So, funny story… You know how a few years back when the New York Times and others published a story about the NSA wiretapping phones without warrants and the Bush administration said it wasn’t a big deal because they weren’t spying on Americans? Remember when, a few months ago, a group of conservative and moderate Democrats (including Obama) broke party ranks to join Republicans in passing a bill that authorized such wiretapping and gave retroactive immunity to the telecom companies, preventing any future investigation of what happened? Remember how those Democrats said that it was all right because Bush wasn’t spying on Americans? Like I said, there’s a funny story. Well, maybe not quite so funny if you find the idea of the U.S. government spying on Americans without warrants to be at all disturbing. If you fall into that latter category then you clearly have no sense of humor and you probably don’t want to read the new report out from ABC News.

It turns out that the government was, in fact, listening in on the communications of innocent Americans calling home while they just happened to be in the Middle East. The government would even listen in on soldiers calling their spouses back in the States. How do we know all this? Well, there are some whistle-blowers that were part of this program who revealed to ABC that they themselves had listened in on such phone calls on a regular basis. Apparently, it was even common for these intelligence officers to exchange tips about where on the tapes they could find particularly steamy or funny phone sex. The whistle-blowers estimate that hundreds of Americans have been spied on in this way without warrants, but the actual number is impossible to determine without doing a full investigation.

Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) is quoted as saying that these new revelations are “extremely disturbing.” Well he’s certainly right about that, but he was the Democrat leading the charge to legalize this program and provide the retroactive immunity that will prevent it from ever being investigated. Many civil rights advocacy groups warned both Senator Rockefeller and Congress as a whole that the Bush administration was doing precisely this. Given that, I feel that Senator Rockefeller, Barack Obama, and the other Democrats who voted for this owe the country an apology for getting this so wrong and exposing innocent Americans to this illegal and incredibly intrusive program. I would include Bush, Congressional Republicans, and the NSA in that list, but I think it’s already pretty clear that they’re not going to give such an apology because they believe that this program is not only right, but was legal even before the most recent FISA law passed.

My hope now is that the next president will put a stop to this program (Obama pledged to do so long before voting for the new FISA law). After all, we now have reason to believe that Bush’s wiretapping program started at least 6 months before the attacks of September 11th. We also have evidence, as recently as this week, of how ridiculous anti-terror programs like this can be abused by people with other agendas and to limit free speech. In this case, it was a Maryland police department putting 53 nonviolent activists on terrorist watch lists for their work against the Iraq war and the death penalty. (One choice quote from the man who authorized the Maryland program: “I don’t believe the First Amendment is any guarantee to those who wish to disrupt the government.”) On top of that, the National Research Council recently released a report (summaries here and here) stating that data-mining isn’t good at catching terrorists, something security researchers have been saying for years. But data-mining is exactly what Bush’s wiretapping program relies on to find terrorists. So even if the program wasn’t violating the privacy and civil liberties of hundreds of Americans and even if there wasn’t a history of programs like this being abused, it still wouldn’t be any good because it doesn’t work!

America is long overdue to have a national security policy that protects Americans’ civil liberties, makes sense, and actually works. Maybe, just maybe, our next president will actually do that. We’ll find out in 99 days.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 at 12:38 am and is filed under Politics, Politics & Business, Ripe!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.