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Friday, September 15, 2006
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A bill radically redefining and expanding the government's ability
to eavesdrop and search the houses of U.S. citizens without court
approval passed a key Senate committee Wednesday, and may be voted on
by the full Senate as early as next week.
By a 10-8 vote, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved SB2453, the National Security Surveillance Act (.pdf), which was co-written by committee's chairman Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Pennsylvania) in concert with the White House.
The committee also passed two other surveillance measures, including
one from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-California), one of the few senators
to be briefed on the National Security Agency program. Feinstein's
bill, which Specter co-sponsored before submitting another bill,
rebuffs the administration's legal arguments and all but declares the
warrantless wiretapping illegal.
11:47:33 PM 
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Why New Spy Powers Now, Expert Asks.
Why does Congress seem poised to hand over extraordinary new wiretapping powers to the President, when just months ago it was convulsing over the renewal of much more minor tweaks of the Patriot Act?
That's what the hawkish national security law expert Orin Kerr wants to know.
Kerr suggests a few possible answers, including:
Most members of Congress and their staffers don't particularly understand this complex area of law. The intricacies of surveillance law can be just a big blurry mess to them, and they don't fully realize the scope of the NSA bill.
Other possibilities, according to Kerr, are that, unlike Congress, the Administration knows what its doing, that people are tired of hearing about anti-terror spying, and that the press over-hyped the Patriot Act and first mis-described the NSA bill as a "compromise".
The whole post is definitely worth your time, and the comments are pretty smart too, until you get to the guy who suggests sending a certain federal judge to Guantanamo.
[27B Stroke 6]
11:45:19 PM
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WIPO Broadcasters Treaty: Who Cares About Consensus? Thanks to our friends at EFF, CPTech and IP Justice, we got excellent reports covering this week[base ']s meeting of the WIPO Standing Committee on Copyrights and Related Rights (SCCR) on the WIPO Broadcasting Treaty. According to those reports and those of others attending, our side did a great job of moving countries closer to the position PK and its allies have taken: that should there be a broadcasting treaty, it should only protect against signal theft, and should not provide IP-like protection for a broadcast signal. This in turn led to a very long series of interventions in opposition to moving the treaty to a diplomatic conference, which is the final step towards approval. Even the US delegation, which had been somewhat supportive of the treaty in the past, opposed moving towards a diplomatic conference at this time.
But it was all for naught. At the eleventh hour, SCCR Chairman Jukka Liedes of Finland made a recommendation for a diplomatic conference on the treaty in summer 2007, essentially prohibited any futher discussion and gaveled the meeting to an end, declaring the recommendation adopted. Our side is still in shock.
Where do we go from here? The SCCR[base ']s proposal will be considered by the WIPO General Assembly at the end of the month, and most expect that the General Assembly will vote to approve the proposal. But that is far from the end of the line. The disagreement over the scope of the treaty is not going away. There will be yet another draft treaty that will be discussed (and undoubtedly fought over) at the next SCCR meeting in November. And according to reports, the diplomatic conference is scheduled to be 3 weeks long - which should be enough time for our side to either build a consensus against the bill or for a signal theft approach. read more [Public Knowledge - Policy Blog]
11:28:57 PM
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© Copyright 2006 Paul Hardwick.
Last update: 10/1/06; 4:30:01 AM.
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