FISA: Get ready to get "Rockefellered."

Does anybody not know someone with a no-fly list nightmare story?

The Transportation Security Administration's secret no-fly list includes some very unlikely terror suspects -- Bolivian President Evo Morales, 14 of the 19 dead 9/11 hijackers, and every single person named "Robert Johnson."

Has anybody not heard how the FBI has run roughshod over all the rules and regulations supposedly in place to protect American from creepy government intrusion through the abuse of "National Security Letters?"

The Justice Department's inspector general told a committee of angry House members yesterday that the FBI may have violated the law or government policies as many as 3,000 times since 2003 as agents secretly collected the telephone, bank and credit card records of U.S. citizens and foreign nationals residing here.

Well, remember these disasters well, because Senator Jay Rockefeller wants to make sure they ruin your life, too, and preferably as soon as possible.

Why? Because Jay Rockefeller can't bend over fast enough for George W. Bush and his astoundingly intrusive domestic spying plans. Instead of evaluating the enormous legal implications of the White House's proposed new "laws," Rockefeller, the Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, found himself overawed by the claims from the nation's intelligence chiefs that they needed to radically redesign how our government spies within our own borders. This kind of power grab is to be expected from the George W. Bush cadre of spooks -- they have done it and intend to continue doing it no matter what the so-called "law" says.

But how far Rockefeller is letting them go now, even in the wake of their absurd failures in every other National Security State endeavor?

Wired knows:

In a Senate floor speech, Senator Jay Rockefeller (D-West Virginia) inadvertently made plain that the proposed changes to the nation's spying laws radically expand how the government wiretaps inside the United States. Rockefeller was decrying an amendment that would require the government to discard non-emergency evidence if a court later finds that the spying methods violate the law.

Rockefeller makes clear that the impending changes to the law aren't about making it easier for the National Security Agency to listen in on a particular terrorism suspect's phone calls. Instead, the changes are about letting the nation's spooks secretly and unilaterally install filters inside America's phone and internet infrastructure.

Rockefeller, the chief Democratic architect of the changes, explains:

Unlike traditional [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] application orders which involve collection on one individual target, the new FISA provisions create a system of collection. The courts role in this system of collection is not to consider probable cause on individual targets but to ensure that procedures used to collect intelligence are adequate. The courts' determination of the adequacy of procedures therefore impacts all electronic communications gathered under the new mechanisms, even if it involves thousands of targets.

In short, the changes legalize Room 641A, the secret spying room inside AT&T's San Francisco internet switching center that was outed by former AT&T employee Mark Klein. That room sits at the center of a lawsuit against AT&T for its alleged illegal participation in the government's secret, warrantless spying program.

Under the new rules, secret spying court judges will no longer be evaluating whether the government has probable cause to eavesdrop on a spy or a terrorist who is inside the United States or to wiretap a particular foreigner via wiretaps inside the United States.

Instead the judges will simply evaluate descriptions of how NSA filters in the infrastructure are designed to not catch purely domestic traffic.  They can also approve or disapprove of how the spooks 'disguise' or reveal the identities of Americans who are one of the parties in any communication that involves a foreigners.

But Rockefeller has never been particularly clear about what his actual job is as Intelligence Chair. Instead of actually performing as a watchdog over Bush's already out-of-control domestic spies, Rockefeller spent most of his time hiding under his desk, issuing secret letters of "protest" that he showed to no one, and which -- astoundingly! -- had no effect. His excuse, of course, was that he feared revealing critical "national security" information. But as people who actually know what they're talking about have pointed out, Rockefeller blew it HUGE, failing to understand the constitutional imperative of speaking out, and the protections available to him in doing so.

He is a stone moron, and it will cost you your freedom some day very soon.

You owe it to yourself to remember how it came to be that you and your family found yourselves "Rockefellered."

He won't give a shit. If he can't get on a plane, he'll just buy one. So it'll be up to you to remember how this happened.

As Wired's Ryan Singel notes:

This marks a radical legal shift in how the nation's spooks interact with the nation's communication infrastructure. And by infrastructure, I mean telephone switches for your landline, the server farms that serve up your Google search results, and the computers that handle and store emails for your Yahoo account.

The nation's current batch of politicians -- save for a handful like Rep. Rush Holt (D-New Jersey) and Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) -- see no problem in handing this unchecked power to the nation's spooks.

Feingold's got an amendment on the floor today that would put in place the only limits yet proposed on the government's use of information it captures from purely innocent domestic telephone traffic -- information it will inevitably suck up in the massive dragnets somnambulant idiots like Rockefeller are waving through.

Yes, this bill contains no penalties whatsoever should the NSA -- oopsies! -- violate (what you and I call) the law in their snooping. Seriously, now. Who writes a bill in this day and age that grants more power to the Bush "administration," but doesn't even stop to wonder what could or should happen if they break it? Honest to God, I have no idea why these people get up to go to work in the morning.

But, hey! What could go wrong? Could anyone have foreseen the government making a "mistake"?

Not Jay Rockefeller. He's not even looking.