Carpe Datum

Strange Victory

If you haven't been following the latest battle in the Senate, Glenn Greenwald has a good summary. Basically, it is now fairly clear that most of the major telecommunications companies in America were asked by the Bush administration to monitor all telephone communications without a warrant. Not just communications where one party is in a foreign country, but all communications where both parties are on U. S. soil.

You can't monitor communications within the U. S. without a warrant, period. That's in the Constitution. It is considered an unlawful search, essentially, and the law is very well established on this fact. In light of the importance of catching terrorists, the FISA law was established, which basically lets the government get around most of this. Basically, if you want to monitor a phone call, you can do it in real time as long as you get a retroactive warrant within 72 hours, and the FISA court has basically never turned down a warrant request.

So the question is, why did the Bush administration stop asking for warrants? Is it because they don't want a record of whose calls are being monitored? Is it because they're recording *everyone* and using computer algorithms to search transcripts for calls of interest? If it is the latter, they could've easily gone to Congress and asked for a rewrite of FISA to accomodate this request, especially during the aftermath of 9/11 when the Republican Congress would give Bush anything he wanted.

But they didn't do that, so we are left with the former reason.

The phone companies had to cooperate to make this happen. Those who didn't all of a sudden were getting all kinds of scrutiny from the Justice department. Basically, the phone companies were sort of bullied into this by the government.

Did you hear that, all you "libertarians" who are big Bush fans?

So far, lawsuits to prevent this have been hampered by the administration, which basically just says they can't go to trial with any of this for national security reasons, and Congress doesn't have the balls to do anything about it for fear of looking weak. The FISA law is up for renewal, and one of the things the administration wants is retroactive immunity for the phone companies for cooperating with the illegal searches.

Some Dems in the Senate are standing up against this, but a whole lot aren't. Yesterday, Chris Dodd (one of the minor Dem candidates) and several other Senators managed to throw a wrench into things, in part thanks to lots of activists making phone calls, and so now the legislation is delayed until at least next year, giving opposition more time to organize.

And a lot of us are out here wondering why Congress is so eager to do whatever Bush wants when it comes to this issue or Iraq or just about anything. Is it because they are partly culpable? Does the Bush administration have something on a lot of Congress members thanks to the wiretaps (is that whose phones they were listening to and why they didn't want to get warrants)?

We've really gone down the rabbit hole here, and our cowardly leaders have been driven by fear or fascist impulses. You pick. All I can say is that it is really depressing to think about. And don't get me started on how all of this is being reported in the "ultra-super-duper liberal" media.

Posted by Observer at December 18, 2007 11:23 PM