FAQ: How far does the new wiretap law go?

Just before leaving town for a month's vacation, a divided U.S. Congress acceded to President George Bush's requests for expanded Internet and telephone surveillance powers.

Over strong objections from civil liberties groups and many Democrats, legislators voted over the weekend to temporarily rewrite a 1978 wiretapping law that the Bush administration claimed was hindering antiterrorism investigations.

To help explain what the Protect America Act of 2007 means, CNET News.com has prepared the following Frequently Asked Questions, or FAQ list.

What does the new Protect America Act actually do?
The new law effectively expands the National Security Agency's power to eavesdrop on phone calls, e-mail messages and other Internet traffic with limited court oversight. Telecommunications companies can be required to comply with government demands, and if they do so they are immune from all lawsuits.

It also says, as George Washington University law professor Orin Kerr notes, that 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrants are not needed for Internet or telephone "surveillance directed at a person reasonably believed to be located outside of the United States." What that means is that the National Security Agency can plug into a switch inside the United States (when monitoring someone outside the country) without seeking a court order in advance.

How long will this law last?
The law signed by Bush is set to "sunset" in 180 days. That addition was tacked on as an amendment after last-minute negotiations among politicians and the Bush administration, who remain at odds over how a permanent law should be worded.

"Our main objective at this point was to ensure that a bill passed that would give us the tools we needed to continue to fight the war on terror," a spokeswoman for Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell told CNET News.com on Monday. "The politics of it were such that that was the concession we were willing to make in order to get this bill passed sooner than later."

Translation: If the protracted skirmishing over the Patriot Act renewal is any indicator, this won't be settled easily, quickly or amicably.

Why did House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic leadership bring this bill to a vote over the weekend, instead of delaying it until fall or killing it outright?
The short answer? Political concerns. House of Representatives rules let the majority party control the schedule of votes, so Pelosi had the power to push back a vote indefinitely. In fact, Pelosi even said the legislation "does violence to the Constitution of the United States."

Many Democrats were worried about rushing to approve a bill just before Congress left town for a summer holiday. "Legislation should not be passed in response to fear-mongering," said Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey.

But in the end, the Democratic leadership became fearful about appearing weak in the so-called "War on Terror" and interfering with intelligence gathering, and scheduled the vote before they left town. Liberal publications such as Mother Jones responded by saying: "The Democrats can rest easily over the August recess knowing that they haven't left themselves vulnerable to political attacks. The rest of us can worry about whether the NSA is using its enhanced surveillance authority to spy on Americans." An article on DailyKos.com was even less complimentary.

Weren't there some concerns about a recent court ruling?
Yes, although details remain murky. House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, told Fox News last week: "There's been a ruling, over the last four or five months, that prohibits the ability of our intelligence services and our counterintelligence people from listening in to two terrorists in other parts of the world where the communication could come through the United States." Because the ruling--and even the existence of a ruling--is not public, there's no way to tell what's really going on.

A subsequent Los Angeles Times article says it was a ruling by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court that imposed new restrictions on the National Security Agency's ability to intercept communications that are between people overseas, but that "transit" U.S. data networks operated by Internet service providers and telecommunications companies. The newspaper, citing an anonymous source, said the FISA ruling dealt with a request for a "basket warrant," meaning a kind of dragnet approach rather than warrants issued on a case-by-case basis for surveillance of specific terrorism suspects.

The Washington Post elaborated on the impact of the ruling, saying its effect was to block the NSA's efforts to collect information from a large volume of foreign calls and e-mails that pass through U.S. communications nodes clustered around New York and California.

The FISA court is relevant because Attorney General Alberto Gonzales said in January that the Bush administration would seek its approval for future electronic surveillance.

What does this mean for lawsuits against the telecommunications companies for allegedly opening their networks to the NSA in violation of federal law?
It may be too early to tell. The Justice Department declined to comment about the various pending suits, and the ACLU said it was still assessing the effect of the new law on its case.The law does immunize telecommunications companies going forward, but does not exempt them from legal liability before this week. So the court challenges would become weaker but could, at least in theory, continue.

[chris_d]

Wait for it, wait for iiiit....

Queue the comments that say, "If you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about." The implication that if you don't want Big Brother Government prying into your business, you must be doing something wrong. Hey, why not put a camera in your bathroom, or your bedroom, so the NSA can make sure you're not doing anything wrong? You could be making bombs or plotting an attack in there! You oppose? You must be with the terrists!

The second thing to realize is who gets to decide whether something is wrong. If you're George W., opposing the war is wrong. You can bet the NSA listens to Cindy Sheehan's phone calls. If you're Hillary, then owning a gun is doing something wrong and she'll direct the NSA to listen to the phone calls of gun owners.

