Slashdot Mirror
Judge Orders White House To Produce Wiretap Memos
sv_libertarian sends this excerpt from the Associated Press:
"A judge has ordered the Justice Department to produce White House memos that provide the legal basis for the Bush administration's post-Sept. 11 warrantless wiretapping program. US District Judge Henry Kennedy Jr. signed an order (PDF) Friday requiring the department to produce the memos by the White House legal counsel's office by Nov. 17. He said he will review the memos in private to determine if any information can be released publicly without violating attorney-client privilege or jeopardizing national security. Kennedy issued his order in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups in 2005 after news reports disclosed the wiretapping."
I thought it was fairly well established that the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping predates 9/11. The NSA was meeting with Qwest executives in February 2001, trying to pressure them into allowing it. They said no, other carriers buckled.
A Democratic administration doesn't necessarily mean a stance against wiretapping. Many of the "ECHELON" activities which came to the public's attention with the 2001 European Parliament report were instituted under President Clinton, who also was a fan of "leveling the playing" field between American and foreign businesses through eavesdropping. A good introduction to the troubling rise of violation of privacy in the 1990s, which coincided with a popular Democratic president, is James Bamford's Body of Secrets .
Posted [...] on 2008-11-02
Kennedy issued his order in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups in 2005 after news reports disclosed the wiretapping.
It has taken three to four years, roughly a whole term, to get a judge to dig up this bit of the current administration's {,mis,ab}use of power.
What will the consequences for the Bush et al. be, if their practices are found to be unconstitutional? Is there a real incentive to uphold the constitution if it takes so long to dig up the dirt?
FISA - The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act - of 1978 provided the president a method to tap communications without a warrant in a "Ticking Time Bomb" situation. FISA allows investigators begin surveillance without proper documents as long as the activities are reported to a judge for review within 72 hours. In any Time-Bomb scenario, 72 hours should be ample time for the investigators to gather the needed information to prove that their hasty wire-tap was legitimate. The judge will sign the warrant and everybody is happy.
In any other case, the judge will surveillance must be shut down and the records sealed immediately. This law has been so effective that out of the hundreds of FISA taps exactly ZERO have been denied.
This is why the Bush administrations new warrantless wiretapping is so distressing. The system wasn't broken! It worked very well. This is simply yet another attempt by the administration to do an end run around due-process. Bush and Cheney have done more to erode the constitution than any other duo in this country's history.
Lets all hope that our next president will restore some order to the land and respect the laws that provide his power. If we allow our executive to choose which laws he will follow, we're on a short trip to the disaster that won't be unlike Russia's "Democracy".
This one's tricky. You have to use imaginary numbers, like eleventeen... --Hobbes
No.
Obama voted for the bill that pretty much rubber stamps Bush's current surveillance and wiretapping regime.
Attacking the legal government... setting off IEDs... That would make the Republicans... TERRORISTS!!!
I like how a self-professed Republican's response to (hopefully) losing a democratic election is to call it a coup and threaten setting off IEDs. I mean, that is really high-quality irony.
How did Bush put it? "If you're not with us, you're with the Ter.. err.. us."
"Won't get fooled again!"
... are we finally going to see some serious investigations and accountability for this current administration?
I'm not holding my breath. On the one hand, the party in power generally prioritizes the things it wants to get done over the things it would like to see punished. On the other hand, if you dig too deeply into anything in Washington, you're going to find wrongdoing on both sides. And on the other other hand, presidents don't generally act to limit their own power.
There may actually be an opportunity here to break the back of the Repbulican party, but it's not clear that that would benefit the Democrats. The timesharing arrangement they've got going now seems to work out pretty well for them. How much do you think they want to face a wave of conservative activists energized to build a new party?
I'm awake! The answer is BONK!
The Stasi (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stasi), East Germany's secret police, ended up collecting so much information on its citizens that it was impossible to process and analyze it all. "Some calculations have concluded that in East Germany there was one informer to every seven citizens."
Sure, the NSA has all kinds of wizz-bang gadgets to sort and process their stuff, but I wonder if the same thing is happening with them?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
No, but it means the knee-jerk reaction of "oh, things will be better under the other party" isn't going to work either. If we want real oversight, we need to get a 3rd-party involved. I bet if we had a Libertarian executive would have a whole lot of opening of government.
I think I speak for all ACs when I say, "Sir, you are retarded."
Of course, but if you had a libertarian executive, we could all just move into wood shacks with our guns and forget this whole economy and globalization thing.
It's a lot more nuanced than that.
The idea of a single chief executive is really useful when decisions have to be made fast, especially in wartime. The founding fathers thought a lot about how to properly balance government, and basically decided that congress was to be a slow and deliberate body, and the executive was to be able to make quick decisions. (it's also more nuanced than that, but I think my version is closer to the mark.)
That it worked well in 18th century diplomatic circles was a happy side effect.