Government Doesn't Need Warrants For Eavesdropping

The backlash on this should be fun. I can see all the posts about the death of the 5th Amendment again from people who've never read the 5th Amendment, and more whining without any historical perspective. Best part is that those decrying fowl for being able to listen to international calls are going to propose opening more crates in our ports ... as if there is a difference.

NY Times:

President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.

“This more or less legalizes the N.S.A. program,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.

We've been hearing for a while now (falsely) that the government eavesdropping program was "spying on Americans" whenever they made a call. This was completely untrue, and a well known lie. The government can only monitor calls where one party was outside the US, and a terror suspect. The new law makes that clear as day.

By changing the legal definition of what is considered “electronic surveillance,” the new law allows the government to eavesdrop on those conversations without warrants — latching on to those giant switches — as long as the target of the government’s surveillance is “reasonably believed” to be overseas.

For example, if a person in Indianapolis calls someone in London, the National Security Agency can eavesdrop on that conversation without a warrant, as long as the N.S.A.’s target is the person in London.

So we can stop the lying now.

Just to calm the nerves of you paranoid folks out there ... it's just a stop-gap and expires in six months.