Earlier today, Jim wrote about the newly-introduced H.R. 2399, legislation that would somewhat restrict, but not end, massive wiretapping of Americans’ electronic communications by the U.S. military through the National Security Agency.
Another piece of legislation with the same goal, though perhaps not the same mechanisms, was introduced yesterday in the U.S. Senate. The bill is S. 1182, “A bill to modify the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 to require specific evidence for access to business records and other tangible things, and provide appropriate transition procedures”.
The text of the legislation is not yet available from the Government Printing Office, but bill’s author, Senator Mark Udall, said in a floor speech yesterday that it is “designed to narrow Section 215 of the USA PATRIOT Act, known also as the “business records” provision, to better balance the authorities we give the federal government while protecting our constitutional rights. More specifically, my legislation would prevent the federal government from collecting millions of law-abiding Americans’ phone call records without first establishing some nexus to terrorism. We all expect the NSA to target terrorists, but the revelations in the past few weeks have made clear that the information of millions of law-abiding Americans is being swept up in the process… While this legislation would still allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies to use the PATRIOT Act to obtain a wide range of records in the course of terrorism and espionage-related investigations, it would require them to demonstrate that the records are in some way connected to terrorism or clandestine intelligence activities – which is not the case today.”
As you can see, the bill’s cosponsorship is bipartisan, though most of the cosponsors are Democrats.
The Democrats Who Support S. 1182:
Mark Begich
Jeff Merkley
Mark Udall
Tom Udall
Ron Wyden
The Republicans Who Support S. 1182:
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, what Obama refers to as the FISA court, is not transparent. It’s a court that acts in secret. Its judges aren’t identified. Its location is not identified. The cases that are brought before the it are secret. Its process is secret. Even the legal theories the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court are kept secret from the American people.
However, we’ve learned this month that the National Security Agency, which is not even a domestic law enforcement agency, but a part of the U.S. military, has been engaging in massive violations of the Fourth Amendment rights of tens of millions, and perhaps hundreds of millions, of Americans every day. They’ve been seizing private phone records, spying on who talks to who. They’ve been seizing private social media data. They’ve been grabbing private emails, and information about who visits what web sites, when, and what for.
Most of the soil that’s available in the garden centers is filled with MiracleGro, a synthetic fertilizer that encourages plants to grow lush, and full, and beautifully, but a bit too fast, leaving them. I don’t want to use that, so I took a few bags of what looked like a smaller company’s soil – EarthGro potting soil. It said it was “organic” and “natural”.
That’s an illusion. The cost of using Google services is actually quite high.
The hidden cost of Google’s services doesn’t end there. Once Google has your private papers, pictures, and videos, military spies have them too. The 
Clapper, the director of the military’s National Security Agency, told members of the U.S. Senate that his organization’s electronic surveillance dragnet had stopped “dozens” of attacks against the USA by nasty terrorists bent on bloody murder. The truth, however, is rather less dramatic.
An even more delicious petition in the White House system has come to my attention in the meantime. This petition demands that 
