One Time Review of All Wiretapping Programs Rubberstamps Loss of Privacy

Bush has gotten Specter the one Republican hold out against wiretaps to cave in to a compromise that guts the right to privacy. Instead of obtain the equivalence to a search warrent by submitting each claim, this bill proposes for the government to submit voluntarily each PROGRAM for approval by a secret court. No one will ever find out the results.
Not only that, all the lawsuits brought by customers of the telcoms for giving away their privacy would end up in the same court. The government will be to act in impuny, as they have in the past, regardless of what they say they'll do, what rules they'll follow, they'll do whatever they want and we won't know what happened.
New York Times

Critics of the Bush administration’s program for wiretapping without warrants said Friday that they would fight a new White House agreement to let a secret court decide the constitutionality of the operation, and the compromise plan failed to deter lawmakers from offering up competing proposals of their own.


The agreement, completed Thursday by Senator Arlen Specter after negotiations with the White House, drew immediate scrutiny in Washington, as politicians, national security lawyers and civil rights advocates debated its impact and legal nuances.


The plan would allow the secret court known as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which normally issues wiretapping warrants in terror and spying cases, to review the program and decide on its legality. The proposal would have to be approved by Congress.


Representative Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who has been critical of the National Security Agency wiretapping program, said in an interview Friday that he saw the White House-Specter proposal as “a further abdication” of the role of Congress in setting rules for federal surveillance and wiretapping. “We’re going to let a secret court decide for us what to do?” Mr. Schiff asked. “I think it’s a cop-out.” MORE

The Times told us very little about the right to privacy issue. The Free Press has more details.
Detriot Free Press

Instead, Bush agreed to submit the program one time for court review if Congress enacts the bill as it is. There would be no ongoing oversight, Specter said, and future presidents wouldn't have to submit any future program for review.


The court wouldn't have to make its findings public. If the government kept tabs on people it shouldn't have been monitoring, that could stay secret.


The bill also would give the administration more surveillance tools, including expanding the amount of time the government can conduct wiretaps without a warrant from three days to seven days. It would further authorize roving wiretaps that follow individuals from device to device, Specter said.


In addition, the Associated Press reported that an administration official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the bill would give the attorney general power to consolidate 100 lawsuits filed against the surveillance operations into one case before the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.

Here is a recent example what the government wants to listen into. This is COMINTERN of the 60's and 70's all over again.
U-WIRE.com/Government monitored anti-war group e-mails

Newly surfaced government surveillance reports reveal that the U.S. Department of Defense monitored anti-war and anti-military e-mails sent by University of California-Berkeley students in April.
The students' e-mails contained plans to host a campus protest against the war in Iraq and against the presence of military recruiters on campus.


The reports, released on June 15 following a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the Servicemembers Legal Defense Network in January, contained information copied from an e-mail circulated by student group UC Berkeley Stop the War Coalition regarding a protest planned for April 21, 2005 on Sproul Plaza.


Multiple protest e-mails were submitted to the department's Talon database -- which stores information about potential terrorist threats -- and were subsequently processed, reviewed and stored, according to the report.
The UC Berkeley coalition planned to protest the presence of campus military recruiters at the annual campus career fair. In March 2005, the ASUC passed a resolution charging recruiters' presence violates the campus anti-discrimination policy because of the military's opposition to recruitment of gays and lesbians.


Nothing in the e-mail specifically referenced terrorism or outlined specific plans of the protesters, but the surveillance report stated that there was "a strong potential for a confrontation at this protest given the strong support for anti-war protests and movements in the past."