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Since the previous post is long and a little technical, I want to pull out one point more succinctly. When Congress amended FISA in the years after 9/11 to allow for “roving” wiretaps, they made some other balancing changes in the law. In particular, since FISA orders can be granted based on a description of [...]

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Some things are clear about the FISA Amendments Act that President Bush signed into law today: Despite occasional attempts to persuade us otherwise, it licenses surveillance of Americans’ communications with overseas parties. But is that all it permits? Join me, if you will, on a short trip through the weeds of the foreign intelligence surveillance [...]

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Over at Huffington Post, Lanny Davis establishes that he has no idea at all:
(1) How to spell “Sister Souljah,” and
(2) What the FISA “compromise” bill says.
He writes:
The compromise bill would provide strict supervision by the special FISA Court of all intelligence agency anti-terrorist surveillance activities, with strict time limits on renewal of court orders.
This is [...]

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I’ve got a writeup at Ars Technica of an important ruling in yesterday in a suit against the government stemming from extralegal NSA wiretapping. Short version: Yes, FISA really is the “exclusive means” by which the government can do foreign intelligence wiretaps in the U.S., assertions of magical “inherent authority” notwithstanding. And no, you can’t [...]

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If you had told me five years ago I’d be writing pieces attacking Democratic leadership forThe American Prospect, I would have been… skeptical.  Welcome to our brave new world.

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David Kris, a former top Justice Department attorney, knows more about FISA than pretty much anybody else out there. So his Guide to the FISA Amendment (part one and two) posted at Balkinization is required reading if ou care about the issue, as is Marty Lederman’s follow-up.

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I sat through the painful House debates on the FISA deal, so you wouldn’t have to.  My writeup is over at Ars. Possibly my favorite moment of the proceedings is up in the lede:
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” Rep Trent Franks (R-AZ) intoned on the floor of the House of Representatives, purporting to [...]

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One of the things we keep hearing from the apologists for the FISA bill that just passed is that it provides wonderful new protections for Americans abroad. I’m not so sure. (See update—I jumped the gun slightly here.) I’ve run this by some ACLU attorneys I know, who are studying the bill to attempt to [...]

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Really, they’re not that strange anymore: Bob Barr and the American Conservative Union have been working with the American Civil Liberties Union to oppose executive overreach for years now. But the “strange bedfellows” narrative is probably helpful insofar as it helps to puncture the notion that it’s only the “far left” that has a problem [...]

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