The weirdness of the FISA bill

I am truly confounded and have taken several days trying to make sense of it.

Did the Democrats do what I think they just did? Are they that afraid of being handed the Iraqi hot potato? Do they think some sort of terrorist strike is going to happen in August and if they dared block the FISA bill they would be blamed? Do they think we will vote them into the White House just because they aren't Bush? What the hell were they thinking?

Anonymous Liberal at Crooks and Liars thinks the bill was worded to be deliberately confusing:

It is imperative that members of Congress and the media be made aware of the full scope of this bill. It is not as advertised. By carving out a large category of surveillance activities from the definition of “electronic surveillance,” the bill effectively exempts such surveillance from FISA altogether. And while the bill purports to establish conditions and procedures for conducting warrantless surveillance, these requirements are effectively optional and, in any case, there is no penalty in the statute for disobeying them. Those lawmakers who voted for this bill need to be confronted with these facts and shamed into doing something to correct the situation.

Steve Bates of The Yellow Doggerel Democrat has collected statements from John Dean, Glenn Greenwald, Marjorie Kohn, Marty Lederman and others.

Update 8/12: Kevin Drum of the Washington Monthly:

...NSA (and the White House) were specifically looking for new authority to monitor communications that included U.S. persons. And not just communications related to terrorism. They wanted a free hand for warrantless surveillance of any communication between foreigners and Americans that was related to foreign intelligence in any way.

And then, once Democrats reluctantly agreed to that, they decided they wanted even more: the authority to monitor any communications — including domestic calls — "concerning" foreigners. With no FISA court oversight at all.

I'm still not sure about all this. I've read a bunch of media interviews from the period when this was being debated, and the issue of broadening U.S.-to-foreign surveillance rarely comes up explicitly. Whether this was because it was hard to talk about without revealing classified information, or because no one quite understood this was really what was going on, I don't know. But the technical "glitch" appears to have been nothing more than a smokescreen as far as the White House was concerned. From the get-go, they wanted a vastly broadened ability to monitor calls on U.S. soil without a warrant, and they wanted the FISA court out of the picture.

And in the end, thanks to incompetence on the part of the Democratic leadership, they got wildly more than they had ever thought possible. There is, at this point, virtually no oversight on NSA's data collection at all. Hooray.