{"id":15173,"date":"2012-05-24T19:06:33","date_gmt":"2012-05-25T03:06:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/?p=15173"},"modified":"2012-05-26T20:13:41","modified_gmt":"2012-05-27T04:13:41","slug":"the-surveillance-state-trust-us-its-legal","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/2012\/05\/24\/the-surveillance-state-trust-us-its-legal\/","title":{"rendered":"The Surveillance State: Trust Us, It’s Legal"},"content":{"rendered":"

Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute<\/a> on the renewal of the FISA Amendment Act and the lawless surveillance state:<\/p>\n

It\u2019s been almost four years since the\u00a0FISA Amendments Act of 2008<\/a>\u00a0put President Bush\u2019s warrantless wiretap program on legal footing by authorizing broad, programmatic surveillance of Americans\u2019 international communications. The only thing the public really knows about it so far is that it was\u00a0almost immediately misused<\/a>, resulting in \u201csignificant and systemic\u201d overcollection of Americans\u2019\u00a0purely domestic<\/em>\u00a0communications.\u00a0Subsequent reporting<\/a>\u00a0revealed that the improperly \u201covercollected\u201d communications could number in the millions, and included former president Clinton\u2019s private e-mails. So naturally, the Senate is\u00a0charging ahead toward the renewal of these sweeping powers<\/a>\u00a0without hearings or debate.<\/p>\n

…This is a truly incredible state of affairs. We have a vast apparatus for intercepting\u2014and retaining indefinitely\u2014American communications on a mass scale. We are being asked to take it as an article of faith that this is absolutely necessary to the security of the United States, even though similar claims about the original warrantless wiretap program\u00a0could not be substantiated by later internal audits<\/a>. The government doesn\u2019t want to have to even defend the constitutionality of this program in front of a judge. And Congress doesn\u2019t seem interested in so much as\u00a0discussing<\/em>\u00a0the question, or making the public privy to so much as the raw numbers involved, before giving the NSA four more years of carte blanche. But hey, look over there, someone tangentially related to a presidential campaign said something dumb on cable television! Clearly there\u2019s no time to discuss trivia like this \u201cvast government database of intercepted communications.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The ACLU also has a nice round up of links<\/a> including “the Obama administration\u2019s explanation of the law\u00a0here<\/a>”\u00a0and “the ACLU\u2019s letter to the Senate Intelligence Committee\u00a0here<\/a>” and the ACLU’s “lawsuit challenging the law\u00a0here<\/a>.” They also explain how the Director of National Intelligence “said it\u00a0isn\u2019t even \u2018reasonably possible\u2019 to estimate<\/a>\u00a0how many Americans are swept up in the NSA\u2019s expansive dragnet.”<\/p>\n

The Obama administration, as is usual in cases where they disregard the Constitution, promises this mass surveillance comes with strong safeguards and accountability. In reality, the war on terrorism is continuing to be used to justify major infringements on the civil liberties of Americans<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Julian Sanchez at the Cato Institute on the renewal of the FISA Amendment Act and the lawless surveillance state: It\u2019s been almost four years since the\u00a0FISA Amendments Act of 2008\u00a0put President Bush\u2019s warrantless wiretap program on legal footing by authorizing broad, programmatic surveillance of Americans\u2019 international communications. The only thing the public really knows about […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":86,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-15173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15173","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/86"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15173"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15173\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15205,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15173\/revisions\/15205"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15173"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15173"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15173"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=15173"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}