On Tuesday, fearing that they will be perceived as weak on terror, the Democrats in the House will propose a bill that “would maintain for several years the type of broad, blanket authority for N.S.A. eavesdropping that the administration secured in August for six months.”

The new bill, the RESTORE Act of 2007, clarifies “that no court orders are required for the government to conduct surveillance on communications outside the United States even when the surveillance is conducted on U.S. soil” and “allows the attorney general and the director of national intelligence to request an “umbrella warrant” to conduct surveillance of foreign targets” for up to one year.

The New York Times notes that the new bill does include some oversight provisions:

In an acknowledgment of concerns over civil liberties, the bill would require a more active role by the special foreign intelligence court that oversees the interception of foreign-based communications by the security agency…the House bill would not give retroactive immunity to the telecommunications utilities that participated in the eavesdropping. That has been a top priority of the administration. The temporary measure gave the utilities immunity for future acts, but not past deeds.

The House bill would also require the administration to disclose details of the program. Democrats say they plan to push the administration to turn over internal documents laying out the legal rationale for the program, something the administration has refused to do.

The extension comes on the heals Mike McConnell’s, the Director of National Intelligence, attempts to intimidate Congressional Democrats into extending blanket NSA eavesdropping authority by falsely claiming that “the new expansive FISA legislation passed by Congress prior to the August recess — the so-called Protect America Act — had helped to thwart a an alleged terror plot in Germany.” McConnell, who had previously claimed that “Americans are going to die “if Congress publicly debated wiretapping, later “acknowledged that he lied to the Senate.”

Congressional Democrats should not reward the administration’s scare tactics. Rather than allowing Republicans to frame the debate, the Democrats, recalling the consequences of unchecked surveillance, must demand adequate oversight. For the most part, the public is on their side. According to a AP-Ipsos poll released in January of 2006, when asked:

Should the Bush administration be required to get a warrant from a judge before monitoring phone and internet communications between American citizens in the United States and suspected terrorists, or should the government be allowed to monitor such communications without a warrant?

Fifty-six percent of respondents said “the administration should be required to get a warrant; only 42 percent of those polled said it should proceed without one.” And while the RESTORE Act of 2007, may be an improvement over the August bill, the new legislation “still authorizes the interception of Americans’ international communications without a warrant in far too many instances, and without adequate civil liberties protections.” Americans deserve better.

UPDATE: Glenn Greenwald makes a good point:

It is important here to recall that there is actually an amendment to FISA that is at least arguably justifiable. Even the original FISA law never required warrants in order to eavesdrop on (a) foreign-to-foreign calls or (b) calls involving a U.S. citizen where the target was a non-citizen outside the U.S. (who just happened to call into the U.S.). But recently, technological developments resulted in such calls, even foreign-foreign calls, being routed through the U.S. via fiber optics, and a FISA court ruled this year that the language of FISA requires warrants for such calls.

Even civil libertarian stalwarts such as Russ Feingold agree that it was never the intent of FISA to require warrants for those categories of calls and that amending FISA strictly to fix that problem is justifiable.

UPDATE II: A summary of the RESTORE Act can be found here.

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