Obama correspondence

Here's a reply I received on Friday, to an email I sent to Senator Obama awhile ago

Dear L____:

Thank you for advising me of your concern about the Bush Administration's use of Executive power. I share your frustration that Congress has acquiesced too much in the President's use of his Executive authority and agree this must change if we are going to get the country back on the right track.

The President and his advisors have shown a willingness to at worst ignore, and at best stretch, the limits of the law in countless instances. But the elections last November have given Congress the opportunity to restore balance within the Federal government.

Under its new chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy, the Senate Judiciary Committee for the first time in nearly six years exercised its responsibility to investigate and expose wrongdoing in the U.S. Department of Justice. As a result, Attorney General Gonzales was forced to resign over the politically motivated firing of U.S. Attorneys. In addition, the faults of a constitutionally ambiguous domestic surveillance program were exposed.

Also, this Congress has forced the President to defend his Iraq policy. While we are not making progress as quickly as I would like in removing our troops from Iraq, public sentiment has turned against the President's war in Iraq.

In the coming weeks, Congress will have additional opportunities to challenge the ill-conceived policies and heavy handed practices of this administration. With regard to intelligence gathering, Congress has seized the opportunity to do what the President would not. I have been working with my colleagues to craft an effective surveillance program that both combats terrorism and contains meaningful judicial review of wiretapping. This would most effectively address the tension between the battle against terrorism and the rule of law.

Although we have a long way to go to restore the correct constitutional balance between the President and Congress, I believe we are on the right track. However, like you, I remain unsatisfied. I will continue to use my position in Congress to oppose those policies and practices with which I do not agree. My focus is on doing what I can in this environment to address the many challenges facing America and Illinois, some of which will likely test us like never before. Our ultimate objective should always be to get this country back on the right track. While that challenge may seem more daunting as the days pass, I am confident that we can meet it.

Thank you for writing and please stay in touch in the days ahead.

Sincerely,

Barack Obama

United States Senator

Telecom immunity- voted down in House

Yeah!! Surprise - the US House passed a bill that does NOT include telecom immunity. Woo hoo!
All the details here,and here and here. Finally they stopped caving! Today I have finally started to almost admire Speaker Pelosi. They did the right thing, thank God.

Abortion & Torture

I think this is an interesting post (h/t Andrew Sullivan) . Read all the comments too -some smart people over there... will have to go back and visit this site, very philosophical... I've thought a lot about this recently, wondering to myself "why" am I so obsessed with this torture issue? I had a feeling like "I bet this is how pro-life protesters feel about their cause... like, WHY aren't more people UPSET about this??!! "

" Yet--have I missed something? I did, after all, attempt to separate the "monstrousness" of an act from its ultimate evil. I believe, after all, that wrong-doing requires intention. Killing someone accidentally is a fault, but not the same wrong as killing someone intentionally. Is it different, then, for a woman who does not believe she is killing a human being to abort a nascent child than for a soldier to torture someone? I think it is. Dramatically so. Many women believe they are acting out of compassion (however mistakenly); is it possible for a torturer to hold similar beliefs? To put it poetically: how blackened are the souls of all involved in torture? How blackened are the souls of all involved in abortion?

I think torture is the most manifestly destructive to all human goodness, because it is less possible to commit the crime through simple error. It requires significant subversion of a person's humanity to make him into a torturer (even if it is frighteningly easy to do), whereas it requires significant attention to specific arguments to convince someone of the evil of abortion. As such, I think we need to pay greater attention to obliterating all instances of torture than to obliterating instances of abortion."

RTWT! This also reminds me about a book I finished a couple of weeks ago..."Fear Up Harsh: An Army Interrogator's Dark Journey Through Iraq". The author Tony Lagouranis details the devolution of torture and how easily it spreads... how it doesn't WORK to get good information and mainly how it had such a horrible effect on his psyche knowing that he was capable of evil in these circumstances. The soldiers have to deal with this there and when they come back.... Good summary story from the Chicago Reader

Verizon and I will no longer be doing business together

Now I feel morally compelled to drop Verizon. (Scott Horton, Harpers)

" And all of this occurs as another engineer has come forward to blow the whistle on the lawless surveillance of telecommunications by the Bush National Surveillance State.

