If you hear someone talk about the FISA Amendments Act and all that person ever talks about is the question of retroactive legal immunity for telecommunications corporations that broke the law by helping George W. Bush spy on millions of Americans, watch out. You’re witnessing a piece of political spin developed by politicians who are attempting to justify the unjust proposed law.

It isn’t that the retroactive immunity isn’t an important issue. It is, especially given the fact that the Constitution explicitly forbids ex post facto laws. The trouble is that retroactive immunity isn’t at all the total of what the FISA Amendments Act is about.

Read the FISA Amendments Act, and you’ll see that the bill actually makes it legal for the President, through the Attorney General, to conduct physical searches of Americans home without telling any court at all, not even the FISA court, until weeks after the spying has begun. Even after the FISA court finds out about the spying, the court can’t do anything to stop it. The FISA court doesn’t even have the power to rule that illegally-obtained information is inadmissible for use in a trial. The same outrageous standards also apply to electronic surveillance.

The FISA Amendments Act essentially authorizes the White House to break the law and violate Americans’ constitutional rights without any consequence. The FISA Amendments Act shoves the FISA court out of the way, making it an irrelevant, mute witness of government crimes.

That’s pretty heavy stuff. So how come the people who discuss the FISA Amendments Act almost never mention these provisions? How come people like “Paul V”, commenting on an article about the FISA Amendments Act, describes the FISA Amendments Act only as “a bill going through Congress giving immunity to telephone companies involved in the Bush administration’s controversial warrantless wiretap programme”?

Surely, you’ve figured the answer out by now. These people are following a script written by Republican and Democratic leaders in Congress, who are hoping that if they never mention the gross violations of your freedom contained in the FISA Amendments Act, you’ll never actually read the FISA Amendments Act, and so you won’t notice that you’re there.

The author of that article that Paul V. commented on had a comeback that pretty well describes the huge gap in mainstream media coverage of the FISA Amendments Act:

“Saying that the FISA Amendments Act is ‘a bill going through Congress giving immunity to telephone companies involved in the Bush administration’s controversial warrantless wiretap programme’ is like saying that a giraffe is an animal with ears.”