The House approved a bill that would allow for a form of the "warrantless wiretaps" program to continue. On a side note, it's hilarious how much Congress can get done when a) they break on Friday and b) they're not trying to figure out if we should amend the document that literally defines the country to worry about whether or not gays can marry. While I'm very cautious about giving the government power to conduct searches that are in violation of the 4th amendment, this bill would at the very least provide some guidelines, as follows.
1) The President has to clear any and all searches by the House and Senate congressional committees and notifies leaders of both (though how much good that would do for a group of people that appear to be entirely defined through which team they're on is debatable)
2) The President has to have reason to believe an attack is imminent and has to explain why the hell he wants to wiretap them.
3) He's got a 90 day certification on all of that.
So it does set some limits, as opposed to "whatever the hell he feels like." Again, I don't think that a dystopia is upon us yet. But I'm not sure how one sets this into law without the first person it's used on claiming violation of the 4th amendment. I can see why wiretaps could be invaluable to fighting organizations which wish to harm us, but I really dislike the "if you're not doing anything wrong, why do you care" argument, because it's asinine.
So I'm torn. Whatever. The wheel keeps turning.
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