No Spying Immunity! Stop Senate Bill 2844!
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Originally published at:
http://www.buzzflash.com/articles/contributors/1677
Senate votes Tuesday, 7/8
FISA Amendment Just In Time To Steal Election
By Elliot D. Cohen
Senate Democrats and Republicans alike are now poised to pass H.R. 6304, known as the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, a bill touted by both House and Senate leaders to be a compromise proposal to prior Senate Bill 2248. Unfortunately, H.R. 6304 may give the Bush administration, in its last months, the ammunition it needs to hijack the 2008 presidential election.
It has been known for some time that, since 2001, the Bush administration has conducted mass surveillance of the email and telephone calls made by American citizens. All electronic messages passing through switches in the US, regardless of whether they were international or domestic communications, have been systematically intercepted and screened by the National Security Agency (NSA).
Technologies, which were installed at major hubs of telecommunication companies throughout the nation copy and deposit all electronic messages into a giant NSA computer network. The NSA then uses complex algorithms to parse through these messages using matching criteria such as key words, phone numbers, and dates, and linking these data to further data--anything from credit card and bank records to movie rentals.
"This case resembles
"black box" voting where once the votes are cast, it is impossible to
see what happens to them. . . . But now we may be faced with a potentially more
ominous strain of the black box problem: votes that disappear into the
void of cyberspace only to reappear at the other end of a wire in an
altered state."
H.R. 6304 does not, on the face of it, require that these complex
algorithms that are used to parse through our electronic messages be
examined and approved by a FISA Court. The role of the FISA Court seems
to be limited to approving the general design of the software used in
conducting acquisitions of information.
This consists of
reviewing the authorizations made by the Attorney General and Director
of National Intelligence to see if this general design satisfactorily
conforms to "minimization procedures," that is, that they take
reasonable precautions to avoid targeting American citizens. However,
without access to the algorithm itself, as well as to the actual source
code and a representative sampling of the data that ultimately get
caught in its electronic net, there is no way to confirm that the
actual procedures pass legal muster and are constitutional.
The Act does require that the certification sent to the FISA Court "include the procedures adopted in accordance with subsections (d) [targeting procedures] and (e) [minimization procedures]." However, if this requirement is to have teeth, then it must be interpreted very strictly to include demonstrable evidence that the algorithm satisfies the said standards. Otherwise, the new rule is tantamount to a blank check to invade the privacy of every American citizen.
CONTINUED: Click Here to Read Complete Article
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Elliot D. Cohen, Ph.D., is a political analyst and media critic. His most recent book is "The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into a Dictatorship." He was first-prize winner of the 2007 Project Censored Award.
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Source: http://www.nsawatch.org/scandal.htm
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