Babak Pasdar, a computer security consultant, has gone public about his discovery of a mysterious “Quantico Circuit” while working for an unnamed major wireless carrier. Pasdar believes that this circuit gives the U.S. government direct, unfettered access to customers voice calls and data packets. These claims echo the disclosures from retired AT&T technician Mark Klein, who has described a “secret room” in an AT&T facility.

The name of the wireless carrier that collaborated in the installation of the “Quantico Circuit,” allowing the Bush Administration to spy on every phone conversation, text message and other communications it transmits, with no warrants or prior approval? Verizon.

Michael McConnell will of course insist that the intelligence community is looking only at foreign communications involving suspect terrorists. And that statement is a lie. In fact the technology employed allows the indiscriminate filtering of all communications of all types. And as to what portion is actually examined with any particularity, on that particular point, we’re told “trust us.” But why? I suggest we repose our trust elsewhere, namely: in the Constitution.

Surveillance is not outlawed. But it is bound to a system of constraints and checks. The Administration must justify its targets and must be subject to the oversight of a magistrate. That is what the Founding Fathers provided. And there is no reason to move from this system; what has transpired over the last six years provides only more evidence of its wisdom.

Damn! I just had a conversation about this a week ago with my Verizon rep on the phone when I was trying to get a text/data plan added to J's phone on our family plan. He didn't know anything about it so I filled him in. Since I knew Qwest was the only telecom who put up a stink I figured Verizon was one of them, however I didn't know for sure so I kept my head in the sand as long as I could. This is going to be a really tangled web to unweave but I have to do it. Their loss of a great customer for 7+ years, monthly bills always >$120 (mostly expensible business calls & data plan for my Treo. Too bad, so sad. Follow the law corporate overlords! So much for the free market... I'm taking my business elsewhere. Why worry about bad press from lawsuits when your business practices will drive your customers away first.

"We live in the age of the Great Betrayal, in an age in which too few are willing to state the obvious. There is still time to check the progress of tyrannical power, but the hour grows late, and the sounds of alarm no longer seem to register with a somnolent populace."

NSA Domestic Spying

So its all here in the left-wing ;~) Wall Street Journal...

" Two former officials familiar with the data-sifting efforts said they work by starting withsome sort of lead, like a phone number or Internet address. In partnership with the FBI,the systems then can track all domestic and foreign transactions of people associated withthat item -- and then the people who associated with them, and so on, casting a gradually wider net. An intelligence official described more of a rapid-response effect: If a person suspected of terrorist connections is believed to be in a U.S. city -- for instance, Detroit, a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans -- the government's spy systems may be directed to collect and analyze all electronic communications into and out of the city.

The haul can include records of phone calls, email headers and destinations, data on financial transactions and records of Internet browsing. The system also would collect information about other people, including those in the U.S., who communicated with people in Detroit.

The information doesn't generally include the contents of conversations or emails. But it can give such transactional information as a cellphone's location, whom a person is calling, and what Web sites he or she is visiting. For an email, the data haul can include the identities of the sender and recipient and the subject line, but not the content of the message.

Intelligence agencies have used administrative subpoenas issued by the FBI -- which don't need a judge's signature -- to collect and analyze such data, current and former intelligence officials said. If that data provided "reasonable suspicion" that a person, whether foreign or from the U.S., was linked to al Qaeda, intelligence officers could eavesdrop under the NSA's Terrorist Surveillance Program."

So what is "REASONABLE SUSPICION"? Having an Arabic sounding last name? What I'm even more worried about is oh I don't know, law enforcement officers/politicians having a reasonable suspicion to link each other with a foreign government or hmmm maybe even a prostitute that can allieve a certain NY governor's stress illegally. Besides wanting to fight terrorism, its also all about who is open to bribery and ruining careers etc.

The Republicans aren't going to be concerned about privacy until a Democrat is in the White House... then maybe they'll start worrying about who is spying on whom. Don't get me wrong, I certainly don't think the Dems should have this surveillance power either. This could get very nasty and we wouldn't even know about it... politicians would 'retire' or be humiliated in public... an effective coup d' etat. How could whistleblowers get information to government officials that could publicize it if they know their phone and emails are going to be spied on? Deep freeze on democracy if you ask me.... not to mention the 4th amendment.

