Allowing the new surveillance law to stand would seriously cripple our free press.
by Chris Hedges via The LA Times
If the sweeping surveillance law signed by President Bush on Thursday — giving the U.S. government nearly unchecked authority to eavesdrop on the phone calls and e-mails of innocent Americans — is allowed to stand, we will have eroded one of the most important bulwarks to a free press and an open society.
The new FISA Amendments Act nearly eviscerates oversight of government surveillance. It allows the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The court will not be told specifics about who will be wiretapped, which means the law provides woefully inadequate safeguards to protect innocent people whose communications are caught up in the government’s dragnet surveillance program.
3 Comments
July 13, 2008 at 11:37 am
BnF,
I understand that the constitution grants the Congress the power to strip the judicial branch of adjudication authority over any issue they want (and has been done to prevent the Supreme Court from declaring certain laws unconstitutional), but can they actually pass a law “repugnant to the constitution” that flat out contradicts the plain meaning and wording of the constitution?
To review (for those who haven’t read it in a while, if ever), the Fourth Amendment reads:
(emphasis mine)
My question is, how can Congress pass a constitutional law that says that warrants can be issued unsupported by oath or affirmation, and without particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized? And how can they pass any constitutional law that denies us our right to have that Amendment followed by the government? This law must be unconstitutional, and the courts should be allowed to say it this.
The law itself is unconstitutional because it allows the government to not follow the Fourth Amendment. How do we challenge it on those grounds, and not have to be turned away as previous attempts have been because we couldn’t prove “standing”? Obviously we should all have standing, because it’s our constitution that’s being violated. That should be grounds enough.
July 13, 2008 at 1:22 pm
http://goesdownbitter.wordpress.com/2008/07/13/naomi-wolf-at-ron-paul-rally/
Both the right and the left are united in opposition.
July 13, 2008 at 7:27 pm
goesdownbitter,
Das machst nix, Der Fürher hast spritzen.
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