What Are You, a Terrorist?
Jacob Sullum | July 10, 2008, 11:30am
During the last year the focus of the debate about amending the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) has been retroactive immunity for the telecommunications companies that cooperated with President Bush's illegal post-9/11 program of warrantless wiretaps. But the scandal from now on will be what's legal. Although Democrats, including Barack Obama, made a big show of resisting the immunity provision, they seemed resigned from the beginning to surrendering the privacy of Americans' international communications. Under the newly revised FISA, only the executive branch's good faith and competence will protect innocent people from warrantless snooping. Which is fine, if you assume that government officials never have bad motives and never make mistakes. According to Sen. Christopher Bond (R-Mo.), The New York Times reports, "there is nothing to fear in the bill...'unless you have Al Qaeda on your speed dial.'"
Bond seems to speak for most Americans. The most common reader response I get when I write about this subject is, "What makes you think the government is interested in spying on you? Get over yourself!" The second most common response is, "What are you, a terrorist?"
Polling on this issue suggests that framing it the way Bond does makes a big difference. An August 2007 ICR poll commissioned by Democrats.com told respondents, "President Bush wants the power to wiretap the phone calls and emails of Americans without a search warrant from a judge." Nearly three-quarters (73 percent) disapproved, 60 percent strongly. A January 2006 ABC News poll, by contrast, told respondents, "The National Security Agency has been investigating people suspected of involvement with terrorism by secretly listening in on telephone calls and reading e-mails between some people in the United States and other countries, without first getting court approval to do so." Asked whether "this wiretapping of telephone calls and e-mails without court approval" was "an acceptable or unacceptable way for the federal government to investigate terrorism," 56 percent said it was acceptable.
Just saying terrorism, it seems, makes concerns about civil liberties disappear. Notably, of the two major-party presidential candidates, it was Obama, the one who supposedly is more sensitive to civil liberties (having taught constitutional law and all), who voted for the FISA amendments. McCain supports the bill too, but he was too busy campaigning to cast a vote, and he knew it wouldn't be close. The Senate vote was 69 to 28, which means senators are even more eager than their constituents to let the government spy at will. Only on terrorists, of course.
Kwix | July 10, 2008, 3:21pm | #
Garrett J,
The issue of legally ingrained yet blatantly illegal spying is not exceptionally high on my list, other than it is just another example of "warrantless searches" that are becoming more pervasive in today's society. I agree that the WOD and all of it's attendant breaches of liberty is, without a doubt, a far more pressing matter in the lives of the average citizen.
What bothers me isn't that we have a spy network or that they are most likely spying on American citizens without probable cause. It's that people like John view it as perfectly acceptable and something that not only should be tolerated but embraced. It's like saying that drug smuggling checkpoints, while illegal on the face, are really something that we should accept "for the greater good of America". Sorry, but I can't accept either.
That we don't have people being arrested and tried based on evidence so obtained* does make it a lower priority but by no means is it benign. Like any cancer, you treat the large, aggressive and life threatening tumors first but always keep an eye on the smaller ones. No matter what, you don't accept them as "a normal part of life".
Ultimately, I view terrorism as so low on my totem pole that I don't understand why the government, much less the average citizen, worries about it so. For Christ's sake, more people die in auto accidents in any given month than died in the WTC incident. None of those deaths are any less tragic, are they? You don't see Congress, the NSA, the President, or the public, jumping through hoops to install secret cameras into every car just to see who
might be a reckless driver.
*It is possible that illegally obtained evidence could be used to obtain warrants that then lead to court admissible evidence. Of course, since the exact content obtained by the NSA program is kept secret, no one can prove otherwise.
James Anderson Merritt | July 10, 2008, 6:40pm | #
First, thank you antiglobalist. You are precisely correct that terrorism is the result of imperialism, which makes the "War on Terror" futile, yet unavoidable, as long as we fail to adopt a non-imperialist foreign policy. In November, any vote cast for a candidate who will accept, maintain, or expand our imperialist policy is a vote for the inevitable, and probably imminent, collapse of this nation.
Second, kwix wrote, "{The Constitution} doesn't say shit about 'citizens' or 'Americans' it says 'the people.' Now, given that the Constitution is only valid within the borders of the US, this means people within the borders of the US."
Actually, "the people" is generally accepted to mean the same as "We the people," i.e., citizens. Also, the Constitution doesn't grant rights that are effective only within the borders of the nation. It recognizes rights that individuals have, primarily by the mechanism of prescribing or proscribing specific government behavior. Some people (especially those in government) like to think that those restrictions no longer apply when the government operates outside our borders, or when it deals with non-citizens, but that's a total crock. If, for example, our government holds a (non-military) trial, anywhere in the world, the guarantees of counsel, facing one's accusers and the damning evidence, no coercion to testify against oneself, etc., bind our government regardless of what local laws say (or even if there is no local law, as aboard a ship or airplane that is operating outside of any national territory), and regardless of the citizenship status of the accused.
Finally, to those who say that the Executive Branch informed Congress (or at least its "important" members) about the covert surveillance activities, Senator Feingold painted a much different picture in a recent speech on the floor of the Senate, in opposition to the FISA Amendments bill. He basically said that the few people who got a peek at what the Executive was doing weren't shown much, and that they were sworn to secrecy. He sits on relevant committees, and to the extent that he was one of the people who got peeks, he said what little he did see (which he couldn't talk about in public) convinced him that the bill needed to be defeated. Now, it is up to the people to ensure that the Senators who voted for that unconstitutional bill are defeated the next time they run for office. They have proven their incompetence to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and if we let them get away with it, that will only encourage worse behavior -- if not by the current perpetrators then by those who come after. Can you doubt it?
