Congress Takes Up Surveillance Bills

CONGRESS TAKES UP SURVEILLANCE BILLS
[SOURCE: Associated Press, AUTHOR: Jim Abrams]
The Bush Administration gave guarded support to several terrorist surveillance bills Wednesday as Congress took up the sensitive issue of how to give legal backing to the President's warrantless wiretapping. The acting assistant attorney general told a House Judiciary subcommittee that legislation backed by the House GOP leadership showed promise and that the President had expressed support for a measure from Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA). But Steven Bradbury and the National Security Agency's general counsel, Robert Deitz, also said the NSA's wiretapping program was proper and necessary, and that tampering with it could jeopardize national security.
http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/C/CONGRESS_EAVESDROPPING?SITE=RIWOO...

See also --
* CDT Testifies Against Dangerous "Update" of Surveillance Law
An effort gathering momentum in Congress to "update" the major law governing domestic surveillance could radically undermine the privacy of innocent Americans -- not just by legitimizing the administration's warrantless surveillance programs -- but by granting this and future administrations unfettered authority to spy on Americans in the United States. Testifying today before the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism and Homeland Security, CDT Policy Director Jim Dempsey again urged lawmakers to seek a better understanding of the administration's shadowy surveillance programs before drastically rewriting the laws intended to govern them. CDT has argued that it would be better to do nothing than to rush out an ill-considered bill. Last month, a judge ordered the Administration to halt its surveillance programs, finding that they violated the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) -- the law that some in Congress are attempting to "update." September 06, 2006
Dempsey Testimony [PDF], September 06, 2006: http://www.cdt.org/testimony/20060906dempsey.pdf