Back In The USSR

It has occurred to me lately to wonder whether or not anyone actually 'won' the Cold War.

WASHINGTON, Aug. 5 — President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens. ...

For example, if a person in Indianapolis calls someone in London, the National Security Agency can eavesdrop on that conversation without a warrant, as long as the N.S.A.’s target is the person in London. ...

The new law gives the attorney general and the director of national intelligence the power to approve the international surveillance, rather than the special intelligence court. The court’s only role will be to review and approve the procedures used by the government in the surveillance after it has been conducted. It will not scrutinize the cases of the individuals being monitored.

The law also gave the administration greater power to force telecommunications companies to cooperate with such spying operations. The companies can now be compelled to cooperate by orders from the attorney general and the director of national intelligence.

Growing up in the 60s, I thought one of the creepiest aspects of living in the Soviet Union was that the government had complete control over your contacts outside the country. Travel was tightly restricted, and it was assumed that phone calls would be listened in on, and mail opened. One of the reasons the Soviet system was so heinous, we were taught, was that it violated the privacy of the individual, and so thoroughly ignored individual liberty in the interest of the State.

Now, here in the land of the free and the home of the brave, it is legal for the government to listen to me talk to, say, my in-laws in Europe on a summer vacation, and intercept my emails to them. The government won't even have to bother with the fig-leaf FISA court. Now judgments about who should be investigated can be made by that paragon of wisdom, sound reasoning, and legal exactitude Alberto Gonzales. You know, the guy who didn't think it important to tell Congress that the FBI was making 'mistakes' left and right in using its Patriot Act powers.

I'm supposed to believe that the man who colluded in a shameless attempt to politicize the Department of Justice should be trusted not to eavesdrop on calls by the administration's political opponents?

What about domestic calls? How much comfort can I draw from the provision that the other party be "reasonably believed" to be overseas. I'm afraid that Alberto Gonzales finds it reasonable to believe a great many things that seem absurd to me, and to have a remarkable ability to miss critical details. It doesn't take too much of a stretch for me to believe that if someone told him the caller was in Athens, Cairo, Geneva, or Rome, he might 'forget' to think about Georgia, Illinois, Wisconsin or New York. It would be, no doubt, an 'inadvertent' mistake, though the information would probably stay in a classified database forever.

I'm still feeling like it must be a bad dream. This entire bill swooped in at the end of last week, and, with the muscle of the White House behind it, somehow replaced a less heinous version previously negotiated between congressional leadership and the Director of National Intelligence. Now it is law. It's amazing.

How it is that Congress would, all of a sudden, give even more surveillance authority to a man several Senators suggest may have already perjured himself in his discussion of existing surveillance programs? In what bizzaro universe does it seem that Gonzales is a man to trust with determining probable cause, or defending the innocent from violation?

The bulk of Democrats opposed this measure, but a frightening 16 Democratic senators voted for it. Given the speed of the maneuvering, I am confident that most who voted for the bill had not read it, and had no idea what powers they were actually giving this administration. Pathetic, and tragic.

You know, I seem to recall the Soviet Union had a legislature too. It was dominated by the Party, and always voted for what the Party Leader wanted. Even us schoolchildren could understand it was a sham, and we felt happy to be living in a real democracy.