DoJ: New Surveillance Law Could be “Misconstrued”
Critics of the new Protect America Act who wonder if it will be used to conduct warrantless surveillance of Americans have misunderstood the legislation, according to a Department of Justice official, but he also admitted the law may be susceptible to such a misunderstanding.
“Contrary to some reports, the new legislation does nothing to change FISA’s prohibition against targeting a person in the United States for surveillance without a court order,” said Assistant Attorney General Kenneth L. Wainstein (pdf) at a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee last week.
At the same time, he indicated that ambiguities in the language of the law may lend themselves to just such an interpretation.
“To the extent that the statute could be construed to allow acquisitions of domestic communications, we would be willing to consider alternative language,” Mr. Wainstein said in his prepared statement (at page 10).
A copy of Mr. Wainstein’s September 6 statement is here.
The text of his oral remarks is here (pdf).
The ambiguities in the Protect America Act are far more extensive than what has yet been officially acknowledged, according to Morton H. Halperin of the Open Society Institute. (The Open Society Institute helps fund Secrecy News.)
“Congress enacted legislation the meaning of which is simply not deducible from the words in the text,” he told (pdf) the House Judiciary Committee last week.
Will the new law “lead to the interception of phone calls and emails that the intelligence community should not be reading”?
“I have no idea if that is the case or not but neither does anyone else in the public and most of the Congress,” said Mr. Halperin. “That very uncertainty is simply unacceptable and a threat to both our liberty and our security.”
Here’s what we learned at the 2nd Meeting of States Parties (MSP) to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW).
To empower new voices to start their career in nuclear weapons studies, the Federation of American Scientists launched the New Voices on Nuclear Weapons Fellowship. Here’s what our inaugural cohort accomplished.
Common frameworks for evaluating proposals leave this utility function implicit, often evaluating aspects of risk, uncertainty, and potential value independently and qualitatively.
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]