The ACLU’s Top Reasons to Vote Against the RESTORE Act (HR 3773)

Wednesday October 17, 2007

Five things to keep in mind about HR 3773 during the debate over reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act:

1. H.R. 3773 doesn’t mandate individualized warrants for every time the government wants to access American communications on American soil – neither before nor after the fact.
2. It allows the government to institute new dragnets of all calls and emails coming into and out of the United States, even if they are not related to terrorism and even if Americans in the US are on one end.
3. It has no affirmative requirement to destroy or sequester US information that is caught up in the new dragnets – it instead allows the Attorney General to negotiate secret guidelines with the secret intelligence court about how to handle US information.
4. It explicitly says these new year-long program warrants don’t even have to specify who’s being targeted or even the telecom facilities they will be directly accessing – violating the particularity requirement of the Fourth Amendment.
5. It explicitly and Congressionally endorses a scheme where Americans’ international communications are essentially up for grabs and receive far less protection than domestic communications – a distinction that is not supported by law and unrealistic in our new globally connected world.