Make No Law

MAKE NO LAW
[SOURCE: Washington Post, AUTHOR: Editorial Staff]
[Commentary] The Senate Judiciary Committee is scheduled today to mark up legislation dealing with the National Security Agency's program of warrantless domestic surveillance. What kind of bill it will report out is anyone's guess. Three different bills are floating around -- one by Chairman Arlen Specter (R-PA), one by Mike DeWine (R-OH) and one by Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) -- and they would do wildly different things. What the committee should do now is clear: nothing. Any legislation is premature, because most members of the committee still have no firm sense of what the NSA surveillance program consists of. The goal of legislation should be to legitimize important surveillance by requiring judicial review, limiting the use of material collected to counterintelligence purposes and ensuring that irrelevant material is not retained. The best way for the Judiciary Committee to move toward this goal is to hold off on a markup and insist that it receive more information about the program -- so that it's not shooting in the dark.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/05/24/AR200605...
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