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Federal judge says, "Get a warrant"
15 comments- IT TOPICS:Government & Regulation, Security
Yesterday U.S. District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor handed down a ruling telling the the NSA to stop their warrantless wiretapping immediately. The Department of Justice, which is a very ironic name in this case, immediately filed an appeal. I foresee that there's a good chance that the judge's ruling will be over-ruled at least once in its path to the Supreme Court, but I'm very hopeful that the highest court in the land will see the direct conflict between what has been done and the Constitution.
Let's be clear about something from the start: The NSA can still tap our phone calls, they still have the capability of listening to every terrorist and private citizen in America. The judge's ruling just tells them they have to get a warrant to do it. And the bar for getting a warrant isn't all that high; the NSA can perform the wiretap, then it has 72 hours to ask the FISA court for approval. And in the close to 30 years that the FISA court had been in existence, they have only turned down a handful of these requests, literally 3 or 4 out of a set of thousands of requests.
Despite what one of my colleagues has written , there is nothing about Judge Diggs Taylor's ruling that is going to prevent the NSA from doing their job; they just have to start doing so in a manner that is consistent with our Constitution and the law of the land. President Bush was making a push for expanding the power of his office, and has been allowed to do so by the Congress for the last six years. The judge is making it clear that even the President has to respect the Constitution and follow the laws that have been layed out by our leaders, previous and current.
There are many people who can explain this decision better than I can . But as an American and someone who's been accused of being a 'rabid' proponent of privacy in the past, I'm relieved by this decision. I don't, not even for an instant, propose that we stop using wiretapping as a tool in the arsenal of law enforcement around the country. It's just that I want to see judicial oversight of any wiretapping that goes on, no matter who authorized it. Our government was set up with a series of checks and balances exactly to prevent the abuse of power, or potential abuse if you prefer, that we've experienced with the NSA wiretapping. No branch of our federal government, Legislative, Judicial or Administrative, is allowed to rule by fiat. Each has to have their decisions and ruling overseen by the other two branches.
So the wiretapping will continue, it just has to be run by the FISA courts after the fact. I want you to think about something for a second before you go on about your day: would you want your worst enemy having the same power that the NSA was trying to assert? Right now the fight is against 'terrorists', but think back 50 years or so and substitute 'communists' in its place; would you want Senator McCarthy to have the power to listen into any phone call anywhere in the country without any oversight at all? Or what if Nixon had the same power before Watergate? I'm not saying the NSA or President Bush are abusing their power in the same way, but what about the next President of the United States? We don't know who that will be, and we don't know how much respect he'll have for personal privacy and our rights. No amount of safety is worth trading my freedom for, and if you believe you can trade privacy for safety, you're sadly mistaken and in need of more than a few history lessons.
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