Are war protesters doing something wrong? I don't think so. Are gun owners who want guns for protection wrong? I don't think so. But then, I'm not the Decider.

It's time to end warrantless spying on American citizens and authoritarian government.

[anomalator]

RIP Bill of Rights

Lets cut to the chase and just do away with the Constitution all together. Nobody in "our" government seems to respect it anyway, and as far as they're concerned, it just gets in their way.

[drtyrell]

CNET is officially one of "Them"

It's interesting to read an article and manages to give every
single individual or organization full immunity for turning our
country into a tyranny ridden police state. We know that nearly
all mainstream press is controlled by four mega corporations
that have been specializing in yellow journalism since the false
ratification of the 16th and formation of the private bank better
known as the Federal Reserve (which still has refused to identify
over 80% of it's members).

Nope, CNET is not a true independent non-bias news source,
but a line towing Bilderberg / NeoCon organization that is doing
its part to ensure that the citizens of the world think that losing
all our civil liberties is okay. RFID chips in every person in the
world is a great technological development we should be excited
about.

I remember when CNET was pure and edgy, and wrote articles,
all articles that read nothing like the blathering fluff pieces for
the end of our freedoms. You best believe that when an internet
startup needs venture capital to operate, it will sell its soul to
stay alive, and that's is the rest of the story.

[dondarko]

"Live Free or Die" NH state moto

here are some others...

"Thus Always to Tyrants" - Virginia
"Virtue, Liberty, and Independence" - Pennsylvania
"By the sword we seek peace, but peace only under liberty" Massachusetts
"Freedom and Unity" - Vermont
" Liberty and union, now and forever, one and inseparable" - North Dakota
"Liberty and Prosperity" - New Jersey
"Our liberties we prize and our rights we will maintain" - Iowa
"The life of the land is perpetuated in righteousness" - Hawaii
"Liberty and Independence" - Delaware
"The people rule" Arkansas
"We Dare Defend Our Rights" - Alabama

nuff said...

[lingsun]

If you're calling Afghanistan your call should be tapped

People making phone calls to foreign countries that support terrorism should have their phones tapped. The same is true if you're calling Muslims overseas. Back in WWII they put thousands of Japanese citizens in concentration camps. This is nothing compared to that.

[Alpah Trion]

Left-leaning reporting

Okay folks, calm down. Any proof that the "evil" Bush has ever
listened in on any phone calls he shouldn't have? Hmmm... I
didn't think so. Second, how do you think we can stop terrorists
plans ahead of time... or should we just wait until the next "9-
11." Third, this concept that somehow the "evil" Bush has come
up with wiretapping (warrant-less) in nonsense. Have you ever
heard of Project ESCHELON? That was conducted during the
Clinton administration (and maybe before, who knows?)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ECHELON

Finally, how about some balance in the reporting? All the outside
experts and opinions are against the wiretapping. This is more
about the political ramifications of the bill than what it actually
does. These reporters need to get outside of the Bay Area
political bubble and realize that there is more to life than the
fate of the Democrat party (and the plots of the "evil" President
Bush.) End rant. Thanks for listening.

Everyone, have a nice day. Really.

[ethana2]

How much processing power do they have?..

...cause if they **** everybody off, I think they may run out quickly... *cough!*encryption*cough*

We have too many reasons to encrypt stuff already. If ISP's had their heads on straight (didn't worry about your traffic on the connection that you payed for i.e. blocking port 80, http, throttling torrents, etc...) And we had faith that we would see due process always, and our government was more transparent, I wouldn't mind.

None is the case. If only we had a revised networking protocol stack...

IP w/ null/random ports
TCP
Encryption
anything (I intend to leverage p2p to host my own social networking profile)

OpenDNS' cooperation will be needed as well...

[bobby_brady]

I hear peoples cell phone conversations all the time

No wire tap is needed! Most people don't care about privacy. The other day some lady was talking about her medical test results in the grocery store line. Do you wanna know if she was positive for hepetitus B?

[gerhard_schroeder]

Bush PWNS his liberal puppets

Mwahahahaha! The Democrats puppeted the voters when they said "Bush is ruining your rights and we will fight it". The Dem voters actually believed this, and elected them. Idiots... Now the Dem voters look like they were duped. No way around it. Must be nice to have an army of puppets who will believe anything you tell them.

[rbannon]

Encrypt!

Thawte offers free email certificates that will allow a reasonably
safe way to encrypt and authenticate emails. Visit:

http://thawte-notary.blogspot.com/

if you want more information.

[julius027]

Thanks a lot washington

Thanks a lot Washington for sticking out
for the PEOPLE. May be you'll find the WMD or osama yeah right. It will be interesting to see when these backdoors given to the agencies are found by hackers what's gonna happen then. I tell you what! nothing No one will be responsible and with the law telecommunications companies will be liable free. Good job Ass..les

[mgmchan]

Does it matter?

