Go Team
by digby
NEW YORK – The American Civil Liberties Union filed a landmark lawsuit today to stop the government from conducting surveillance under a new wiretapping law that gives the Bush administration virtually unchecked power to intercept Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls. The case was filed on behalf of a broad coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal and media organizations whose ability to perform their work – which relies on confidential communications – will be greatly compromised by the new law.
The FISA Amendments Act of 2008, passed by Congress on Wednesday and signed by President Bush today, not only legalizes the secret warrantless surveillance program the president approved in late 2001, it gives the government new spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications.
“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.”
In today’s legal challenge, the ACLU argues that the new spying law violates Americans’ rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution. The new law permits the government to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and email addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it’s conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.
Plaintiffs in today’s case are:
• The Nation and its contributing journalists Naomi Klein and Chris Hedges
• Amnesty International USA, Global Rights, Global Fund for Women, Human Rights Watch, PEN American Center, Service Employees International Union, Washington Office on Latin America, and the International Criminal Defence Attorneys Association
• Defense attorneys Dan Arshack, David Nevin, Scott McKay and Sylvia Royce
We’ll see what happens. I’d be very surprised if the new right wing reactionary courts overturn this law, but you have to try. They’ve surprised us before.
There’s no going back on telcom immunity, however, and so we have no avenue to find out what happened in the past unless the government itself generously decides to cough up the information. With the way the vote went, I’m not holding my breath that that’s going to happen any time soon. In fact, it will likely be revealed like one of those time capsules they unearth years later. Everyone will look at what happened during this era like we look back on the Palmer raids or the Salem Witch trials, tut-tutting and wondering how those strange people could have done such things. Only this time they may not feel free to say anything about it. The Surveillance State will be so firmly entrenched that we’ll be having our political conversations and planning sessions only out doors, speaking in code. After all, there will always be enemies and the State will always have an excuse to “protect us” by using modern communications capabilities to spy on everything we do. When the people’s representatives fail to hold the line on old fashioned enlightenment principles, the authoritarians get to work.
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