This makes me so angry!

"Ignorance is Strength" (Orwell, 1984)

This is the cognitive dissonance we need to recognize and pay attention to:

" In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president -- and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers....

When reduced to its purest form, Mukasey's Paradox is that government officials cannot violate the law -- but that because executive privilege is also a law, it's sometimes necessary to violate the law in order to uphold the law."

RTWT! (LA Times Editorial by Jonathan Turley)

He's right, its completely twisted. Wake up Winstons!

FISA perspectives: Now vs. Then (1977)

Glen Greenwald -Salon.com

"Back then -- with a relentless, ideologically extreme Evil Empire threatening our very existence and our freedoms -- GOP fear-mongering was brushed aside. The political establishment overwhelmingly concluded that warrantless eavesdropping presented intolerable dangers, and many believed that FISA's "safeguards" were actually woefully inadequate. Telecoms lobbied on behalf of their customers' privacy rights and against being drawn into government surveillance. Editorial boards were almost unanimously on the side of greater oversight on presidential spying.

That all seems so quaint. The mindset which back then defined the radical, pro-surveillance right-wing fringe has now become the sweet spot of our political establishment. The GOP fear-mongering that back then was laughed away today dominates our discourse and shapes our laws. The secret FISA court which back then was viewed even by some conservatives as an extreme threat to civil liberties is now the outermost liberal viewpoint, one that is about to be ejected altogether by the Democratic Congress from the mainstream spectrum. The political establishment today knows only one viewpoint: literally no limits are tolerable on the power of the loving, protective Surveillance State."

It appears that the Dems are going to cave... Now what?!

Letter to the Trib Editor re FISA / PAA

I love the Trib but their editorials make me so angry sometimes... particularly today:

"If there ever were a time when this nation sought to be certain its spy agencies were operating at peak efficiency, this is it. Actually, there isn't a time when we'd want anything less. But something less is what we have at the moment, thanks to the Democratic leaders of the U.S. House.

Last week, the House left on recess without voting to renew a crucial terrorist surveillance bill. What does that mean to America's spies? It won't immediately interrupt wiretapping cases against terror targets already approved. But it could prevent authorities from opening new cases under the expanded powers they've had since last August. Any new targets now will be forced to go through an earlier, more cumbersome standard."

Here's my reply- I just emailed in to ctc-TribLetter@Tribune.com :

To the Editor:

Regarding your editorial “A dangerous spy caper” (Feb 22) you ask the US House not to “play chicken” with the nation’s security and renew the Protect America Act with provisions for Telecom immunity. Perhaps you might consider that the President is the one “playing chicken” with our security? If he truly felt that the American People were imminently endangered by the expiration of PAA he would have signed the bill without the telecom immunity provisions. Are the telecom corporations' legal bills more important than our collective safety? Would they really drag their feet to comply with future legal requests? If so then that would be a future enforcement issue the executive branch has a duty to carry out. But perhaps the critical issue in this legislation for President Bush is his hope that no legal cases can be pursued whereby the public could learn the true depth of the surveillance dragnet he asked the Telecoms to put in place… This is not necessarily about “punishing” telecom companies that did what they were asked to do, its fundamentally about finding out WHAT they were asked to do. It’s about the Executive Branch of Government protecting itself from the checks and balances of Congressional and Judicial review, not just about protecting the telecoms.

You may call it “playing chicken”, I call it defending the Fourth Amendment from a Big Brother surveillance state. It is the key law American citizens have to protect themselves from Government power. This is what the Fourth Amendment says: “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized”

If the Executive Branch will not uphold this part of the Constitution because they view it as insufficient to fight terrorism in the 21st Century electronic frontier, then they need to step forward and advocate amending the Constitution, not just asking for a bad bill that may in effect be unconstitutional anyway.

