In Other News…
…okay, while I wait for SOMEONE to get my little quiz below right, here’s a massive post from AJ regarding a FISA/NSA surveillance document dump from the DoJ. Very informative…thanks, AJ!…
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In Other News……okay, while I wait for SOMEONE to get my little quiz below right, here’s a massive post from AJ regarding a FISA/NSA surveillance document dump from the DoJ. Very informative…thanks, AJ!… 3 comments to In Other News…Leave a Reply |
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Is there any evidence that anybody involved called it the “Terrorist Surveillance Program” until January, when they needed a PR term to convince people that only “terrorists” were targeted? What a silly, meaningless PR term.
Which, of course, is the problem: without Congressional or Court oversight there’s no mechanism for stopping them from wiretapping innocent people. The significant bit is the fear that if the FISA court denies a retroactive warrant, they might inform American citizens that they have been unjustly spied upon — in other words, the Bush Administration wants to make sure that if they unjustly wiretap an American citizen, that citizen should never know he’s been unjustly spied upon by the government. All part of the Bush Administration’s determination to use war powers against its own people — the Bush Administration’s war on America.
Well, M.A., suppose the citizen is in contact with terrorists, and is warned of the surveillance because it didn’t meet ‘warrant’ standards – it’s a safe bet the citizen will tell his terrorist contacts, is it not?…
Well, M.A., suppose the citizen is in contact with terrorists, and is warned of the surveillance because it didn’t meet ‘warrant’ standards – it’s a safe bet the citizen will tell his terrorist contacts, is it not?
True, but if he is in fact in contact with terrorists, then why wouldn’t it meet warrant standards? I can think of a scenario where it wouldn’t and the citizen would still be likely to tip off his terrorist contacts (let’s say the NSA screws up and taps him while talking to a non-terrorist).
What it comes down to is, without the FISA court or Congressional oversight or some kind of mechanism like that, what is to stop the NSA from pulling this stuff on innocent people and then using it for the wrong reasons? (Even if Bush/Cheney aren’t using this information for Nixonian purposes, some rogue NSA guy could find ways to use it.) The assumption is that we are safe because there is a mechanism to prevent abuse: if the cops abuse their power over us, the courts can smack the cops down. What we have here is Bush and the NSA bypassing the courts and Congress (the few members of Congress they brief have no actual power to make them stop or even to tell anybody). The closest thing to an oversight mechanism there is is the ability of concerned people to leak classified information — in other words, people can only control this program by breaking the law.
If FISA was inadequate to the tasks at hand, and the DoJ is still being very evasive about why they thought it was, then they didn’t necessarily need to amend FISA, but they needed to give the program some kind of mechanism allowing someone outside the administration to put a stop to abuses. The fact that they didn’t, and don’t want that proves either that they have something to hide, or that the Bush administration has simply taken the conservative obsession with the evil of judges to the next level. (As we learned during the Schiavo affair, all judges, even Republican ones, are evil activists who need to be stripped of power.)