I actually missed this speech yesterday, but fortunately Marcy Wheeler didn’t.

Jello Jay’s speech is eye-popping for several reasons. It reveals he simply does not care if the government abuses this collection program. For him, it’s more important to make massive collection easy than to include safeguards against abuse. His speech amounts to legal sanction for the government to abuse this program….

Also, Jello Jay’s speech reveals just how false are all the claims that this program does not involving spying on Americans. The reason he falsely asserts that Feingold’s program would cause the government to lose all of the information collected in a given program is because the US person data collected as part of these programs cannot be segregated out from the foreign data.

This program is, Jello Jay reveals, designed to spy on Americans.

Ryan Singel at Threat Level has much more on Rockefeller’s efforts to expand the government’s ability to spy on American citizens. Singel writes:

The changes aren’t about making it easier for the National Security Agency to listen in on a particular terrorism suspect’s phone calls. The changes are about letting the nation’s spooks secretly and unilaterally install filters inside America’s phone and internet infrastructure.

Rockefeller essentially wants to make everything the Bush administration has done outside the law legal. Moreover, Rockefeller’s argument for bulk collections of Americans’ communications runs in direct contravention to the 4th Amendment and likely makes the SSCI bill unconstitutional.