In our quest for physical safety from terrorists are we willing to live with the subdued but real terror of a weakened Constitution, weakened habeas corpus laws, and a government that has recently admitted to torture? These are the other “terrors” we need to be vigilant against while in pursuit of terrorists. The democratic freedom provided in the 4th Amendment is in essence one of the most highly valued democratic freedoms Americans ask our Government (all 3 branches, including the our Soldiers in Iraq) to fight FOR, not against. Let's not take it for granted. If this is important to you, tell your Congressman or Congresswoman.

Who is the Terrorist?

re FISA "Protect America Act" expiration & telecom immunity.... "Ditto"

(linked from Scott Horton at Harpers.org )

Fingerprinting Americans who travel to the EU

The European Union's top justice official proposed Friday to replicate U.S. border security measures in Europe with plans to fingerprint and electronically record the entry and exit of all visitors to the 27-nation bloc.

Oceana, indeed... its all coming together.

WaPo:
" What for? Does this actually make the world a safer place?"
The Bush administration says it does.

"Not only do we support these measures, we applaud them," said Russ Knocke, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security. "Measures like fingerprint and passenger-data collection can disrupt the ability of terrorists to move easily across international borders. They also serve to protect American citizens traveling overseas."

DHS already has a database of 85 million sets of fingerprints collected, for instance, from U.S. and foreign travelers stopped at the border for criminal violations, or for U.S. citizens adopting a child overseas. The FBI is building a huge biometric database for criminal justice purposes. All are supposed to be built to the same standards so data queries can be easily exchanged.
The "common ambition across the Atlantic," the European official said, is to achieve "as much interoperability as possible," through common technical standards for fingerprints and facial images..... "

I really don't want to do this when I travel.... The Euros already do when they come here...

We're screwed on Privacy

We're screwed on Privacy, the Senate caves.





" Analogously, in 1973, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for its work in uncovering the Watergate abuses, and that led to what would have been the imminent bipartisan impeachment of the President until he was forced to resign in disgrace. By stark and depressing contrast, in 2006, Jim Risen, Eric Lichtblau and the NYT won Pulitzer Prizes for their work in uncovering illegal spying on Americans at the highest levels of the Government, and that led to bipartisan legislation to legalize the illegal spying programs and provide full-scale retroactive amnesty for the lawbreakers. That's the difference between a country operating under the rule of law and one that is governed by lawlessness and lawbreaking license for the politically powerful and well-connected. "

RTWT- Glenn Greenwald, Salon.com

Spying on Americans

Kevin Poulson at Wired.com :

As first reported by Wired.com, the software, called a "computer and internet protocol address verifier," is designed to infiltrate a suspect's computer and collect various information, including the IP address, Ethernet MAC addresses, a list of open TCP and UDP ports, running programs, operating system type and serial number, default browser, the registered user of the operating system and the last visited URL, among other things.

That information is sent covertly to an FBI computer in Quantico, Virginia. The CIPAV then monitors and reports on all the target's internet use, logging every IP address to which the machine connects.

While the FBI FOIA official did not remark on the quantity or details of the CIPAV affidavits, it's likely the surveillance requests were granted Through the end of 2004, the court approved 18,761 warrants, and rejected only five. It approved 2,072, in 2005, and 2,181 in 2006, rejecting none. Five were withdrawn before a ruling.

OK everybody - this is really happening.... And these are just the ones they get rubber-stamp "permission" for. Our voices need to be heard to protest this... call your Congressman and Senators.

Michael "Peter & the Wolf" McConnell

Glenn Greenwald rocks!- tell it:



This is really, really scary. We better forget about checks and balances and oversight and restraints of any kind and everything else and just make sure that the President can spy on our emails and telephone calls with no oversight, otherwise Al Qaeda is going to slaughter us in our Homeland. And we also better make sure that telecommunications corporations don't have consequences when they break the law, otherwise we're doomed, because Al Qaeda is coming.



blah blah not scared of Al-Qaeda. Maybe I should be but my ears are closed listening to this crap. I'm more scared of phone and email tapping. I think I'll send an email to my ex-husband's family in Tunisia right now. Hello NSA!

Detention of US Citizens

Chilling !!

The story of how immigration officials decided that a small-town drifter with a Southern accent was an illegal Russian immigrant illustrates how the federal government mistakenly detains and sometimes deports American citizens.

