Of course spying on congress is no big deal. Why do you ask?
by digby
Peter King further proves his obtuse misunderstanding of the constitution and American democracy.
“I think members of Congress should be treated the same as everyone else,” King said. “If a member of Congress is talking to an Al Qaeda leader in Iraq or Afghanistan, why should that member of Congress be any different from any person on the street?”
Peter King would probably have been in a world of hurt if they’d been monitoring his own very real terrorist supporting activity in the past.
But be that as it may, the problem with this is even more acute than just the clear violation of the constitution by doing any of this stuff without probable cause. It’s the idea that the executive branch is using surveillance on the legislative branch which, last I heard, was equal to the executive. It’s constitutionally very dicey to do this. In fact, it’s a clear cut violation.
And they don’t have to actually be doing it to chill the sort of adversarial inquiry that might make for some unpleasantness down at Star Fleet headquarters, do they? All they have to do is leave the question open: every legislator with any brains will know that their conversations, political, partisan or otherwise, might find their way to places they might not want it to end up. It’s not as if the NSA hasn’t done this before.
The point is that even the possibility that the NSA is spying on another branch of government is cause for alarm. And unfortunately, they are not denying it, which means that the implied threat is very much in effect.
Update: I see that Sirota brought this up earlier and cited an anecdote which illustrates the problem perfectly.
[W]hen I asked U.S. Rep. Alan Grayson (D-Fla.) if the NSA was keeping files on his colleagues, he recounted a meeting between NSA officials and lawmakers in the lead-up to a closely contested House vote to better regulate the agency:
“One of my colleagues asked the NSA point blank will you give me a copy of my own record and the NSA said no, we won’t. They didn’t say no we don’t have one. They said no we won’t. So that’s possible.”
Grayson is right: presumably, if the NSA wasn’t tracking lawmakers, it would have flatly denied it. Instead, those officials merely denied lawmakers access to whatever files the agency might have. That suggests one of two realities: 1) the NSA is keeping files on lawmakers 2) the NSA isn’t keeping files on lawmakers, but answered vaguely in order to stoke fear among legislators that it is.