary Committee to prohibit "bulk collection" -- the collection of all international communications between the U.S and a whole continent, or even the entire world. Such collection without a foreign intelligence purpose would be constitutionally suspect and would go well beyond what the government has says it needs to protect the American people. Yet, the Director of National Intelligence testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the Protect America Act – which was enacted last year -- permits "bulk collection." The amendment prevents such massive dragnets by requiring the government to certify that it is collecting the communications of foreign targets from whom it expects to obtain foreign intelligence information.

• Prohibiting "Reverse Targeting"
  Senator Feingold successfully offered this amendment in the Judiciary Committee to add a meaningful prohibition on “reverse targeting,” a practice by which the government gets around FISA’s court order requirement by wiretapping an individual overseas when it is really interested in a person in the U.S. with whom that supposed foreign target is communicating. The Director of National Intelligence has agreed that “reverse targeting” is unconstitutional. Senator Feingold’s amendment requires the government to obtain a court order whenever a significant purpose of the surveillance is to acquire the communications of an American in the U.S.

• “Use Limits” Amendment
  This amendment, which was part of the Senate Judiciary Committee version of the FISA bill, gives the FISA Court discretion to impose restrictions on the use of information about Americans that is acquired through procedures later determined to be illegal by the FISA court. This enforcement mechanism is needed because the government can implement its procedures before it has to submit them to the FISA Court for review to determine whether they are reasonably designed to target people overseas rather in the United States.

In addition, Senator Feingold was successful in including the following amendment in the bill:

• Giving Congress Access to FISA Court Materials
  This amendment assists Congress in its legislative and oversight functions by requiring that Congress be provided timely access to FISA court pleadings related to significant interpretations of law, which may be necessary to understand the court’s rulings, as well as past FISA court orders containing such interpretations. The amendment was part of the bill reported by the Judiciary Committee and is based on language approved on a bipartisan basis by the Intelligence Committee when Senator Feingold offered it as an amendment to the intelligence authorization bill.

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