Suits Filed on Domestic Spying

The opening salvo is getting the White House to stop breaking the law:

Federal lawsuits were filed Tuesday seeking to halt President Bush's domestic eavesdropping program, calling it an "illegal and unconstitutional program" of electronic eavesdropping on American citizens.

The lawsuits accusing Bush of exceeding his constitutional powers were filed in federal court in New York by the Center for Constitutional Rights and in Detroit by the American Civil Liberties Union.

The New York suit, filed on behalf of the center and individuals, names Bush, the head of the National Security Agency, and the heads of the other major security agencies, challenging the NSA's surveillance of persons within the United States without judicial approval or statutory authorization.

It asked a judge to stop Bush and government agencies from conducting warrantless surveillance of communications in the United States.

The Detroit suit, which also names the NSA, was filed by the ACLU, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, Greenpeace and several individuals.

It's going to be hard to prove these cases, because you essentially have to prove that the plaintiffs were indeed spied upon. I'm pretty sure the government will resist discovery of that evidence in the name of national security (or they'll flat-out say they destroyed it, which is not unusual for them to do). But it's important to file them to get Congress out of its slumber, to get them to understand that you can't let the executive get away with illegal action that sidestep legislative and judicial oversight.

At a news conference, Center for Constitutional Rights Legal Director Bill Goodman portrayed the president as a man on an unprecedented power grab at the expense of basic democratic principles.

He said the public was starting to understand the assertion that the erosion of individual rights is a slippery slope that lets the government "brand anyone a terrorist with no right to counsel, no right to be brought before a judge and no right to privacy in communications."

The Detroit lawsuit said the plaintiffs, who frequently communicate by telephone and e-mail with people in the Middle East and Asia, have a "well-founded belief" that their communications are being intercepted by the government.

"By seriously compromising the free speech and privacy rights of the plaintiffs and others, the program violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution," the lawsuit states.

It's your move, Congress.

UPDATE: By the way, if Abu Gonzales is going on Larry King to defend NSA spying, you know he has no argument. Larry King is the go-to guy for the truly guilty, where hard-hitting questions are as rare as Rick Santorum at an atheist luncheon. As soon as anyone appears on Larry King, we should charge them with something. The statistical probability is very high.

And Gore was absolutely right about this. If the Attorney General at the time was trying to get Congress to explicitly give authorization for domestic spying, and they demurred, you can't very well say that the authorization was IMPLICIT after the fact. It's ludicrous.