Word: fisa
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...bill requires any surveillance of a suspected threat to be reviewed by either Congress or the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court within 45 days. It requires the President to submit operational details of the program and specific surveillance whenever requested by a new Congressional subcommittee, which can require answers to detailed questions. It forces the Attorney General to certify in writing and under oath every 45 days that the program accords with the restrictions laid out in the new law. It also notably removes all authorization for the program after five years...
...Still, many critics of the Bush Administration and Congress argue that the entire FISA needs to be rewritten to handle threats posed by the kind of low-lying, educated actors who perpetrated 9/11, rather than trying to tack provisions onto the existing law to account for the new danger. That is also the position of New Mexico congresswoman Heather Wilson, the chairman of the House subcommittee that oversees the eavesdropping at the National Security Agency. Wilson has been engaged in lengthy negotiations with the White House and other members of Congress over access to details of the program in advance...
...current legislation simply piggybacks on the 1978 FISA law, which was designed to put restrictions on electronic spying against foreign powers rather than solo, stateless actors. So there is no change to the requirement, viewed as outdated by many national security experts, that one party to the tapped call be outside the United States. Which means that for America?s most powerful intelligence tools to be used against its most dangerous threats, any plot has to be discovered while it is still being hatched overseas. If plotters get inside the country as they did before 9/11, the powerful eavesdropping abilities...
...Under FISA, the spooks needed to show "probable cause" to a secret court before they attached bugs to a suspect's phone lines. All indications are that, under the post-9/11 program, a softer legal trigger was used. How much softer? That's an explosive legal and political mystery. Michael Hayden, the former NSA head who has taken a public role in defending the program but who is not a lawyer, has implied that the NSA officers who were manning the spotter desks had to have a reason to believe that a terrorist plot might be in the works...
...What did the U.S. collect in what it calls the terrorist surveillance program that it could not have collected had it obeyed the FISA procedures? Even Americans who had not heard of the FISA court three months ago now know that the government can start wiretapping someone tonight and still wait to ask the court for permission for another 72 hours. So what did it need that FISA wasn't permitting? The answer, most people believe, is about the law and goes to what the lawyers call the "triggers...