IT'S ABOUT POWER, NOT SECURITY

Pres. Fredo wants to greatly expand the NSA's legal ability to wiretap and the kicker is there would be no outside oversight of the program.

A Push to Rewrite Wiretap Law
White House Seeks Warrantless Authority From Congress
By Ellen Nakashima
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, August 1, 2007; Page A04

The Bush administration is pressing Congress this week for the authority to intercept, without a court order, any international phone call or e-mail between a surveillance target outside the United States and any person in the United States.

It would also give the attorney general sole authority to order the interception of communications for up to one year as long as he certifies that the surveillance is directed at a person outside the United States.

We often get the malarkey that the FISA Court isn't fast enough to respond to terrorist threats but according to a former presiding judge of the Court, that's nonsense and the judge goes on to make a good point about executive power.

Ex-Surveillance Judge Criticizes Warrantless Taps

By Michael J. Sniffen
Associated Press
Sunday, June 24, 2007; Page A07


"We have to understand you can fight the war [on terrorism] and lose everything if you have no civil liberties left when you get through fighting the war," said Royce C. Lamberth, a U.S. District Court judge in Washington and a former presiding judge of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, speaking at the American Library Association's annual convention.

Lamberth, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, expressed his opposition to letting the executive branch decide on its own which people to spy on in national security cases.

The judge said it is proper for executive branch agencies to conduct such surveillance. "But what we have found in the history of our country is that you can't trust the executive," he said.

Here's the part about how fast the Court can work:

Lamberth was stuck in a carpool lane near the Pentagon when a hijacked jet slammed into it that day. With his car enveloped in smoke, he called marshals to help him get into the District.
By the time officers reached him, Lambert said, "I had approved five FISA coverages [warrants] on my cellphone." He also approved other warrants at his home at 3 a.m. and on Saturdays.

"In a time of national emergency like that, changes have to be made in procedures. We changed a number of FISA procedures," Lamberth said.

Normal FISA warrant applications run 40 to 50 pages, but in the days after Sept. 11, the judge said, he issued orders "based on the oral briefing by the director of the FBI to the chief judge of the FISA court."


In another article, Lambert gives us this tidbit:

Judge Discusses Details of Work On Secret Court
He Takes Issue With NSA's Wiretaps

By Walter Pincus
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, June 26, 2007; Page A04

At 3 a.m. on Aug. 8, 1998, the day after the bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, the chief judge of a special court that supervises applications under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act was awakened at home in order to approve five wiretaps, including one of Osama bin Laden's former secretary in Texas.

"Those five wiretaps turned out to be very productive," U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth said Saturday during an unusually open discussion of his work at the helm of the FISA court. Wadih el-Hage, the bin Laden aide, was tried and convicted in the bombings in 2001, and "all the evidence from those wiretaps that I authorized that night were used at the trial," Lamberth said.