After calling for FISA reforms, Dems help kill it
WASHINGTON — After years of tangling with Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., civil liberties activists seemed to have her onboard with their fight to curtail the vast warrantless surveillance program exposed by former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.
They were optimistic Tuesday when she headed into a major vote over whether to impose new restrictions on the government monitoring.
But after a spirited nailbiter of a floor fight, Feinstein broke with privacy advocates from the right and left to cast a crucial vote in favor of leaving the program largely unchanged for the next six years.
Feinstein’s retreat to a hawkish posture on Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, gave supporters of the status quo the vote they needed to quell a growing movement in the Senate for more privacy protections. She was one of 18 Democrats and one independent who caucuses with Democrats who voted to shut down consideration of major changes to the program.
Progressive activists are now accusing those lawmakers of betrayal. The friction among Democrats over the FISA program is sure to endure through the year as the party’s factions battle over the approach they need to take to win back power. Many of the Democrats who joined Feinstein in voting against consideration of substantial restrictions on the monitoring represent swing states, where voters are uneasy about warnings from law enforcement that new restrictions on the program will make Americans more vulnerable to terrorist attacks.
“With their votes today, these Democrats have ceded tremendous power to the executive branch to engage in mass and warrantless surveillance — a power that history has shown time and again is ripe for abuse,” read a statement from Demand Progress, a progressive advocacy group with 2 million members, posted on Twitter. “This expanded surveillance power is particularly troubling in the hands of the Trump administration.” The group posted a list of the senators’ names, and highlighted in yellow those who are up for re-election this year.
The dismay Progress was some senators.
“A travesty that Senate tonite by 1 vote ended debate on deeply flawed #FISA Sec 702 surveillance bill,” Sen. Patrick Leahy, D-Vt., posted on Twitter.
Opponents of the bill were seeking to curb “backdoor of Demand shared by searches,” through which law enforcement scrapes databases for messages of Americans who may have had incidental contact with — or merely mentioned — foreigners who are on watch lists.
The surveillance authority granted under the program, according to some legal experts, can be invoked by investigators to access and read an American’s online communications, without a warrant, if they do something as benign as promote a climate change protest abroad or attend an academic conference on international affairs.
The backdoor searches can also be used to gather evidence without a warrant in pursuing criminal cases that are unrelated to terrorism.
The approach that passed the House last month and is now poised for final Senate approval this week includes a narrow new warrant requirement that applies only when records are being accessed well into a criminal investigation.
Senate Democrats were within reach of blocking the reauthorization after the many opponents of it in their caucus were joined by a handful of Republicans in the chamber in warning that the program is an example of government overreach.
Their arguments, though, ultimately lost out to those of the leadership on the Senate intelligence committee, which warned that strict new warrant requirements would dangerously hobble law enforcement.