More on FISA

Powerline on the new FISA bill, NY Times story and NRO's McCarthy dissecting it:

McCarthy can't find evidence of the ghosts that Risen and Lichtblau summon in the new bill:

So I checked with the radical American Civil Liberties Union. Certainly, I imagined, it would elaborate on the hidden landmines the Times has found. After all, the ACLU so despises the bill that it has put out a “fact sheet” sniping that the new law should be called the “Police America Act” (it is actually called the “Protect America Act”). Yet for all its predictable bombast, nowhere does the ACLU repeat, much less explain, the Times’s spin that FISA reform has left us wholesale exposed to the snatching of our files, the scrutinizing of our phone usage, and even the violation of our persons.

It also turns out that no less a doctrinaire civil libertarian than the University of Chicago’s Geoffrey Stone has weighed in on FISA reform, as a guest blogger for the American Constitution Society. As he has throughout the NSA controversy, Professor Stone makes a number of misleading and inaccurate claims; but even he, like the ACLU, limits his complaints to the actual subject matter of the bill: telecommunications. Nothing about business records and the like.

The Times is engaged here in the worst kind of journalistic abuse. Risen and Lichtblau sprinkle their story with the names of several experts, but not a single one is identified as standing behind the explosive claims quoted above. Those are attributed to “experts” — unnamed. And unnamed for good reason: What the Times represents as a respectable, mainstream interpretation of the new law is actually a fringe construction unsupportable by any coherent reading.