Amnesiac America
The leaning tower of FISA
The media tends to picture politics as a horse race: Who’s winning? Who’s losing? Who is performing better than expected, and who has dropped out? When covering the news this way, sometimes the big bad media buries the lede.
Take this week: The new(ish) speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives suffered a loss. He didn’t meet expectations. He didn’t win, place or show on the FISA renewal. Could he make up for it in another race? Or will the Republican caucus get a new jockey? Will the—
Wait uh minute. FISA renewal? This is important. National security-level important. If the renewal isn’t granted, it’s not the speaker of the House who loses. It’s the country.
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (passed in 1978) sets the rules for our spooks as they gather information on the bad guys. Mostly overseas bad guys. As you can imagine, it had to be revamped after Sept. 11, 2001, to take into account new tech and nix the rules that prevented the FBI from talking to the CIA, among many other changes. And the law has to be renewed every few years. Responsible leaders know this.
As our cloak-and-dagger types— or, these days, our mouse-and-laptop types—intercept communications from foreigners, conversations with Americans “inevitably get swept up,” as The Washington Post recently noted. And there have been abuses. Which a former president named Trump has trumpeted in order to push Congress to throw the baby out with the admittedly dirty bathwater.
“Kill FISA,” the former president wrote on Truth Social, with his now familiar all-caps shouting/writing: “IT WAS ILLEGALLY USED AGAINST ME, AND MANY OTHERS. THEY SPIED ON MY CAMPAIGN!!!”
For once, he’s right. A campaign adviser was caught up in the surveillance. (Remember the name Carter Page?) But the new renewal would keep that from happening again, along with other changes that tighten up the rules. The
FBI came under a lot of scrutiny about several abuse claims (illegal searches, overly broad searches) and the new language would “codify in law every change the FBI made” to its rules, according to The Post.
Let’s step out of the weeds, for once: The intelligence types in this country need FISA, even if it must be cleaned up as technology evolves. There have been an untold number of crimes prevented because of it. Literally untold, because the spooks can’t even tell us some of the names of the court cases that judges review behind closed doors in these matters. (In re Sealed Case, No. 02-002 doesn’t roll off the tongue like Roe or Dobbs.)
Besides, with 5,000-plus illegal aliens coming over the border every day, with Israel/ Hamas and Ukraine/ Russia at war, with Iran still smarting as its military leaders keep disappearing in a flash, from radical elements all around the world hoping to target this country, America is no longer a fortress. We are a target. We need all the resources we can get to stay one step ahead of the next 9/11.
To our libertarian friends on the right and our ultra-liberal friends on the left who fear for privacy concerns, let us now quote Newt Gingrich, who, in the aftermath of the Twin Towers falling, sounded almost reasonable when he said: If you think the new surveillance rules are a hassle now, you won’t believe what the American people will demand if we have another Sept. 11 attack.
As for the legal view, we have come to trust Bill Barr, Donald Trump’s former attorney general. Whether to kill FISA, he says: “I think it’s a travesty and reckless.”
Telling CNN: “We’re faced with probably the greatest threat to the homeland from terrorist attack and our means of defending against that is FISA. And to take that tool away I think is going to result in successful terrorist attack and the loss of life.”
FISA is designed to prevent that. So our leaders should let it.