Senator Russ Feingold, 2/4/08:

We all know the stakes are very high. I want my colleagues to understand the impact the Intelligence Committee bill being considered on the Senate floor could have on the privacy of Americans, because that is exactly what our amendment addresses. This bill does not just authorize the unfettered surveillance of people outside the United States communicating with each other; it also permits the Government to acquire those foreigners' communications with Americans inside the United States, regardless of whether anyone involved in the communication is under suspicion of any kind of wrongdoing at all.

There is no requirement the foreign targets of this surveillance be terrorists, spies, other types of criminals or even agents of a foreign power. The only requirements are that the foreigners are outside the country and that the purpose of the surveillance is to obtain "foreign intelligence information," a term that has an extremely broad definition covering anything involving the foreign affairs of the United States.

The key, of course, is that no court reviews these targets individually. Only the executive branch decides who fits these criteria. So the result is many law-abiding Americans who communicate with completely innocent people overseas will be swept up in this new form of surveillance, with virtually no judicial involvement and virtually no judicial oversight. That is astounding, isn't it? Yet there has been very little discussion of it.

[snip]

Even the administration's illegal warrantless wiretapping program, as described when it was publicly confirmed in 2005, at least focused on particular al-Qaida terrorists. But what we are talking about now [with the Rockefeller/Cheney FISA bill] is different. This is the authority to conduct a huge dragnet that will sweep up innocent Americans at home, combined with an utter lack of oversight mechanisms to prevent abuse.

[snip]

The executive branch was asked whether it could acquire all the calls and e-mails between employees of a U.S. company and a foreign company the U.S. Government is targeting, with no requirement to get a warrant and no requirement that there be some link to terrorism or a specific threat against the United States. The administration did not deny this would be entirely legal under the PAA.

So any American who works at a company that does business overseas should think about that.

As to the "authorization" Congress granted to the Executive Branch last August:

Americans should also think about the testimony of the DNI himself, in which he said the PAA would authorize the collection of all communications between the United States and overseas. In other words, the Government has the authority [under the Protect America Act] to collect all international calls and e-mails into and out of the United States--every last one. - Senator Feingold, 2/4/08

Http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2008_record&page=S568&position=all

More, from the imperious Intelligence Committee Chair, as he laid out his legislative record for the Judicial Branch, to whom he is trying to pass the Constitutional buck (which, however, the Supreme Court just declined to accept, on first offer):

In contrast to limiting the use of a small amount of information collected on one target during 72 hours of emergency procedures, Senator Feingold's amendment potentially limits use of all information gathered through a new system of intelligence collection. To understand why these are different situations, it is useful to consider the difference between traditional FISA applications and orders and the new [Cheney/Rockefeller FISA bill] Title VII provisions.

Unlike traditional FISA applications and orders, which involve collection on one individual target, the new FISA provisions create a system of collection. The court's role in this system of collection is not to consider probable cause on individual targets but to ensure that the procedures used to collect intelligence are adequate. The court's determination of the adequacy of procedures, therefore, impacts all electronic communications gathered under the new mechanism, even if it involves thousands of targets.

[snip]

The Feingold amendment would require the intelligence analysts to sift through all of the intelligence collected under the new process in order to identify information potentially subject to restriction.

As part of that process, analysts might be required to look at information that had not previously been analyzed in detail because it did not appear to contain significant foreign intelligence information, in order to determine whether the information concerned U.S. persons.

Senator Feingold's amendment, therefore, has the potential to be more intrusive of U.S. privacy interests than the initial collection.

- Senate Royalist John D. Rockefeller IV, 2/4/08

Http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getpage.cgi?dbname=2008_record&page=S579&position=all

Our Congress, in response to Executive Branch pressure, is intentionally interpreting the meaning of "The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures..." in the Fourth Amendment so as to define as "reasonable" the most powerful, invasive and secret modern computing surveillance procedures, when applied - initially, 'anonymously' - to one-end-domestic private communications collected en masse by our government or its corporate partners. All without holding a public debate about this dragnet collection, with the software and surveillance technical experts who know its strengths and weaknesses best and who know its meaning and impact on our daily lives, and on our expectations of privacy, in today's high-tech world.

The European Union holds that the collection of the data is the point of action. [...snip...] But all these state secrets and standing rulings and the immunity stuff in the Congress seem to be pointing to reading the conclusion as the point of action.

[snip]

Was the dossier on Martin Luther King, Jr. wrong because they acted on it or because they compiled it?

- ondelette

That is the debate Congress is avoiding, and which the Supreme Court just decided to bypass. It is, however, a debate that is absolutely essential to our democracy, and impossible to avoid under our Constitution's Fourth Amendment.