Taking the FISA fight to the next level
I've often thought that President Bush probably read "The Trial" and "1984" at some point and mistook them for how-to manuals. Today's signing of the FISA bill tends to support that theory. On the heels of yesterday's capitulation by the Senate on telecom immunity and warrantless spying, President Bush wasted no time in signing this abrogation of the Fourth Amendment into law.
Fortunately, the ACLU wasted no time in filing suit to have it declared unconstitutional:
President George W. Bush signed a law on Thursday overhauling the rules for eavesdropping on terrorism suspects but immediately met a civil liberties challenge calling it a threat to Americans' privacy.
[...]
The action was filed on behalf of human-rights groups, journalists, labor organizations and others who say they fear the law will allow the U.S. government to monitor their activities, including compiling of critical reports on the United States.
The press release summarizes the issue this way:
"Spying on Americans without warrants or judicial approval is an abuse of government power - and that's exactly what this law allows. The ACLU will not sit by and let this evisceration of the Fourth Amendment go unchallenged," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero. "Electronic surveillance must be conducted in a constitutional manner that affords the greatest possible protection for individual privacy and free speech rights. The new wiretapping law fails to provide fundamental safeguards that the Constitution unambiguously requires."
More to the point, neither the President nor the Congress have the authority to annul our rights, whether those rights are implicit or explicit in the Constitution. This law must be overturned.
Since most Democrats (including Obama) cowered in fear of Republican name-calling, and since McCain supported the bill but didn't have the guts to vote for it on the record, the responsibility for righting this wrong now rests properly within the courts.
Supporters of the FISA bill have cast the issue as a root conflict of liberty vs. security, but that's wrong; the real issue is liberty vs. control. The existing FISA framework (which dates back to the 1970's) permitted emergency surveillance by a government agency of someone outside the US, with a requirement for a proper, judicially sanctioned search warrant to be issued up to three days later. If the current FISA "reform" bill had not been signed into law, those pre-existing requirements would have still held true. No useful surveillance tools would have been lost had this "reform" bill not been enacted. No terrorists would have gone unmonitored had this bill not been signed. National security would not have been hampered in any way if this law hadn't been signed, but the ability of the NSA (or some other agency) to conduct arbitrary dragnets and fishing expeditions certainly would have been.
Those aren't the tactics of valid government in a free society; those are the tools of a totalitarian state, and they have no place in our country.