In a press conference call today called by the Obama campaign to discuss John McCain's opposition to an Everglades restoration bill, Nick Juliano of RawStory.com went off topic and asked one of the speakers, former Sen. Bob Graham (D-FL), who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee when warrantless wiretapping issues were first brought to it post-9/11, about McCain's "shifting position" on wiretapping and about McCain's position that telecommunications companies should receive sweeping immunity for their roles in any past illegal wiretapping without being required to testify before Congress first.
In his response, Graham gave a concise and accurate summary of current wiretapping law -- including longstanding rules that already allow the government to wiretap without warrants in an emergency, and the fact that over 99% of warrant requests already are granted by a secret court -- and then accused the Administration of using fear of terrorism as a "smokescreen" and "subterfuge" to secretly resurrect a large scale "data mining" operation involving millions of Americans' conversations, like the "Total Information Awareness" program that was rejected in 2003 for being too intrusive.
Here's Juliano's piece today about McCain's "flip-flopping" on warrantless eavesdropping and telecom immunity and the role telecom lobbyists play in his campaign. And here's Charlie Savage's New York Times article today, which Juliano refers to in his question.
You can listen in on the conference call with Graham, and come to your own conclusions about whether the country would really be made safer by giving the Administration even more authority to conduct warrantless wiretaps. Here's Juliano's question:
And here's Graham's answer, which (because the question was off topic) was deferred until the end of the call:
Final note: as I write this, the Obama campaign (in another example of its impeccable timing) has issued a press release pointing out the NYT article.
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(P.S.: Despite its name, this column is not focused on FISA and wiretaps; I leave that to great analysts like Glenn Greenwald, who also wrote on this topic today. Rather, I write about the campaigns' press conference calls, press releases, and other "insider" or "primary sources" that the press base their stories on, in order to make the media process more transparent and democratic. It's purely coincidence that my second column is actually on warrantless wiretaps - just another case of the gods going out of their way to prove that my dad, who warned me that the column's name would confuse people on this point, is always right.)