Senate will debate H.R. 5949, the FISA Amendments Act Reauthorization Act of 2012, on Thursday, December 27 for five hours.
The bill would reauthorize FISA for five years without any changes.
The Senate will vote on the following four amendments (these are summaries as final text isn't yet available):
Leahy Amendment
Amendment would force the government to disclose a public, unclassified summary of the secret reports it sends to select members of Congress every year about how the surveillance program actually works.
Merkley Amendment
Amendment would compel the government to declassify FISA court opinions, or at least offer a declassified summary. The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court approves requests for surveillance on suspected foreign agents in the US and interprets the scope of the US government's surveillance laws. This takes place entirely in secret, and only a few members of Congress and their staff members have the authority to view these laws in their entirety. As it stands, Americans have no idea how broadly (or narrowly) the secret court has interpreted these laws.
Paul Amendment
Amendment would explicitly spell out that the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unwarranted searches and seizures extends to third party searches conducted by NSA and other intelligence agencies.
Wyden Amendment
Amendment would compel disclosure of how many Americans have been swept up in the National Security Agency's surveillance of foreign targets. Wyden requested this information from the NSA and the NSA responded with this must read:
The NSA Inspector General provided a classified response on 6 June 2012. I defer to his conclusion that obtaining such an estimate was beyond the capacity of his office and dedicating sufficient additional resources would likely impede the NSA's mission. He further stated that his office and NSA leadership agreed that an IG review of the sort suggested would itself violate the privacy of U.S. persons.
Ron Paul's statement on September 12, 2012 when the House passed H.R. 5949:
See how your Representative voted here:Mr. Speaker: I rise in strong opposition to the reauthorization of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, as it violates the Fourth Amendment of our Constitution. Supporters of this reauthorization claim that the United States will be more vulnerable if the government is not allowed to monitor citizens without a warrant. I would argue that we are more vulnerable if we do allow the government to monitor Americans without a warrant. Nothing makes us more vulnerable than allowing the Constitution to be violated.
Passage of this reauthorization will allow the government to listen in to our phone calls, read our personal correspondence, and monitor our activities without obtaining a warrant. Permission for surveillance obtained by a secret FISA court can cover broad categories of targets rather than specific individuals, as the Fourth Amendment requires. Americans who communicate with someone who is suspected of being affiliated with a target group can be monitored without a warrant. The only restriction is that Americans on US soil are not to be the primary targets of the surveillance. That is hardly reassuring. US intelligence agencies are not to target Americans on US soil, but as we all know telephone conversations usually take place between two people. If on the other end of the international conversation is an American, his conversation is monitored, recorded, transcribed, and kept for future use.
According to press reports earlier this summer, the Director of National Intelligence admitted to the Senate that "on at least one occasion" US intelligence collection agencies violated the Constitutional prohibitions on unlawful search and seizure. Without possibility for oversight of the process and with the absence of transparency, we will never know just how many Americans have been wiretapped without warrants.
Creating a big brother surveillance state here is no solution to threats that may exist from abroad. I urge my colleagues to reject these FISA amendments and return to the Constitution.
http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2012/roll569.xml
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Originally Posted by anaconda
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