Hooley’s Tap Dance

[October 17th, 2007]

U.S. Rep. Darlene Hooley is in an odd spot for a Democrat—sponsoring a wiretapping bill that civil libertarians warn is a “blank check” for abuse.

The congresswoman from West Linn was the only Oregon lawmaker among seven co-sponsors— all Democrats—of the RESTORE Act, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives on Oct. 9.

The bill, H.R. 3773, seeks to restore limited oversight over the National Security Agency’s vast electronic spying network. In essence, it would expand the feds’ ability to intercept communications passing through the U.S., but they’d need to justify it to a secret court created under the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

The Bush administration ignored those courts with its domestic surveillance programs.

Privacy watchdogs say the bill is better than previous congressional efforts to rein in executive branch snoops, but they caution that it still fails to guarantee Americans their Fourth Amendment right “to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects.” The American Civil Liberties Union doesn’t like that the bill allows for so-called blanket warrants. Those warrants can last for up to one year, and don’t require the government to name individual targets of searches.

An ACLU analysis of the bill calls the warrants “virtually a blank check that only requires the surveillance be directed at people abroad, which may very well be unconstitutional.… If a U.S. phone call or email is picked up in these general warrants—not based on any suspicion of wrongdoing, or even based on a link to terrorism—they can be saved and used by the government without any court review.”

Before the “war on terror,” collecting foreign intelligence was supposed to be covert eavesdropping’s “primary purpose.” The bill Hooley co-sponsored uses a lower “significant purpose” standard that means, in effect, spooks may secretly keep tabs on an American protest group—provided there’s a foreign connection to justify the surveillance.

Hooley, , whose lifetime ACLU rating is 85 percent, says the bill maintains Fourth Amendment protections and mandates greater congressional oversight of the secret surveillance. “Overall, the RESTORE Act is a good bill that rights previous wrongs and checks the increasingly unfettered power of the president,” Hooley said Tuesday.

As for the other Portland-area House Democrats, Rep. David Wu said through a spokeswoman he’s still considering the bill, and Rep. Earl Blumenauer didn’t respond to a request for comment.

President George W. Bush isn’t happy with the RESTORE Act, either. He’s threatened to veto it because it doesn’t include retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that aided the NSA’s domestic spying program.