All the fearmongering around FISA has got to stop. It's maddening and irrational, based on fantasy, accusation, innuendo, and political gamesmanship. And, honestly, by gamesmanship, I mean unsportsmanlike conduct.
Case-in-point, this Slashdot post indicates that the US intelligence community as resumed wiretapping. Presumably this would be the legal wiretapping that can be approved, with a warrant, under FISA law (one hopes, anyway). My favorite part, though, is the claim that they missed important information because the Protect America Act expired. Three points of contention on that:
1) How do they know they missed important information if they weren't monitoring? They can't know definitively.
2) Why did they stop monitoring? If there was important information going over the wire, then the pre-existing FISA laws would have allowed them to place and continue those taps. Moreover, the expiration of PAA did not require a cessation of surveillance.
3) Why did they refuse to renew the original PAA? If they knew that expiration of the Protect America Act was going to be problematic, then why did they refuse to compromise in order to allow an interim renewal while the telecom immunity issue could be resolved?
The answer to all of these questions is quite simple: the White House is lying, trying to manufacture a security issue based solely on FUD. Except for eviscerating their extremely flawed logic, there's no way to prove that they're full of bologna. What this does prove, however, is that they're more than willing to put their personal political agenda ahead of national security. We should all take this as a prime exemplar of the type of logic that is used within the Bush administration. They have consistently put themselves first, before all else, including before the US Constitution, national security, and the well-being of the People.
