USA Today: Congress keeps itself, public in the dark on surveillance

http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/editorials/2006-06-14-our-view_x.htm?csp=34

With its wiretapping of international phone calls and collecting a database of domestic phone records, the Bush administration is busy watching for evildoers.

Today, six months after The New YorkTimes disclosed that the National Security Agency has been wiretapping international phone calls of U.S. residents without court orders, and one month after USA TODAY revealed that the NSA has been compiling a huge database of domestic phone records, Congress is poised for its first action.

Apparently not content to ignore Congress, the White House is now trying to run it. In an angry letter to Cheney, Specter said he had been advised that "the telephone companies had been instructed not to provide any information" to his committee.

Congress has a right and a responsibility to learn about these secret programs — whether the vice president likes it or not. The wiretapping program might involve an unlawful expansion of executive power carried out under a cloak of secrecy. The call records program also raises constitutional questions, as well as the likelihood that such a vast database will inevitably be abused, by this administration or a future one.

seems to escape most mainstream analysts

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The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to consider a bill by its chairman, Arlen Specter, R-Pa., that would consolidate a gaggle of lawsuits challenging the constitutionality of the warrantless wiretapping program. It would send the issue to a special court created by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which approves — or in some rare instances denies — wiretap requests.

Specter's goals are admirable. He wants to ensure that challenges to these programs get their day in court and are not dismissed on technical grounds. But his measure would do more harm than good. It appears to embrace the president's dubious claim that he has the constitutional authority to order wiretaps without the FISA court's approval.

By explicitly stating that the president might have such authority, Congress not only would fail to guard its constituents' privacy, it would also deepen the risk. Its actions could influence the court's thinking on the legality of the wiretaps. (An earlier version of the bill would have retroactively shielded officials who carried out the program from prosecution, raising the question: If the program is perfectly legal, as the administration insists, why would anyone need amnesty?)

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Wow. Considering Congress has been in session like a month of that six months, this whole thing is moving along swiftly.

Amazing that they just continue to stonewall and wrest control of the country.

tight. Security is going backwards at airports. The enemy of the US gov't is NOT Al Qaeda. They are tracking domestic telephone calls. Their building detention centers for the big group of immagrants coming into the country - or for us. They are hiding information from us. The FBI is spending a lot of it's time looking at us. We are the enemy our own gov't is preparing for.

You've summed the whole issue up in one sentence.