The New York Times featured a kick ass editorial yesterday about "Spies, Lies and Wiretaps". The editrorial is written in a rather "drop the bullshit" manner that goes one by one through the Bush administration's defenses of its recently disclosed warrantless eavesdropping program and swats them down in clear language. The reader is even helped by bolded titles for each attempted defense and misdirection.
A brief example:
The spying is legal. The secret program violates the law as currently written. It's that simple. In fact, FISA was enacted in 1978 to avoid just this sort of abuse. It said that the government could not spy on Americans by reading their mail (or now their e-mail) or listening to their telephone conversations without obtaining a warrant from a special court created for this purpose. The court has approved tens of thousands of warrants over the years and rejected a handful.
As amended after 9/11, the law says the government needs probable cause, the constitutional gold standard, to believe the subject of the surveillance works for a foreign power or a terrorist group, or is a lone-wolf terrorist. The attorney general can authorize electronic snooping on his own for 72 hours and seek a warrant later. But that was not good enough for Mr. Bush, who lowered the standard for spying on Americans from "probable cause" to "reasonable belief" and then cast aside the bedrock democratic principle of judicial review.
The whole thing is worth a read, and it's pretty obvious that the "paper of record" considers this to be a pretty big deal for the nation. From my experience, editorials are usually rather short, often no more than one internet page, but this editorial was not only given two internet pages, but also a large, prominent and boxed location in the print edition of the Times' sunday opinions page.
And they're right. This is a big fucking deal.
- Glitter
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