The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday is expected to decide whether to give subpoena authority to Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) so that he can deepen the congressional investigation into the administration’s warrantless wiretapping of Americans.

We held a press briefing here earlier today to discuss the warrantless surveillance program(s), the subpoena process and the status of the administration’s proposal to legalize warrantless surveillance on Americans. In anticipation of possible subpoenas, we also released our lists of the “Most Wanted Documents” and the “Most Wanted Answers” relating to the warrantless wiretapping program.

CDT has long maintained that Congress needs to learn the scope and nature of the warrantless surveillance activities that have been conducted in the wake of September 11, 2001 before it can even begin to consider rewriting the law designed to prevent innocent Americans from being swept up in investigative dragnets. By asking the right questions and obtaining the documents that the administration considered in creating the program, Congress can finally understand how that surveillance impacted the privacy rights of Americans.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 20th, 2007 at 4:53 pm and is filed under Security & Freedom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.