U.S. citizens who are mistakenly jailed by immigration authorities can get caught up in a nightmarish bureaucratic tangle in which they're simply not believed.

An unpublished study by the Vera Institute of Justice, a New York nonprofit organization, in 2006 identified 125 people in immigration detention centers across the nation who immigration lawyers believed had valid U.S. citizenship claims.

This is what always bothered me about the secondary stop before San Onofre going between San Diego and Orange County on the I-5. If you looked like you're not American -- and you don't travel with a birth certificate because you are NOT crossing an international border, because you're in your own country -- who is to say some border agent just could decide you look suspicious and take you in for a day or two until someone finds your birth certificate at home. I guess it didn't bother me as much in the 1990's because I always thought of it more as a drug enforcement check to keep drugs from getting to LA from TJ. But I'm sure its a lot scarier now after 9/11 to go through? (From 1989- 1995 I used drive from SD to Irvine every single week and it just got to be a routine drive through Camp Pendleton with a great view of the ocean. Its the only place left undeveloped on the Southern California coastline. ) But if I were an American of Hispanic ancestory I would feel like I wouldn't want to be driving between SD & LA very often. I think people want to keep the drugs out, but they also don't want to be "profiled" or thought of with suspicion either. Over 1/3 of the population of CA is hispanic.

I was looking for a picture of this sign because its stayed in my memory ( that's how you know you're getting close to the border stop) and found this interesting story about the sign and what it means to different people: http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib/20050410/news_1n10signs.html

Electronic Frontier Foundation, FISA & privacy

I'm on the EFF email list... lot's of stuff going down this week.

Since I already know that Durbin's fighting against the FISA Telecom Immunity Bill I just called a left a message with Obama's offices -at his DC office, his Chicago office, and an #800 they gave me to pass along my feedback to the campaign. This would be a very good way to demonstrate "presidential-ness". No lame excuses to avoid the vote even if they don't have enough votes. He could be in there influencing the vote of his colleagues right now- as could Senator Clinton!

Glenn Greenwald from Salon.com is also on the case!

FISA update

Update on a previous post about FISA :

Received an email form letter today from my "other" IL senator, Dick Durbin :

Dear Ms. Z____:

Thank you for contacting me about amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) and the Protect America Act. I appreciate hearing from you and share your concerns.

President Bush authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to conduct warrantless electronic surveillance of communications made by American citizens living within the United States. At the time of the President's authorization, FISA required the government to seek a warrant from a special court in order to conduct electronic surveillance of communications between American citizens and anyone outside the country. The NSA did not obtain approval from the FISA court or from any other court before initiating its domestic surveillance program.

In August 2007, the Administration proposed amending FISA with a bill known as the Protect America Act. I believed the bill provided too much opportunity for excessive intrusion and potential abuse by the NSA and other intelligence officials. I voted against the measure, as did Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy of Vermont and Intelligence Committee Chairman Jay Rockefeller of West Virginia. Nonetheless, Congress passed the bill and the President signed it into law.

The Protect America Act expires in February 2008, and Congress is now considering legislation that would amend FISA and provide relief to the telecommunications companies that allegedly participated in the NSA program.

I oppose retroactive immunity for these companies. Under current law, telecommunications companies already receive absolute immunity for assisting the government with lawful surveillance. Retroactive immunity would only aid companies that have assisted with unlawful surveillance. During the Senate Judiciary Committee's consideration of the legislation, I opposed an amendment that would have provided these companies with retroactive immunity. This amendment ultimately was rejected by the committee. I supported an amendment adopted by the committee that would prevent reverse targeting of Americans inside the United States without a warrant. The committee's version of the bill and a competing version are now being debated by the full Senate.

I am deeply concerned about the manner in which the Executive Branch has initiated and conducted the NSA surveillance programs. I continue to believe that companies that participated in unlawful surveillance should not receive retroactive immunity. When the President and his Administration order actions such as the surveillance of American citizens, these actions must be conducted in a manner consistent with the rule of law and the Constitution's commitment to civil liberties.

