A small editorial about recent events.

Bill Stewart bill.stewart at pobox.com
Sun Dec 18 17:58:30 EST 2005


At 10:58 AM 12/18/2005, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
>The President claims he has the prerogative to order such
>surveillance. The law unambiguously disagrees with him.
>
>There are minor exceptions in the law, but they clearly do not apply
>in this case. They cover only the 15 days after a declaration of war
>by congress, a period of 72 hours prior to seeking court authorization
>(which was never sought), and similar exceptions that clearly are not
>germane.

One of the NYT articles also said that the
President's lawyers gave him an opinion saying that the
post-9/11 resolutions gave him the authority to do this.
If the resolutions actually did that, then that could
supersede the previous laws that made it criminal.

But this wasn't the only domestic spying story in the news this week.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316/
NBC reports that the Defense Department is back to
CONINTELPRO-style spying on Americans,
specifically anti-war groups and campaigns against military recruiting,
especially suspicious groups associating with Quakers.

And the EU parliament just voted on massive data collection laws,
requiring ISPs, telcos, and mobile phone companies to
collect and retain information in ways that would have
previously violated EU privacy laws.

That's one of the big problems with protections based on laws -
they're only good until the politicians change the laws.
Constitutional protections are somewhat more durable,
but can still be changed either by Amendments or by
significant changes in court interpretations,
such as the Drugs and Terrorism Exceptions to the Bill of Rights
and the expansion of the Commerce Clause to cover almost everything.

One of the Bush Administration's innovations has been
White House legal opinions telling the President that
the courts ought to approve various powers or practices,
so there's therefore no need to actually take them to court,
whether it's wiretapping or "extraordinary rendition" or
defining "torture" to exclude anything done by US forces.
We'll see if he gets away with it this time -
he needs to be stopped.



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