Bush went away, but domestic surveillance overreach didn't. It's now
the law, and the ACLU is fighting back
James Bamford -- Salon
July 22, 2009 -- This
summer, on a remote stretch of desert in central Utah, the National
Security Agency will begin work on a massive, 1 million-square-foot
data warehouse. Costing more than $1.5 billion, the highly secret
facility is designed to house upward of trillions of intercepted phone
calls, e-mail messages, Internet searches and other communications
intercepted by the agency as part of its expansive eavesdropping
operations. The NSA is also completing work on another data warehouse,
this one in San Antonio, Texas, which will be nearly the size of the
Alamodome.
The need for such
extraordinary data storage capacity stems in part from the Bush
administration's decision to open the NSA's surveillance floodgates
following the 9/11 attacks. According to a recently released Inspectors
General report, some of the NSA's operations -- such as spying on
American citizens without warrants -- were so questionable, if not
illegal, that they nearly caused the resignations of the most senior
officials of both the FBI and the Justice Department.
Last July, many of those surveillance techniques were codified into law
as part of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Amendments Act (FAA).
In fact, according to the Inspectors General report, "this legislation
gave the government even broader authority to intercept international
communications" than the warrantless surveillance operations had. Yet
despite this increased power, congressional oversight committees have
recently discovered that the agency has been over-collecting on the
domestic communications of Americans, thus even exceeding the excessive
reach granted them by the FAA.
I am an author and journalist specializing in national security issues
and terrorism, and often communicate with parties in the Middle East as
part of my work. Because of concerns that my communications might have
been monitored, in early 2006, shortly after NSA's warrantless
surveillance program was revealed by the New York Times, I became a
plaintiff in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union
against the NSA that argued that the program was illegal and should be
shut down. We prevailed in federal district court, with Judge Anna
Diggs Taylor finding that President Bush had violated both the law and
the Constitution, but lost on the government's appeal when the court
ruled the plaintiffs could not prove that they were personally victims
of the secret eavesdropping program. In a decision worthy of Lewis
Carroll, the appeals court held both that the government could refuse
to confirm or deny whether it had monitored plaintiffs' communications
and that plaintiffs could not challenge the constitutionality of the
program unless they could show that their communications had been
monitored. A dissenting judge pointed out that the court's decision was
inconsistent with Supreme Court precedent and would effectively render
the program unreviewable by the courts.
On Wednesday, the ACLU will once again appear in federal court, this
time in a separate lawsuit charging that the new FAA statute is
unconstitutional.
Read The Entire Story