I also will continue to support measures that shed light on any illegal actions that were taken in furtherance of the NSA program. We must work to ensure that government surveillance of American citizens is conducted in a manner consistent with the Constitution, the rule of law, and our security needs.

Thank you again for sharing your views on this issue with me. Please feel free to keep in touch.


Sincerely,
Richard J. Durbin
United States Senator

RJD/tf

P.S. If you are ever visiting Washington, please feel free to join Senator Obama and me at our weekly constituent coffee. When the Senate is in session, we provide coffee and donuts every Thursday at 8:30 a.m. as we hear what is on the minds of Illinoisans and respond to your questions. We would welcome your participation. Please call my D.C. office for more details.

History & Totalitarianism

Very interesting article in WIRED (h/t Instapundit) about a project to find out what was written on all the East German Stasi reports on their people- alot of them were ripped up or shredded and now they are trying to piece them all back together with technology. This caught my attention for 2 reasons. (1) I finished reading "1984" by George Orwell a couple of weeks ago. It was certainly THE most depressing book I've ever read - (... well, OK "Sophie's Choice" is a close second). But I'm really glad I read it because its so relevant to our times,... issues about privacy, terrorism, torture, PRESERVING HISTORY. I'm still absorbing it. It certainly inspires me to NOT take any government actions for granted, benign or otherwise. (2) I loved the movie referenced, "The Lives of Others"! Its a foreign film I rented on Netflix last summer and its one of those that also really sticks with you long after you watch it, Highly Recommended!

" Requests dipped in the late 1990s, but the Oscar-winning 2006 film The Lives of Others, about a Stasi agent who monitors a dissident playwright, seems to have prompted a surge of new applications; 2007 marked a five-year high. "Every month, 6,000 to 8,000 people decide to read their files for the first time," Bormann says. These days, the Stasi Records Office spends $175 million a year and employs 2,000 people.

This being Germany, there's even a special word for it: Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or "coming to terms with the past." It's not self-evident — you could imagine a country deciding, communally, to recover from a totalitarian past by simply gathering all the documents and destroying them. In fact, in 1990 the German press and citizen committees were wracked by debate over whether to do just that. Many people, however, suspected that former Stasi agents and ex-informants were behind the push to forgive and forget.

By preserving and reconstructing the Stasi archives, BStU staffers say they hope to keep history from repeating itself. In November, the first children born after the fall of the wall turned 18. Evidence suggests many of them have serious gaps in their knowledge of the past. In a survey of Berlin high school students, only half agreed that the GDR was a dictatorship. Two-thirds didn't know who built the Berlin Wall."

it was good for me, YES it was!

Oooh Andrew linked to a good one today - a poem! I'm not a big poetry reader but I like them. Credit to Sharon Brogan
http://www.sbpoet.com/2008/01/i-have-this-to.html

READ IT!

This hits at so many levels... its an inside wink and a nod to both the duplicity of women at hiding things from men, but also how its just so cool that women will vote their own conscience when push comes to shove, or push comes to pulling the lever on a voting machine or pulling the curtain in the voting booth to be in the privacy of their own opinions and vote for what they think is best for the country, state, county, town, school district etc etc.

It was good for me! ;~)

Let's say a prayer or a toast to the suffragettes who paved the way!

FISA & Civil Liberties

This is a great piece by Glen Greenwald at Salon.com

" Ultimately, what is most significant about all of this is how the most consequential steps our government takes -- such as endless expansion of its domestic spying programs with literally no oversight and constraints of law -- occur with virtually no public debate or awareness. By contrast, the pettiest of matters -- every sneeze of a campaign aide and every trite, catty gossip item from our moronic travelling press corps -- receives endless, mindless herd-like attention.

The very nature of our country and our government fundamentally transforms step by step, with little opposition. We all were inculcated with the notion that what distinguished our free country from those horrendous authoritarian tyrannies, both right and left, of the Soviet bloc, Latin America and the Middle East were things like executive detentions, torture, secret prisons, spying on their own citizens, unprovoked invasions of sovereign countries, and exemptions from the law for the most powerful -- precisely the abuses which increasingly characterize our government and shape our political values."

