ACSBlog: The Blog of the American Constitution Society

A coalition of civil liberties organizations have come out in opposition to a legislative attempt to renew the expansion of the government’s surveillance authority that lapsed last August. They characterize a recent legislative proposal by Senator Christopher Bond to amend FISA as “unreasonably and unnecessarily authoriz[ing] broad surveillance of Americans’ international communications without meaningful Fourth Amendment protections.” Senator Bond said that without the reauthorization, “we’ll start losing intelligence capabilities.” Analysis of the proposal here and its media coverage here.

Some of the sticking points to an agreement, according to the coalition, are as follows:

• The bill would authorize surveillance of American’s international communications without an individualized warrant or determination of probable cause.
• The bill does not provide for a meaningful role for courts to ensure the government does not seize and data-mine American’s private communications.
• The bill grants blanket retroactive immunity to companies that aided the government in conducting warrantless electronic surveillance of Americans.
• The bill’s sunset provision is too long (6 years).

Additional resources on the debate of whether and how to amend FISA are available here (with more on recent legislative proposals here.)