Captain America
Congress passed a law amending the FISA surveillance law last week which lets Dubya order your phone and email companies to forward all your overseas communication to the government and immunized telecom companies from spying. At one stroke, the FISA amendment legalized broad, dragnet surveillance of ordinary Americans for any reason whatsoever. Sadly, Barack Obama voted for the amendment; Hillary Clinton opposed it.
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Jameel Jaffer, ACLU lawyer and all-round stud |
The law turns back the clock to only the Watergate era, but to before American independence, when England’s king regularly issued open-ended search warrants widely abused in the colonies. These open-ended surveillance warrants were one of the reasons the United States was founded in the first place.
Wasting no time, Jameel Jaffer and others at the ACLU have already filed suit to have the law declared unconstitutional, which it plainly is on its face:
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) to review only general procedures for spying rather than individual warrants. The FISC will not be told any specifics about who will actually be wiretapped… “Americans should know that if this legislation is enacted and upheld, what they say on international phone calls or emails is no longer private. The government can listen in without having a specific reason to do so…”
“We intend to challenge this bill as soon as President Bush signs it into law,” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “The bill allows the warrantless and dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international telephone and email communications. It plainly violates the Fourth Amendment.” [Link]
Jaffer previously won a case striking down Fascist Act gag orders and co-wrote a book with Amrit Singh exposing systematic torture at Guantánamo Bay. Sometimes it takes a recent-gen immigrant to sufficiently believe in the Americanness of America. Perhaps it’s the zeal of the converted.
Over at Salon, Glenn Greenwald has been following the FISA fight closely.
on Monday, July 14th, 2008, 11:59 pm in Law › 
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u know Manish even I support this one like obama…If people who are doing wrong are caught I dont mind loosing my freedom or privacy a lil bit to keep the world safe..In todays information world the only way they can capture people doing wrong things is keeping track of phones or emails, so I think that is the only way the govt.has to get to know about who is planning to do bad.
Dan Brown wrote a novel on it forgot the name it was very interesting, it is hard for even govt. to decode hundreds of emails phones..I loved the concept of Dan browns novel I read long time back around that.
But I would like to have an amendment added to this one, if through this taping they capture and hurt an innocent person, the govt. should compensate that innocent person and not just arrest anyone without proper information.
what is scary about this one is that they went and attached iraq assuming iraq had biological weapons and made wrong judgements. If they do the same thing and hurt innocent people and make wrong judgement it is scary.
Torture, surveillance……I am not sure where this all ends. I wonder how much of this will change if Barack wins. Check out the New Harper’s interview with the author of the Dark Side (a book about Bush Admin/torture)
or not taking it for granted, esp. when you know you’re always going to be in the minority. or it could just be the fact that he’s an ace first amendment attorney ;)
btw - any statement from the obama campaign explaining the vote? not that this was a reasoning behind his voting, but it could arguably be seen as putting even more distance between him and his muslim roots - intentionally or unintentionally.
Fair enough, but you’re presuming that the gov’t is both infallible and 100% benevolent with regard to such snoops. In actuality, work of this nature is outsourced to a ridiculous level, backlogged, and totally unsecure (if the data mining scandals of the last few years are anything to work with).
Complete truth be told, I don’t want tax $ going to a money pit like this in light of greater problems we’re facing. So booty.
Can I please say that JJ is totally shaggable. :)
By all means- you’re absolutely right.