Senator Russ Feingold, long an ally, is stepping up in the FISA fight with a raft of amendments that aim to protect Americans’ civil liberties, stop warrantless wiretaps, ensure that the government is minimizing the number of people accidentally spied on, and gives Congress adequate tools to oversee surveillance activities. Here are the details, from Senator Feingold’s website.

Dodd-Feingold Amendment Stripping Retroactive Immunity

Along with Senator Chris Dodd, Senator Feingold will offer an amendment to strike Title II of the Intelligence Committee bill, which provides immunity to telecommunications companies that allegedly cooperated with the President’s illegal warrantless wiretapping program.

Feingold-Webb-Tester Amendment to Provide Protections for Americans

Senator Feingold intends to offer an amendment along with Senators Jim Webb and Jon Tester to allow the government to get the information it needs about terrorists and purely foreign communications, while providing additional checks and balances for communications involving Americans. Under the Intelligence Committee bill, many law-abiding Americans who communicate with completely innocent people overseas will have their communications swept up, with virtually no judicial involvement or oversight.

Use Limits Amendment

This amendment, which was part of the Senate Judiciary Committee version of the FISA bill, gives the FISA Court discretion to impose restrictions on the use of information about Americans that is acquired through procedures later determined to be illegal by the FISA court. This enforcement mechanism is needed because the government can implement its procedures before it has to submit them to the FISA Court for review to determine whether they are reasonably designed to target people overseas rather in the United States.

Prohibiting “Reverse Targeting”

Senator Feingold successfully offered this amendment in the Judiciary Committee to add a meaningful prohibition on “reverse targeting,” a practice by which the government gets around FISA’s court order requirement by wiretapping an individual overseas when it is really interested in a person in the U.S. with whom that supposed foreign target is communicating. The Director of National Intelligence has agreed that “reverse targeting” is unconstitutional. Senator Feingold’s amendment requires the government to obtain a court order whenever a significant purpose of the surveillance is to acquire the communications of an American.

Prohibiting “Bulk Collection”

Senator Feingold successfully offered this amendment in the Senate Judiciary Committee to prohibit “bulk collection” — the collection of all international communications into and out of the U.S to a whole continent, or even the entire world. Such collection without a foreign intelligence purpose would be constitutionally suspect and would go well beyond what the government has says it needs to protect the American people. Yet, the Director of National Intelligence testified at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing that the Protect America Act – which was enacted last year — permits “bulk collection.” The amendment makes clear that bulk collection is not authorized by requiring the government to certify that it is collecting the communications of foreign targets from whom it expects to obtain foreign intelligence information.

Giving Congress Access to FISA Court Materials

This amendment assists Congress in its legislative and oversight functions by requiring that Congress be provided timely access to FISA court pleadings related to significant interpretations of law, which may be necessary to understand the court’s rulings, as well as past FISA court orders containing such interpretations. The amendment was part of the bill reported by the Judiciary Committee and is based on language approved on a bipartisan basis by the Intelligence Committee when Senator Feingold offered it as an amendment to the intelligence authorization bill.

We should expect these amendments to be brought to the floor this afternoon, or depending on how long the debate goes, tomorrow.

Also you can watch Senator Feingold’s speech from this morning on the Leahy Amendment here and read the transcript of it here.

Cross posted at the CREDO blog.