It’s a good thing Congressional Democrats didn’t wait until the last minute to begin figuring out how to revise and renew FISA. It’s clear that it’s a very divisive process for them. Senator Kit Bond–the senior Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee–held a conference call yesterday with some bloggers interested in the FISA debate. Bond pointed out the recklessness and poor logic of the House’s approach to FISA. The bill that the House failed to vote on last week allows U.S. intelligence agencies only to listen in on calls that they know to be from one foreign terrorist to another foreign terrorist–a very small subset of all threatening communications. But because it’s almost impossible to predict in advance who a target will call, most surveillance requires a warrant under the Democratic approach. As a result, the judges who grant FISA warrants face a huge backlog of applications and U.S. surveillance is forced to ‘go dark. When asked about Senator Dodd’s promise to put a hold on the legislation, Bond noted that as of the time of the call, Dodd had not yet placed a hold. And he also commented that Dodd ‘must be spending too much time on the campaign trail’ and he ‘doesn’t know what he’s talking about.’ Bond had insight into how Democrats would tackle the issue. Roll Call reports this morning that Congressional Democrats don’t know what they’ll do on FISA, either. The House is trying to figure out how to pass a bill without empowering the majority–who favor a strong FISA bill–to get their way:
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