New FISA law is pending passage in the Senate. I was going to write a long post on this for a number of reasons. First, it is an important topic. Second, Glenn Greenwald has been blogging about this for a while (here, here and here). Thirdly, Joe Klein for reasons that aren't clear, completely misrepresented the bill and got caught doing so. But, you and I have been saved. One of the authors of the bill Representative Rush Holt has written a nice summary of the bill on the Huffington Post.

From Representative Holt:

I was pleased to see Time Magazine columnist Joe Klein acknowledge that he "may have made a mistake" in his column attacking the House Majority ("The Tone Deaf Democrats") and misrepresenting the RESTORE Act. Unfortunately, Mr. Klein still professes confusion toward the bill's contents and continues to question whether the House should have passed it in the first place.

As one of the bill's authors, I want to set the record straight about what's in the RESTORE Act, why it's needed to safeguard Americans from unwarranted surveillance, and ultimately, why it will lead to better intelligence gathering.

In his original column, Mr. Klein incorrectly wrote, "Unfortunately, Speaker Nancy Pelosi quashed the House Intelligence Committee's bipartisan effort and supported a Democratic bill that - Limbaugh is salivating - would require the surveillance of every foreign-terrorist target's calls to be approved by the FISA court, an institution founded to protect the rights of U.S. citizens only." It contains no such provision. (more...)