| Jason Rhyne Published: Thursday August 30, 2007 |
The recently passed law which allows President Bush to continue wiretapping Americans' telephone calls overseas may allow for domestic spying as well, according to a new report commissioned by Congress.
A recently-acquired Congressional Research Service report of the controversial Protect America Act, which formally legalized communications surveillance where one party is overseas, offers nebulous language which is broadly open for interpretation, according to Steven Aftergood of Secrecy News.
The new legislation seems to provide legal latitude that could smooth the way for domestic spying initiatives involving US citizens. Given the Administration's penchant for signing statements, such an open door may be irresistible.
“The new CRS report offers a careful reading of each provision of the Act,” writes Aftergood, who obtained a copy of the CRS review Wednesday. “But instead of fully clarifying its impact, the report serves to highlight just how unclear and indeterminate the new law actually is.”
Wendy Morigi, a spokeswoman for Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) told RAW STORY by email that she would familiarize herself with the report.
Steven Aftergood points out instances where the CRS summary can’t definitively say what the Act calls for.
Quoting the report, he says, “One provision ‘could conceivably be interpreted’ to apply to parties within the United States. Another provision ‘might be seen to be susceptible of two possible interpretations.’ Still others ‘appear to’ or ‘would seem to’ or ‘may also’ have one uncertain consequence or another.”
“In other words,” he says, “the new law bears the hallmarks of its hasty, poorly-considered origins.”
In an email to RAW STORY Thursday, Aftergood characterized what he thought was a fundamental flaw in the new provisions.
“I would say the most basic problem is that the new law redefines basic legal terms such as 'electronic surveillance,' he wrote. "It adopts new terms such as '[surveillance] directed at' without a clear definition at all. The upshot is that the practical meaning of the law is uncertain in many cases."
On the report's summary page, CRS states that the legislation was enacted "with regard to past abuses of electronic surveillance for national security purposes and to the somewhat uncertain state of the law on the subject," adding that the Act "also creates a mechanism for acquisition, without a court order under a certification by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and the Attorney General, of foreign intelligence information concerning a person reasonably believed to be outside the United States." Powers conferred by the amendments are set to expire in six months, although they can extended if Congress so chooses.
Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), who voted against the measure, said in a statement after its passage that the bill "does violence to the Constitution of the United States," and "also could produce convictions that may well be overturned because the bill does not heed the instructions from the Supreme Court."
President Bush, meanwhile, commended the bill for giving intelligence professionals "the legal tools to gather information about the intentions of our enemies," and said that, because of the amendments, "America is safer."
If anything, Aftergood writes, the new CRS report may help identify questions Congress may have when it revisits FISA legislation next month.
Read a copy of the CRS report in PDF here.
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