FISA Amendments Act of 2008

Floor Speech

FISA AMENDMENTS ACT OF 2008 -- (Senate - July 09, 2008)

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Ms. CANTWELL. Mr. President, I rise today to express my strong disappointment with the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, H.R. 6304. While proponents of this bill have claimed this bill was designed to monitor foreign-to-foreign communications that pass through the U.S. without a warrant, the bill actually goes much further--providing a broad expansion of authority to conduct domestic surveillance.

We all want to protect our country's national security interests and protect Americans from those who would do us harm, but to do so without accountability or without adequate checks and balances is contrary to the vision of our Founding Fathers.

I recognize that some changes have been made to this bill over the past 6 months but those cosmetic changes have failed to adequately protect the privacy rights of innocent Americans.

This bill permits the Government to collect all Americans' international communications, even communications of innocent Americans with no connection to terrorism or other national security concerns. This bulk collection of innocent Americans' private communications is unacceptable and contrary to American values and fundamental Constitutional protections.

While this administration has ignored the congressional mandate that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act is the exclusive means for conducting wiretapping activities on American citizens, Congress can not ignore the weighty constitutional issues being decided here today.

I am also very troubled that telecom companies will not be held accountable for participation in the Bush administration's warrantless surveillance program. Congress should not be providing blanket immunity for telecommunications companies that cooperated with the administration's warrantless wiretapping programs. We don't know precisely what those companies did or the full extent of what they did.

This bill effectively grants retroactive immunity to companies that aided the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping over the last 7 years. It would effectively dismiss 40 cases pending against the telecommunications companies that are undergoing judicial review. Judicial review is a critical component of our Government to check potential overreaching by the executive branch.

This administration wants to ensure that no court has the opportunity to review potential illegal activity, effectively slamming the door shut before the judicial system can determine whether American citizens' rights were violated.

This is why I voted in support of Senator Dodd's amendment to strike the immunity provision today, and I am disappointed that it was not adopted. Congress should respect judicial review and not take away the only opportunity for redress available to American citizens for potential overreaching by this administration.

According to public documents and media reports, a telecom company allegedly split off a copy of the Internet traffic transported over fiber-optic cable running though its San Francisco office and diverted it to another room under the supervision of a Federal Government agency, where the copy was transported to equipment that could review and select out the contents and data mine call patterns of communications.

The reason I say allegedly is because all the details are classified, sources and methods, and those who do not know can at best only make educated guesses while those who do know can not or will not say.

Now the Electronic Frontier Foundation believes that the telecom company has deployed similar facilities in 15 to 20 different locations around the country, implying a significant fraction of the communications to and from the telecom firm's domestic customers could have been examined illegally. And it is critical that we get to the bottom of this.

Congress would be acting even though only last week Judge Walker issued a key ruling holding that held that the government could not prevent plaintiffs from submitting unclassified evidence to support their claims against telecommunications companies. Congress should respect the judiciary's role and allow it to move forward with these cases.

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