It doesn't matter what is signed or allowed as for the past years, the administration has not been playing by the rules anyway... sigh...

[ralfthedog]

Oath of Office.

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the Office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

When any President takes office, he takes an oath to first and foremost preserve, protect and defend the CONSTITUTION of the United States. This is more important than stopping terrorists, cutting taxes, or preventing a Nuclear bomb from detonating in New York harbor.

The United States can survive any attack from terrorists. If we forsake the Constitution, we will no longer be America.

I do not believe the man in office has lived up to his oath.

[CharlesRovira]

Hey, nobody watching so ...

how 'bout listening in on that daughter of yours?

Ever wonder what Bill Gates is telling people these days?

What's really bad is when the whole of America suddenly realizes that's they're on a party line, what will that do to private speech?

[chasejackd]

Great Article

Thanks for the information Cnet!!

[Amairgen]

VoIP

It's my understanding that all VoIP traffic is considered international in nature (or can be routed out and back into the country). I think it's now open season on VoIP.

[dayebreak]

The Question Is Not How Far Does It Go;

The question is how far will this, and other administrations, bend it, abuse it, lie about it, cover it up, enhance it, ignore it, lie about it, conspire about it, etc. Good luck to those innocent civilians who get strung out in a supersecret investigation, cloaked in the 'national security' smoke of this law.

[bluemist9999]

The law isn't a big deal at all

First of all, it's what these organizations actually do (legal or not) that matters. Then, it's a matter of what you believe the organizations do with the information they gather.

Beyond all of that, if there were such a broad listening net, winnowing through the untold petabytes of information would require a ridiculous amount of processing power. Just think of how much CPU speech-recognition takes---and that is ONE voice, not millions of voices in various languages and dialects. And that's not including e-mail or videos, or any type of encryption.

So, if such resources did exist, they wouldn't bother checking every person because of the volume of data and effort required.

Therefore, I don't see the law as being such a big deal.

[rbiz]

All Kinds of Prices

There are all kinds of prices to pay for the political and personal
freedoms that we Americans have heretofore taken as our
collective, God-given rights. And I'm not referring to our right
to buy as much gasoline as we want to as much as I'm talking
about the more fundamental and timeless rights that are
Constitutionally established.

We can pay with our lives by going overseas to stamp out
would-be intruders headed for our country or that can attack us
from afar, and/or we can pay right here at home by having to
put up with the occasional individual or group that pushes their
freedom of speech right too far, or abuses our understanding of
"free enterprise" by pushing the boundaries of what we would
consider fair competition. Occassionally we will even pay the
ultimate price right here at home - terrorism with loss of life
directly from the citizenary. Is it worth it? For me the answer is
yes.

I firmly believe that the level of security we had prior to 9/11,
domestically, was more than adequate. Adding endless amounts
of domestic security, above and beyond what we had before
9/11, will never guarantee that the U.S.A. will not be infiltrated
from time to time. I think the personal rights that we believed
we had prior to 9/11 were already on some kind of a line
between what could be considered reasonable and not, and I do
not believe that adding more than that will yield anything good
for the American people in the long run, including security.

Some might argue that the relative safety we've had since 9/11
is all because of more stingent domestic security practices, but I
think that simply going after Bin Laden [remember him?], and
subsequently Sadaam, together did far more than anything we've
done domestically to keep things relatively quiet on the home
front. Prior to 9/11 we had all of the departments and
subdivisions that we needed to handle domestic terrorism, did
they need improving, and perhaps even some reorganizing?
Yes.

Intended or not I see that the U.S.A. is moving headlong toward
a bout of facism that we've never experienced before and I'm
decidely leary of this new development on the heals of 9/11. We
have already given up more freedoms than we even fully
understand (but thanks for the info anyway CNET), and giving
away more is not going to net a corresponding level of security -
period.

I believe in and trust our current president, but will the next
president be trustworthy, will the president that leads our
country when I'm dead and gone be trustworty? I think that real
Americans will avoid even putting themselves in a situation
where they will almost inevitably, sooner or later, be fighting
their own government to preserve their personal freedoms.

[bdonohue1]

Geek Press Beats MSM, Again

This is coming from an experienced political blogger and observer of the MSM: this kid McCullagh runs rings around any mainstream news outlet you could name--he's better than WaPo, NYT, any of the TV networks, and the press services (with the possible exception of McClatchey). This is journalism the way it's supposed to be done: scratching the surface, going into detail, and handling the toughest questions without getting distracted by the superficial or by the spin coming out of any camp.

Geeks, you're lucky to have a resource like this available in your primary news outlet.