On behalf of the American Civil Liberties Union, a non-partisan organization with hundreds of thousands of members and activists and 53 affiliates nation-wide, we urge you to support an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act for FY 2007 (H.R. 5631) that would cut off funding for illegal wiretapping conducted by the National Security Agency.  The bi-partisan amendment, which will be offered by Representatives Adam Schiff (D-CA), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), Jay Inslee (D-WA), Bob Inglis (R-SC) and Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) provides that none of the funds appropriated in the bill can be used to conduct electronic surveillance in the United States except pursuant to the criminal wiretapping statutes and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA).  The ACLU urges members to support this critically important amendment because:

• Warrantless NSA eavesdropping on the conversations of Americans in the United States is both illegal under FISA and unconstitutional under the 4th Amendment;
• The wiretapping program has been on-going without congressional or judicial checks and balances for over four years, and yet has reportedly targeted the conversations of thousands of Americans (another NSA program appears to be gathering the communications records of millions of Americans);
• The Administration has repeatedly forestalled congressional oversight by failing to disclose substantial information about the program, and it has even argued that challenges to the program to protect Americans’ fundamental privacy rights cannot be heard in court because to do so would reveal state secrets, despite the fact that available court procedures have adequately dealt with classified information in many cases;
• Rationales offered to justify the program simply do not hold water:  Congress never debated, much less voted, to subject Americans to warrantless surveillance when it authorized the use of force after the September 11 attacks, and the notion that the President can act unilaterally as the Commander-in-Chief to override the laws Congress has enacted has been rejected by the Supreme Court;
• The amendment would permit continued wiretapping in the U.S. under FISA of agents of al-Qaeda or other terrorist organizations.  It would not alter the existing criminal statutes that allow wiretapping of anyone when there is probable cause to believe that he or she is engaged in terrorist activity. And it would not interfere with the NSA’s warrantless wiretapping of non-U.S. persons abroad.

This amendment would appropriately remove funding from an illegal program that has targeted innocent Americans with no judicial finding they are involved in crime or scheming with al-Qaeda.  ACLU urges you to support this amendment to help keep America safe and free.

Sincerely,                  

Caroline Fredrickson
Director               

Gregory T. Nojeim
Associate Director