Domestic Spying

Today's Senate obliteration of provisions of the Patriot Act is only the beginning of this struggle. Today the New York Times dropped a bombshell of a report, saying that the President (not functionaries, not rogue White House aides, but the President himself) authorized the National Security Agency to begin domestic spying without warrants, without judicial oversight, on literally thousands of calls and email messages over the past three years. The article claims this was done only on communications which originated outside the United States, but says the agency "still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications."

And if you add that to this week's NBC News report that the Defense Department has been spying on peace groups who gather at Quaker meeting houses, you begin to see the full picture here. The current government has no intention of working within constitutional limits. In his usual dismissive way (since he wants to come across as a libertarian, but has to continue to toe the line when it comes to the GOP agenda), Instapundit says:

I can't see any very compelling reason to bypass the courts here, especially given that warrants in these cases are almost always granted. Which makes me wonder what's up.

Well, let's let you in on something. The government thinks they're above the law. It's happened before and it'll happen again. Actually going to the courts to obtain a warrant is something they'd consider demeaning and unecessarily slow. So the President just orders the NSA to do it, breaking established laws. Yes, laws, punishable by fines and imprisonment:

The law governing clandestine surveillance in the United States, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, prohibits conducting electronic surveillance not authorized by statute. A government agent can try to avoid prosecution if he can show he was "engaged in the course of his official duties and the electronic surveillance was authorized by and conducted pursuant to a search warrant or court order of a court of competent jurisdiction," according to the law.

"This is as shocking a revelation as we have ever seen from the Bush administration," said Martin, who has been sharply critical of the administration's surveillance and detention policies. "It is, I believe, the first time a president has authorized government agencies to violate a specific criminal prohibition and eavesdrop on Americans."

We have in this country a group of people who have been so cauterized by fear that they are all too willing to turn the United States into a place that resembles a police state on far too many counts. In the process they have trashed civil liberties and re-interpreted the constitution so that it places untold secret power in the hands of the executive (I mean, do the words "improper search and seizure" mean anything to these people?). Stopping the Patroit Act's attacks on civil liberties are a high-profile start, and actually the culmination of a return to our collective senses on this kind of stuff that have forced rollbacks in other areas. But based on the past few days it's clear that the Bush Administration doesn't care whether or not it's a law: they're going to do what they want anyway.

The answer to 9/11's intelligence failure is not to violate citizen's rights, sorry. You're basically saying that the solution to bad, ill-gotten intelligence is more bad, ill-gotten intelligence. Balancing law enforcement and civil liberties is a bedrock of this country. Sorry, WAS a bedrock.