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'Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainity and agitation distinquish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones ... All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.' Marx

wiretapping citizens « Previous | |Next »
February 13, 2006

Remember how President Bush ordered the National Security Agency (NSA) to spy on US citzens' emails, phones calls, and other electornic communications? By law, the NSA is not allowed to do that without a court order and only in extraordinary circumstances. After 9/11, President Bush abrogated the legal procedures, jumping over the court orders, and instead told the NSA that he has Geoffrey Stone, constitutional professor of law at the University of Chicago Law School, says that the President Bush's secret decision to authorize the National Security Agency to spy on American citizens

....poses at least four central questions: (1) Is the program lawful? (2) Can the government officials who disclosed the program's existence to reporters at the New York Times be criminally punished for this act? (3) Can the reporters be compelled to disclose the identities of their sources to a federal grand jury? (4) What can we expect from the Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, private lawsuits, and Vice-President Gore's call for the appointment of a special counsel?

Stone holds that the the President's authorization of this program was unlawful and probably unconstitutional. Will Congress find it illegal? No, because the Republicans own Congress. So no impeachment. Nor is Bush shown a willingness to seek clear legislative authority for his actions.

As it stands these actions by the national security state have little to do with a threat to the US from outside, but instead further the govt's goal of playing on the public's fears of the unknown other so as to consolidate support for a political regime that the US public would otherwise find unacceptable.

Here is a legal analysis of the legality of the President's authorization of NSA surveillance on American citizens by constitutional scholars. They take issue with the President's rationale for spying on US citizens and the rulings put out by the Justice Department:

In conclusion, the DOJ letter fails to offer a plausible legal defense of the NSA domestic spying program. If the Administration felt that FISA was insufficient, the proper course was to seek legislative amendment, as it did with other aspects of FISA in the Patriot Act, and as Congress expressly contemplated when it enacted the wartime wiretap provision in FISA. One of the crucial features of a constitutional democracy is that it is always open to the President--or anyone else--to seek to change the law. But it is also beyond dispute that, in such a democracy, the President cannot simply violate criminal laws behind closed doors because he deems them obsolete or impracticable.

Given the absence of any external checks on the secret wiretapping the president ordered after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks why don't the Republicans insist that Bush come back to Congress for authority to continue the wiretaps -- but under court supervision? The Bush administration has shown little interest in accepting seeking a clear statutory authority for their electronic monitoring.

| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 10:54 PM | | Comments (0)
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