We told ya so!

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The NYT's predictable revelation: new FISA law enabled massive abuses

In The New York Times last night, James Risen and Eric Lichtblau -- the reporters who won the Pulitzer Prize for informing the nation in 2005 that the NSA was illegally spying on Americans on the orders of George Bush, a revelation that produced no consequences other than the 2008 Democratic Congress' legalizing most of those activities and retroactively protecting the wrongdoers -- passed on leaked revelations of brand new NSA domestic spying abuses, ones enabled by the 2008 FISA law. The article reports that the spying abuses are "significant and systemic"; involve improper interception of "significant amounts" of the emails and telephone calls of Americans, including purely domestic communications; and that, under Bush (prior to the new FISA law), the NSA tried to eavesdrop with no warrants on a member of Congress traveling to the Middle East. The sources for the article report that "the problems had grown out of changes enacted by Congress last July in the law that regulates the government’s wiretapping powers."

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These widespread eavesdropping abuses enabled by the 2008 FISA bill -- a bill passed with the support of Barack Obama along with the entire top Democratic leadership in the House, including Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer, and substantial numbers of Democratic Senators -- aren't a bug in that bill, but rather, were one of the central features of it. Everyone knew that the FISA bill which Congressional Democrats passed -- and which George Bush and Dick Cheney celebrated -- would enable these surveillance abuses. That was the purpose of the law: to gut the safeguards in place since the 1978 passage of FISA, destroy the crux of the oversight regime over executive surveillance of Americans, and enable and empower unchecked government spying activities. This was not an unintended and unforeseeable consequence of that bill. To the contrary, it was crystal clear that by gutting FISA's safeguards, the Democratic Congress was making these abuses inevitable. MORE