Privacy Digest

TLF: Limiting Terrorist Surveillance:There was an interesting hearing on “Warrantless Surveillance and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act: The Role of Checks and Balances in Protecting Americans’ Privacy Rights” in the House Judiciary Committee on Wednesday. Former Rep. Bob Barr (R-GA) claimed that,

Essentially, thanks to this law, the government has potentially carved out from Fourth-Amendment protection an entire class of communication – electronic communications going to a person outside the United States, or coming to a person inside the United States. There is — and here again contrary to the public missives by the Administration and its supporters — no requirement whatsoever, implied or express, that even one of the parties to such category of communications subject to warrantless surveillance would first have to have any known or even suspect connection with any terrorist or other targeted group or activity.

Barr also repeated the warning of Judge Royce Lamberth, that “you can fight the war [on terrorism] and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war…”

But no one — George Bush included — is advocating that …

Chairman John Conyers, Jr. (D-MI) meanwhile identified three things he wants before he will support a renewal of FISA when it expires in six months:

(Read Original Article - Via The Technology Liberation Front .)