President Pushes To Revise Wiretap Law

Bush Administration Seeks Legislation To Update Foreign Surveillance Act

(AP) 
Judiciary Committee Chairman Arlen Specter, R-Pa., is pushing new legislation to give the secretive FISA court jurisdiction over whether the administration's domestic spying program is legal.

The measure comes as lawsuits have sprung up in other federal courts. The White House is battling them, arguing that they should be dropped because state secrets would be revealed if they are thoroughly argued.

"There has to be a balance to the value to security, contrasted with the intrusion into privacy, and that can only be determined by judicial review," Specter said. "And in a context where the president is demonstrably unwilling to have the program subjected to public view, it would have to be determined by the FISA court if it is to be ruled on constitutionally at all."

On Tuesday, a federal court threw out a lawsuit aimed at blocking AT&T Inc. from giving telephone records to the government for use in the war on terror on the grounds that information would be disclosed that would reveal too much about the government's intelligence programs to U.S. adversaries.

A similar lawsuit against AT&T in San Francisco is proceeding, however, though Specter said U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker's ruling in that case expressed so many concerns about national secrets that it seems likely to be closed soon.

Specter's bill would also require the attorney general to provide the court with information on the program's legal basis, the government's efforts to protect Americans' identities and the process used to determine that the intercepted communications involved terrorism. It would also clarify that international calls that merely pass through terminals in the United States are not subject to the judicial process established under the law.