I'm really glad Senator Dodd is on the case- a filibuster....ooohh! Yes. We need more "Mr.Smith's" in Washington. Just when I'm wondering what will Obama do.. I check my email and here's the reply to my EFF-prompted email the other day.



Dear L___:

Thank you for contacting me concerning the President’s domestic surveillance program. I appreciate hearing from you.Providing any president with the flexibility necessary to fight terrorism without compromising our constitutional rights can be a delicate balance. I agree that technological advances and changes in the nature of the threat we face may require that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), enacted in 1978, be updated to reflect the reality of the post 9/11 world. But that does not absolve the President of the responsibility to fully brief Congress on the new security challenge and to work cooperatively with Congress to address it.

As you know, Congress has been considering the issue of domestic surveillance since the last Congress. The debate is still ongoing, but the shift in party control on Capitol Hill has clearly had an impact on this critical discussion over the balance of power in our system of government. On January 17, 2007, after conducting its wiretapping program without court approval for over 5 years, the Justice Department announced that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court had approved its program to listen to communications between people in the U.S. and other countries if there is probable cause to believe one or the other is involved in terrorism. Then, in early February, the Justice Department announced that it will give the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees of both chambers of Congress access to previously withheld documents on the NSA program. The congressional committees with jurisdiction over this issue hailed the agreement as a step in the right direction.

However, there is still significant work to be done. Just before the August recess, Congress passed hastily crafted legislation to expand the authority of Attorney General and the director of National Intelligence to conduct surveillance of suspected foreign terrorists without a warrant or real oversight, even if the targets are communicating with someone in the United States. This legislation was signed into law by the President on August 5, 2007, and expires after six months.

Congress is working on reforms to the FISA bill to be enacted before the expiration of the current legislation. On November 15, 2007, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 3773, the “Responsible Electronic Surveillance That is Overseen, Reviewed, and Effective Act of 2007” (RESTORE Act) by a vote of 227-189. The House bill does not provide retroactive immunity for private companies that may have participated in the illegal collection of personal information, nor does it provide immunity for administration officials who may have acted illegally. The Senate committees on Intelligence and the Judiciary have since approved proposals with their own reforms to FISA. The debate over retroactive immunity is still ongoing, and I will support a filibuster should legislation that includes such a provision come to the Senate floor.

The American people understand that new threats require flexible responses to keep them safe, and that our intelligence gathering capability needs to be improved. What they do not want is for the President or the Congress to use these imperatives as a pretext for promoting policies that not only go further than necessary to meet a real threat, but also violate some of the most basic tenets of our democracy. Like most members of Congress, I continue to believe the essential objective of conducting effective domestic surveillance in the war on terror can be achieved without discarding our constitutionally protected civil liberties. I look forward to working with my colleagues in Congress, and with the President, to meet this uniquely American challenge.

Thank you again for writing. Please stay in touch as this debate continues.

Sincerely,
Barack Obama
United States Senator

Reject Retroactive Amnesty for Telecoms in S. 2248, the FISA Amendments Act

Email from the EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) to send to our Senators... this showdown will happen on Monday. Form letter email to Obama & Durbin:

I urge you to vote against retroactive amnesty for telecommunications companies in S. 2248, the FISA Amendments Act.

I urge you to support Senator Dodd and others by allowing them to have a full debate on this issue. On Monday, vote "no" for cloture on the motion to proceed to the FISA bill.

I also urge you to support Senator Leahy, Senator Dodd, and others in an amendment to strip retroactive amnesty from the bill. Legislation updating and amending FISA should not include amnesty for telecoms. Companies involved in the NSA's spying have broken the law, and they should be held accountable.

Lawsuits against the telecommunications companies may be the only way for the victims of illegal spying to see justice for the infringement of their constitutional rights. The telecoms are the first line of defense against governmental abuse -- if Congress sends the message that they are not liable for breaking privacy laws, then their interest in protecting customers' privacy may diminish. Finally, the court is entirely capable of protecting legitimate state secrets, while ensuring that the Americans' whose rights have been violated see justice.

Please vote to preserve the rule of law and Americans' privacy rights. Reject any legislative efforts to give lawbreaking telecoms amnesty.