Congress Rejects Privacy Amendments, Approves Continued Wiretapping

The Senate today renewed the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, the bill widely seen as legalizing warrantless wiretapping, for five more years with a 73-23 vote.

The Senate also voted down four amendments that would have made law enforcement actions accountable, in limited ways, to Congress. One would simply have asked law enforcement agencies to provide an estimate to Congress of how many American citizens’ communications may have been intercepted.

The FISA law was originally established to create a process through which law enforcement agencies could obtain, without public disclosure, warrants to monitor potential foreign agents in the United States.