Since December, Americans have learned that their phone calls and other communications are no longer protected from the prying eyes of their government. The Administration has defended its new spying tactics by reminding the country of the special circumstances of the War on Terror--emphasis on "war." An unspoken reality is implied by the Administration's reassurances: we're all suspects.
We don't know everything yet.
This week we learned that the NSA is amassing a database of every single phone call made inside the United States thanks to the cooperation of all but one of the major phone companies. We are supposed to accept that the companies aren't disclosing our names or locations, but by all accounts the NSA can easily get them. In short, the NSA is listening.
So now we know that our international and domestic calls are being monitored without a warrant. The militarized Executive Branch is providing its own oversight and denying access to Congress, the Justice Department, and the media. Concerns about specific statutes governing surveillance and the First, Fourth, and Fifth Amendments are deflected by spokespeople. For this Administration, in secrecy their is security--namely theirs.
Mr. Cheney's spokeswoman, Lee Anne McBride, declined to discuss the deliberations about the classified program.
"As the administration, including the vice president, has said, this is terrorist surveillance, not domestic surveillance," Ms. McBride said. "The vice president has explained this wartime measure is limited in scope and conducted in a lawful way that safeguards our civil liberties." (link)
Good to know, thanks.
Of course, I am forced to return to the fact that, according to this Administration's approach to national security, we're all suspected terrorists. How can this not be domestic surveillance unless the Administration is simply playing with words? There is no distinction between what they call terrorist surveillance and domestic surveillance--you say potato, I say propaganda.
Here's a prediction: the next revelation will be that the NSA is listening to our cell phones, too. To this point, this program appears limited to domestic land line calls and all calls, including cellular, that connect to at least one person outside the US.
I doubt very highly that the NSA is not keeping track of domestic-to-domestic cell phone calls particularly because they've already admitted to doing accidentally:
Despite the decision to target only international calls and e-mail messages, some domestic traffic was picked up inadvertently because of difficulties posed by cell phone and e-mail technology in determining whether a user is on American soil, as The Times reported last year.
Considering what an ordeal it is to get a landline these days, and the rate at which cell phone use is expanding globally (The number of cellphone subscribers has increased to 208 million in the U.S., up from 340,000 in 1985. -WSJ), the Administration has to be rooting around in our cell phone calls. And then there's the incredibly temptingthing about cell phones: you can locate a person physically from their cell phone signal.
Gonzales, Cheney, and Hayden may not want to talk about this yet but I would wager that a leak will force them to.
To conclude, this kind of surveillance (the oversight-free kind) can only be justified by a perverted theory of Executive Power:
For his part, Mr. Cheney helped justify the program with an expansive theory of presidential power, which he explained to traveling reporters a few days after The Times first reported on the program in December.
In a republic, in which sovereignty resides with the people, an "expansive theory of presidential power" can only be achieved in two ways: expanding the Executive at the expense of the other branches of government and/or inventing new powers out of thin air. When this happens, sovereignty is gradually hijacked away from the people. Each new legal theory that justifies ignoring Congress makes it increasingly difficult for the Executive to be checked. The rate at which we are moving towards a dictatorship is exponential.
[Update]:
Billmon makes a great point: even if polls show that people accept Bush's program in light of the War on Terror doesn't make it ok:
But I get a little crazy in the head when I hear people (usually on the authoritarian right) citing the latest poll numbers as a political justification for their own position.
The whole point of having civil liberties is that they are not supposed to be subject to a majority veto.
[...]
It defeats the purpose of having a 4th Amendment if its validiity is entirely dependent on breaking 50% in the latest poll. It would be nice to have "the people" on our side in this debate, and obviously a lot of them are.... But some things are wrong just because they're wrong -- not because a temporary majority (or even a permanent one) thinks they're wrong.
Abdicating our Bill of Rights so that we feel like we're safer is cowardice. Bush's reliance on extra-legal, extra-Constitutional methods for securing the country is lazy leadership that relies on us trusting him to protect us and our liberties. That's not how it works. We trust our President to protect us from physical threats, and we trust our Constitution to protect our liberties. Until Bush shows me a tattoo of the Founding Fathers' signatures on his ass, his decree will lack the legitimacy of the Constitution. (h/t Susan G for the Billmon link