As the 112th Congress comes to a close it's on track to be the least productive legislative branch since the 1940s. Of all the bills that've made their way through the House and the Senate in the past two years, only 219 have been signed into law by President Obama. Compare that to the 111th Congress which managed to get 383 bills through, or the infamous "Do Nothing Congress" which passed 906 bills that became law between 1947 and 1948.
But the recent Congress did get one thing done. On Friday, the Senate passed an extension to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) Amendments Act of 2008. You know, the one that lets the Feds spy on you without a warrant. Obama is expected to sign the bill any day, and the new extension lasts until 2017.
You might've heard of this one before. The original law was passed way back in 1978, but it's been causing a stink ever since Obama quietly signed the amendments into law four years ago. With the new threat of terrorism, lawmakers thought it appropriate to give the government the power to wiretap Americans' phones and email accounts without a warrant in order "to acquire foreign intelligence information." The law doesn't necessarily require the person being surveilled to be a suspect in a crime nor does it ask for the specific terrorist target to be identified before issuing the wiretap.
If all this sounds shady, that's because it is. At least civil liberties groups think so. The American Civil LIberties Union (ACLU) called the law "exponentially worse than any other wiretapping program because they are allowed to do bulk collection and programmatic collection." An ACLU spokesperson also recently said that Bush "is laughing his ass off" that the Fourth Amendment threat is still in place so many years after he laid the groundwork for it.
Lawmakers also have strong feelings about the bill, and some tried to change it before it got rushed through the House and the Senate before the end of this Congress. "The amendment I fought to include would have helped bring the constitutional principles of security and liberty back into balance and intend to work with my colleagues to see that the liberties of individual Americans are maintained," said Oregon Senator Ron Wyden, a Democrat who tried to pass an amendment that would've barred spy agencies from wiretapping Americans without a warrant.
Others don't think it's such a big deal. Washington University law professor Neil Richards is one of them. "Other than the vague threat of an Orwellian dystopia, as a society we don’t really know why surveillance is bad," Richards told TechCrunch after the Senate passed the bill on Friday. But that's not the point. Back to Wyden, "It is never okay, never okay for government officials to use a general warrant to deliberately invade the privacy of a law-abiding American," said the senator. "It wasn’t okay for constables and customs officials to do it in colonial days, and it’s not okay for the National Security Agency to do it today." After all, sometimes, a vague threat is all it takes.
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