Please, Dems. Don’t capitulate on this one, too! WaPo:

“[Bush’s proposed rewrite of FISA is] the president’s surveillance program on steroids,” said Jim Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology. Dempsey said that under the new law the government would no longer have to allege that one party to the call was a member of al-Qaeda or another terrorist group. An unstated facet of the program is that anyone the foreigner is calling inside the United States, as long as that person is not the primary target, would also be wiretapped.

“They’re hiding the ball here,” said Caroline Fredrickson, director of the ACLU’s Washington legislative office. “What the administration is really going after is the Americans. Even if the primary target is overseas, they want to be able to wiretap Americans without a warrant.”

Of… course…. they … do….

Will the zombie-like Beltway Dems march over the cliff toward which Bush is directing them? James Risen (who broke the warrantless surveillance program after the Times suppressed it until Bush was safely elected:

Under pressure from President Bush, Democratic leaders in Congress are scrambling to pass legislation this week to expand the government’s electronic wiretapping powers.

Democratic leaders have expressed a new willingness to work with the White House to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act to make it easier for the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on some purely foreign telephone calls and e-mail. Such a step now requires court approval.

It would be the first change in the law since the Bush administration’s program of wiretapping without warrants became public in December 2005.

In the past few days, Mr. Bush and Mike McConnell, director of national intelligence, have publicly called on Congress to make the change before its August recess, which could begin this weekend. Democrats appear to be worried that if they block such legislation, the White House will depict them as being weak on terrorism.

One question: Why would the Democrats trust anything Bush says?

Or do they want the power themselves after 2008?

NOTE Via the good Glenn, an excellent review of the legislation from Wired:

Government Presses to Turn Internet into Giant Spy Machine; AP Reports Citizen’s Rights Being Protected
In the age of the Internet, a significant number of those conversations, even between foreigners in the same country, now come through switches in the United States. So the Administration wants the right to build spy bases inside the nation’s domestic communication infrastructure and be able to listen in on any email conversation or phone call that it suspects is overseas to overseas, regardless if any American is involved.

For another, the Administration’s proposed bill would let the government order the nation’s telecoms and internet providers to open their networks so that the government can build out spying complexes on their networks. The law would only require that foreign intelligence gathering be a “significant purpose” of the installation. So in essence the government could order the nation’s backbone providers to let the government turn the internet into one giant monitoring device and examine internet traffic for signs of copyright infringement, domestic political dissent, pornography and parking ticket violators, so long as the NSA’s computer algorithms also scan packets for the term “Al Qaeda.”

The Administration now claims it needs a massive rewriting of the nation’s spying laws because some foreigner to foreigner communications pass through switches in the United States. 

Did they just discover this? No. 

Has the Administration known about this hole in the numerous times it has pushed Congress to increase the government’s spying powers in the last 6 years? Certainly. 

Why is it an emergency now? Could it be because the Administration has never moved to have a rational debate about how to grab these communications without sweeping in the Constitiutionally-protected communications of Americans, BECAUSE the administration has been secretly sitting on those switches, monitoring Americans and foreigners alike? 

Nah. Never happen.

The Administration caused this crisis and now is pushing for way broader “fixes” than it needs for the supposed hole at hand.

Why this country is even contemplating allowing the nation’s intelligence services to transform the internet and the phone networks into the world’s largest bugging device, simply because this Administration’s foreign policy has fed, rather than crushed, a pathetic, religious death cult?