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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMitch McConnell’s Surprise Bill Would Extend NSA Bulk Data Collection Until 2020
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McConnell's proposal would reauthorize without revision Title II, Section 215 of the Patriot Act, which enables a large part of the dragnet of American government surveillance and data collection first brought to public attention by former NSA employee Edward Snowden. With that provision set to expire on June 1, the Senate has been working on a set of bipartisan reforms that was expected to be unveiled this week, and the new McConnell-Burr bill could be an attempt to pull that measure closer to the existing law. From the Washington Post:
"This is to help stimulate our members beginning to look at the issue, to understand what this program is and more importantly understand its importance in our overall defense of the country," Burr told reporters in the Capitol. "I think it's safe to say there will probably be a few additional reforms. But what the straight reauthorization does is [it] creates the fence that the debate is going to happen within."
The "straight reauthorization" offered by Burr and McConnellrenewing current law, as originally passed in the post-9/11 Patriot Act, without any new stricturesoffers one end of that fence. On the other, Burr said, are the proposals that have been put forth by reformers such as Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.), ranking member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee is putting the finishing touches on a reform-minded reauthorization bill.
"I can't tell you what the point is that we're going to end," Burr said, "but it's somewhere between Leahy and Goodlatte and" his own bill.
Apart from Burr, the "straight reauthorization" plan has not earned many rave reviews from lawmakers. In a statement emailed to Slate, Sen. Leahy called McConnell's bill a "tone deaf attempt to pave the way for five and a half more years of unchecked surveillance" and vowed to "oppose any reauthorization of Section 215 that does not contain meaningful reforms."
Source.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)They aren't. The hypocrites.
But Americans pay no attention.
My phone calls and e-mails are uncontroversial. And I don't have teenagers or rebellious family members.
But I care about the Fourth Amendment. It is basically the same as an earlier version written by John Adams.
Does McConnell and do our current intelligence officers think they are smarter than John Adams was? Do they think they know better than John Adams and Thomas Jefferson and John Hancock and those who set off our American Revolution?
Why does McConnell love the general warrants that our Founding Fathers found so intrusive that they fought a revolution over them?
delrem
(9,688 posts)Everyone knows that it's a bipartisan train-wreck.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)stated that the authors of the bill did not have the intention to allow the NSA to collect all the data as it has been doing.
So the Republicans should take the lead in clarifying that the Patriot Act should be interpreted so as to comply most definitely with the restrictions of the Fourth Amendment.
The Patriot Act was their baby. They are responsible for being sure that the agencies relying on it do so in compliance with the Constitution.
delrem
(9,688 posts)The Democrats ought to have taken the matter out of the total * hands, and fixed it.
But they didn't. The Democratic party is complicit right to the top.
JDPriestly
(57,936 posts)I am supporting Bernie Sanders and also support Elizabeth Warren. That is what I can do about changing the Democratic Party into a party that will represent the interests of the American people and "fix" the Patriot Act.
We have to free our party from corporate debt.
Volaris
(10,275 posts)Well there's your problem.
a kennedy
(29,723 posts)SamKnause
(13,110 posts)The greatest threat this country faces are Republican
politicians, those who vote them into office, and their wealthy
donors who instruct and finance their destructive, dangerous, deadly agendas.
They are the true enemies of the U.S. !!!
They are the true enemies of global peace !!!
A Little Weird
(1,754 posts)I really thought we were going to get rid of him this time.
Octafish
(55,745 posts)Wonder what they know about him?
Volaris
(10,275 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)Frank Church was a patriot, a hero and a statesman, truly a great American.
The guy also led the last real investigation of CIA, NSA and FBI. When it came to NSA Tech circa 1975, he definitely knew what he was talking about:
I dont want to see this country ever go across the bridge. I know the capability that is there to make tyranny total in America, and we must see it that this agency and all agencies that possess this technology operate within the law and under proper supervision, so that we never cross over that abyss. That is the abyss from which there is no return.
-- Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) FDR New Deal, Liberal, Progressive, World War II combat veteran. A brave man, the NSA was turned on him. Coincidentally, he narrowly lost re-election a few years later.
And what happened to Church, for his trouble to preserve Democracy:
SOURCE: http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=frank_church_1
From GWU's National Security Archives:
"Disreputable if Not Outright Illegal": The National Security Agency versus Martin Luther King, Muhammad Ali, Art Buchwald, Frank Church, et al.
Newly Declassified History Divulges Names of Prominent Americans Targeted by NSA during Vietnam Era
Declassification Decision by Interagency Panel Releases New Information on the Berlin Crisis, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Panama Canal Negotiations
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 441
Posted September 25, 2013
Originally Posted - November 14, 2008
Edited by Matthew M. Aid and William Burr
Washington, D.C., September 25, 2013 During the height of the Vietnam War protest movements in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the National Security Agency tapped the overseas communications of selected prominent Americans, most of whom were critics of the war, according to a recently declassified NSA history. For years those names on the NSA's watch list were secret, but thanks to the decision of an interagency panel, in response to an appeal by the National Security Archive, the NSA has released them for the first time. The names of the NSA's targets are eye-popping. Civil rights leaders Dr. Martin Luther King and Whitney Young were on the watch list, as were the boxer Muhammad Ali, New York Times journalist Tom Wicker, and veteran Washington Post humor columnist Art Buchwald. Also startling is that the NSA was tasked with monitoring the overseas telephone calls and cable traffic of two prominent members of Congress, Senators Frank Church (D-Idaho) and Howard Baker (R-Tennessee).
SNIP...
Another NSA target was Senator Frank Church, who started out as a moderate Vietnam War critic. A member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee even before the Tonkin Gulf incident, Church worried about U.S. intervention in a "political war" that was militarily unwinnable. While Church voted for the Tonkin Gulf resolution, he later saw his vote as a grave error. In 1965, as Lyndon Johnson made decisions to escalate the war, Church argued that the United States was doing "too much," criticisms that one White House official said were "irresponsible." Church had been one of Johnson's Senate allies but the President was angry with Church and other Senate critics and later suggested that they were under Moscow's influence because of their meetings with Soviet diplomats. In the fall of 1967, Johnson declared that "the major threat we have is from the doves" and ordered FBI security checks on "individuals who wrote letters and telegrams critical of a speech he had recently delivered." In that political climate, it is not surprising that some government officials eventually nominated Church for the watch list.[10]
SOURCE: http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB441/
I wonder if Sen. Richard Schweiker (R-PA), a liberal Republican, also got the treatment from NSA?
I think that the report, to those who have studied it closely, has collapsed like a house of cards, and I think the people who read it in the long run future will see that. I frankly believe that we have shown that the [investigation of the] John F. Kennedy assassination was snuffed out before it even began, and that the fatal mistake the Warren Commission made was not to use its own investigators, but instead to rely on the CIA and FBI personnel, which played directly into the hands of senior intelligence officials who directed the cover-up. Senator Richard Schweiker on Face the Nation in 1976.
Lost to History NOT