“And that pizza delivery truck has been parked across the street for two weeks. How long does it take to deliver a pizza?” - Marge Simpson
Over at Salon Glenn Greenwald has been doing his customarily thorough job of exposing the rank stupidity and crass corruption swirling around the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) bill currently under consideration in Congress. (Plenty of others are on the case as well, but Greenwald is a good clearing house if you only want to make one stop.) The short, short, short version of the story is this: after September 11th the Administration asked for, and got, phone taps, e-mail information and other electronic data without warrants. The phone companies acceded to the request. Consumers got wind of it courtesy of The New York Times and, as doing so is illegal, sued the phone companies in federal court. Those lawsuits are pending at this very moment.
What does that have to do with FISA, you may ask? It’s a good question and one to which no honest answer has been forthcoming from either the feds or the telephone companies. Embarrassingly for them the real answer is: not much. The short, short, short history of FISA is this: it was originally passed in 1978 as a reaction to the outrageous government conduct exposed by the Church Committee. During the Cold War the government routinely spied on Americans, usually because they either were Communists or were suspected of being Communists. That was bad enough, but it reached its peak during the Vietnam War (especially during the Nixon Administration) when the government went balls to the wall spying on American citizens who opposed the war, including tapping their phones and opening their mail. Most of the information gleaned had no real national security implications and as such was a massive waste of resources that could’ve been used against legitimate threats. The most famous example of this is the years long telephone surveillance of that notorious anti-American Martin Luther King, Jr.
FISA extended the 4th Amendment’s protections against unreasonable search and seizure to modern communications but allowed the government to quickly get a warrant in cases of national security by going to a specially designated court. It was amended in 2001 to include non-government sanctioned groups (i.e. terrorists).
The preceding is a long way of saying something that is frequently papered over when discussions turn to eavesdropping these days: FISA exists because the government cannot be trusted with unlimited powers of domestic surveillance. When they had such powers, before the Church Committee, they invaded the lives of innocent Americans and squandered their own resources on pointless political witch hunts.
There is ample evidence that this is exactly what the government was up to and the lawsuits, filed on behalf of ordinary Americans, are an effort to shine the light of day on these events and decisions. On Friday the House voted for a bill which would, in effect, quash these lawsuits and put illegal activity beyond the reach of the federal courts. A vote was expected in the Senate some time this week, though now there may be another delay.
(Barack Obama, who had previously pledged to help filibuster any FISA bill which included immunity for the telecom firms, had his campaign put out a meek press release supporting the House bill. They issued it at the end of the day on Friday, guaranteeing that it would make minimal news. That was disappointing, if not unexpected given just how long it took them to respond.)
What’s important here isn’t just this specific instance of Administration lawbreaking, though there’s that. It’s also the telecom companies. AT&T, Comcast, Verizon, etcetera, with the ongoing decline of broadcast television and print news these are the companies which increasingly control the flow of information in our society. To one degree or another they all offer cable television, home internet access, home telephone service, and cell phone service. That covers pretty much every means of both mass and interpersonal communication save postal mail. Now they want to be able to inspect your communications, without cause or permission, and we’ll all just have to trust them that nothing untoward is going to happen.
That is beyond foolish, especially since we are only at the dawn of what electronic surveillance can do. Five or ten years from now, with this FISA bill as precedent for legalized lawbreaking, what is the next thing they’re going to try?
