GovernmentExecutive.com

In a newly released report, members of the Senate Intelligence Committee detail continuing concerns about a bill to control the Bush administration's electronic surveillance activities, including changes they will try to make as the legislation heads to the Senate floor.

The 52-page report, published Friday to accompany the committee's bill to revise the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, sheds new light on conflicts that flared during the panel's closed-door markup on Oct. 18. Taking exception with the majority view, Sens. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., and Russell Feingold, D-Wis., criticize the committee for not adopting three amendments they offered.

One amendment would have given the secret FISA court a greater role in overseeing the administration's spying activities. They said the amendment's defeat "leaves in place what we believe are inadequate mechanisms for protecting the privacy of Americans' communications."

Another amendment would have limited how the administration can use information collected about U.S. citizens or legal residents.

"The defeat of that amendment means that, even when the court finds that the government's procedures are targeting Americans in the United States without a warrant, the government can continue to use the information obtained through that surveillance however it sees fit," they wrote. "This loophole offers an invitation to warrantless wiretapping."

A third amendment would have required all provisions in the bill to expire at the end of December 2009, rather than December 2013. Wyden and Feingold tried unsuccessfully to strip a provision in the bill granting retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have assisted the Bush administration with warrantless surveillance activities dating back to September 2001. Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., announced in a floor speech Friday he would object to allowing the bill to come to the Senate floor if it retains that provision.

Wyden, Feingold and Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., were successful in attaching an amendment that requires the administration to get court approval in order to target the communications of a U.S. citizen or legal resident abroad. Senate Intelligence ranking member Christopher (Kit) Bond, R-Mo., along with three other Republicans on the committee, wrote that the amendment could doom the bill.

The senators wrote that the amendment's language has "significant technical and legal problems ... that would cause the intelligence community to lose valuable intelligence on certain U.S. persons who are spying for a foreign power or supporting terrorism." They added that they "remain hopeful that we will be able to reach a compromise on this issue when we get to the floor."

In a show of bipartisan unity, Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., wrote that they still want to clarify that the White House cannot circumvent FISA while conducting surveillance.

"We continue to believe that Congress must write strong language to ensure that FISA is the exclusive means that the intelligence community may intercept, analyze, and disseminate the phone and electronic communications of any American for intelligence purposes," they wrote. "We will work to strengthen the exclusivity language as the bill progresses."

Whitehouse added that he has drafted another amendment to clarify that the FISA court has the authority to review how the administration is complying with rules to minimize the surveillance and use of communications by U.S. citizens and legal residents. "This change is not yet a part of the bill, but I will continue to press for the court's clear authority to check on the implementation of these minimization procedures," he wrote.

COMMENTS

• The US failure of intelligence has several roots, but one of the reasons that people of questionable backgrounds are considered questionable sources is that their loyalties are profit motivated and vagrant as the breezes. Even defining “questionable backgrounds” is an ambiguous effort at the least. Assigning all the blame to this one action by the Clinton Administration is merely an exercise in denial. Any information gleaned from such sources must be scrubbed and vetted. Dan, please read the US Select committee on Intelligence report released on July 9th, 2004. It recites a litany of causes, none of which points to your conclusion. I quote: “Most of the major key judgments in the Intelligence Community’s October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction, either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting. A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of the intelligence.” The biggest problem was how the Executive Branch interpreted the data. Please remember, the POTUS had ties to the intelligence community. His father was the Director of Central Intelligence (1976-1977). As for blaming Clinton, George 43 kept the same Director appointed by Bill, George Tenet, for 4 years; 3 after 9/11. Evidently he liked what he heard and thought he was doing well. But this article was about the FISA law and primarily concerned with the controls on the direction of the secretive services’ sneaking and peeking. I have NEVER heard anyone in this forum complain about us listening in on ANYTHING outside our borders. It’s the extent and use of intelligence gathering within our border that is the concern. I’ve even heard very few people object when the I-Spies were held to getting warrants for wire-tapping THREE DAYS AFTER the dirty deed was already done. The problem most of us have with the direction we are going as a nation is the blessing of unlimited, unwarranted snooping into our lives; not of those across the pond. To most of us it appears the Republicans, in a state of shock and fear, granted the POTUS cárte blanche; he liked what he tasted (the power supreme) and has kept asked for more ever since. Tip off Posted November 1, 2007 2:13 PM
• I notice that the Dem's have forgotten the reason why our intelligence is so lacking. Torecilli got an admentment passed in Clinton's second term that banned the CIA from using as agents people with questionable backrounds. The end result was we lost our ability to recruit folks dealing with terrorists. There has been no mention of the law, terminitating it so we can actually get real time information. With the lack of sources we ended up casting a wider net inorder to get the same level of intelligence that is less reliable dan ketter Posted October 31, 2007 12:54 PM
• In view of President Bush's proclivities for bloody war and deceptive justifications for his wars, I think the American people can use all the protection they can get. I think we need a national council of wise elders to get this mess under control. I worry about espionage by the U.S. government that leads to coercion of the people and to loss of commercial and military secrets to so-called allies. Don Jones Posted October 30, 2007 6:30 PM