As I noted last night, DiFi appears to have used the Najibullah Zazi investigation as justification to make the language surrounding Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act worse, effectively granting the FBI the ability to collect secret lists of everyone who buys acetone or hydrogen peroxide.

As a reminder, Section 215 gives investigators a way to get business records or other tangible things without telling the people who those business records pertain to that they have done so. I have speculated that the FBI is using Section 215 now to search out people--who may or may not have known ties to alleged Islamic terrorists--who have purchased the precursors of TATP, the explosive that Najibullah Zazi is alleged to have tried to make. Those precursors include things like hydrogen peroxide and acetone, but common ingredients of beauty and home improvement supplies.

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DiFi's language does two things. First, it shifts the burden of proof even further than the current "presumptively relevant" to the "justify the belief of the applicant language." If I understand the language correctly, the FISA Judge would go from presuming something is relevant if the FBI has told him so, to simply checking to make sure the FBI has shown why they believe this information is relevant--and to hell whether the FISA Judge thinks it is relevant or not. Though I guess in both cases the FISA Court is just a mandated rubber stamp. [Update: I've spoken with two people who have persuaded me the new language is an improvement over the "presumptively" language.]

More troubling, DiFi completely eliminates any requirement that the Section 215 records have to pertain to someone with a known contact with someone suspected to be an agent of a foreign power. Whereas under the current language, the FBI can only collect lists of people who have some kind of connection to Zazi who have also bought acetone and/or hydrogen peroxide, under DiFi's proposed language, they could collect lists of everyone--everyone!!--who has bought products with acetone or hydrogen peroxide in it.

When is she going to retire already? It's just an embarrassment to Californians everywhere, even if they are too stupid to know it.

Seriously, it's bad enough that we can't look in the rear view mirror on the legislative atrocities that occurred right after 9/11, but are we going to start trying to out Cheney, Cheney now, every time they catch some half baked would-be terrorist? It's ridiculous.

And they really need to start thinking about how this stuff is affecting the American economy. From Michael Froomkin:

It looks as if the Bush administration policy on making it much harder to get a US visa (which Obama has yet to alter) has come home to sink Chicago's Olympic bid:

In the official question-and-answer session following the Chicago presentation, Syed Shahid Ali, an I.O.C. member from Pakistan, asked the toughest question. He wondered how smooth it would be for foreigners to enter the United States for the Games because doing so can sometimes, he said, be “a rather harrowing experience.”

This is the same stupid anti-visitor policy that is destroying American higher education by driving graduate students to UK and other universities. Here at UM, for example, we have had great trouble getting visas for some great students who want to take our LL.M for foreign students — including one who had a US government scholarship!

Maybe some good can come from this stunning defeat for Obama's personal diplomacy: bring back the pre-9/11 visa rules that made this country a magnet for tourists, investors, and the world's best and the brightest.

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