It is not hard to assume that, if desired, any tourist who comes to the States could fall under this definition. If the proposal sent to American lawmakers is adopted, U.S. intelligence agencies will be able to fully control the life of any foreigner. Thus, the document contains a demand to oblige private telecommunications companies and Internet service providers to provide interested authorities with all information about their clients. And so that they do not fear cooperation with intelligence agencies, they are offered immunity from prosecution if a person dissatisfied with the violation of his privacy decides to sue a telephone operator or Internet provider.
Notably, these amendments to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act will have retroactive effect – they can be applied to persons who have been in the United States after September 11, 2001. By the way, to take these actions, U.S. intelligence agencies will not even need a court order – the sanction for operational measures against a particular foreigner will be issued by the heads of the relevant intelligence agency, of which there are more than a dozen in the United States.
Human rights activists point out that President Bush is trying to take the actions of intelligence agencies outside the law, thereby violating the principle of inviolability of citizens' private lives and their rights. Representatives of the American Civil Liberties Union openly called on congressmen 'not to succumb to vile advertising' and not to adopt the amendments to the law sent from the White House.
Meanwhile, a scandal is gaining increasing publicity after it became known that employees of the Bush administration used their work email addresses to discuss issues not related to their official duties. After an attempt to find out what exactly was discussed in the correspondence, the disappearance of more than 5 million emails sent and received to the addresses of President Bush himself and his Vice President Dick Cheney was discovered. Experts believe that this is a deliberate purge of the archive in order to conceal data compromising someone among the figures in the scandal, and they already compare what is happening to the famous Watergate scandal, which ended with the resignation of President Richard Nixon.
Anatoly POMORTSEV.
Novye Izvestia