Reply #105: WA POST: House Approves Broader Surveillance Legislation

[L. Coyote]

House Approves Broader Surveillance Legislation
By Ellen Nakashima and Joby Warrick - Staff Writers
Saturday, August 4, 2007; 10:54 PM
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/04/AR2007080401744.html


The Democratic-controlled House tonight approved and sent to President Bush for his signature legislation his intelligence advisers wrote to enhance their ability to intercept the electronic communications of foreigners without a court order.

The 227 to 183 House vote capped a high-pressure campaign by the White House to change the nation's wiretap law, in which the administration capitalized on Democrats' fears of being branded as weak on terrorism and on a general congressional desire to proceed with an August recess.

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Privacy and civil liberties advocates, and many Democratic lawmakers, complained that the Bush administration's revisions to the law could breach constitutional protections against government intrusion. But the administration, aided by Republican congressional leaders, suggested that a failure to approve what intelligence officials sought could expose the country to a greater risk of terrorist attack.

Democrats facing reelection next year in conservative districts helped propel the bill to quick approval. Adding to the pressures they felt were recent intelligence reports about hreatening new al Qaeda activity in Pakistan and the disclosure by House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) of a secret court ruling earlier this year that complicated the wiretapping of purely foreign communications that happen to pass through a communications node on U.S. soil.

The bill gives the National Security Agency the right to collect such communications in the future without a warrant. But it goes further than that: It also allows the interception and recording of electronic communications involving, at least in part, people "reasonably believed to be outside the United States" without a court's order or oversight.

White House spokesman Tony Fratto emphasized that the bill was not meant to increase eavesdropping on Americans .....