ACLU and its coalition claims the new wiretapping law “fails to provide fundamental safeguards that the Constitution unambiguously requires.”
by William Fisher
Civil liberties advocates have lost no time in asking a federal court to stop the government from conducting surveillance under the new http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=4592 last week.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and a coalition of other groups declared that the new law “gives the Bush administration virtually http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=3174 to intercept Americans’ international e-mails and telephone calls.”
The ACLU coalition’s legal challenge, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, seeks a court order declaring that the new law is unconstitutional and ordering its immediate and permanent halt.
ACLU Executive Director Anthony D. Romero charged that the new law “not only legalizes the secret warrantless surveillance program the president approved in late 2001, it gives the government new spying powers, including the power to conduct dragnet http://www.wvwnews.net/story.php?id=1507 of Americans’ international communications.”
He added, “Spying on Americans without warrants or judicial approval is an abuse of government power – and that’s exactly what this law allows. The ACLU will not sit by and let this evisceration of the Fourth Amendment go unchallenged.”The wiretapping issue became the center of a storm of criticism after the New York Times revealed that, following the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, President Bush had secretly authorized the National Security Agency (NSA) to eavesdrop on U.S. citizens and others inside the country to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying, according to government officials.
Under a presidential order signed in 2002, the intelligence agency monitored the international telephone calls and international e-mail messages of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people inside the U.S. without warrants in an effort to track possible “dirty numbers” linked to al-Qaeda, the officials said.
Criticism at the time came from a wide variety of civil libertarians, including Bob Barr, a former conservative Republican congressman from Georgia and currently the Libertarian Party candidate for president. He told IPS that in 2000, Gen. Michael Hayden, then head of the NSA and currently director of the Central Intelligence Agency, told a congressional hearing on wiretap targets, “If that American person is in the United States of America, I must have a court order before I initiate any collection against him or her.”
Barr’s advice was, “If the president doesn’t like the law, the solution should be to amend, not violate it.”
The Bush administration then called on Congress to pass amendments to the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which was enacted in 1978. The 2008 version emerged as the result of a “compromise” between Democrats and Republicans in the House and Senate. Among its other provisions, the new law granted retroactive immunity to the telephone companies that had assisted the government in the warrantless wiretaps.
The surveillance legal challenge was filed on behalf of a coalition of attorneys and human rights, labor, legal, and media organizations whose ability to perform their work – which relies on confidential communications – will be greatly compromised by the new law, the ACLU said.
The FISA Amendments Act of 2008 declares that “Electronic surveillance must be conducted in a constitutional manner that affords the greatest possible protection for individual privacy and free speech rights.” But the ACLU and its coalition claims the new wiretapping law “fails to provide fundamental safeguards that the Constitution unambiguously requires.”
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