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Blanketing
Free Speech
By Wiretap Eavesdropping
By William
Finucane
Let’s be very
clear on this wiretapping controversy: everybody wants protection from
terrorists. Nobody advocates letting killers have free reign over American
telephones and planning national destruction without opposition. That would
be suicidal.
But George W.
Bush has his own skewed view. He says all wiretapping has to be exclusively
the province of the executive branch. There was a time when getting a
wiretap on a given location or individual inside the Unites States was by
done by seeking permission from the courts, then recently that became
permission from a secret court. Then that was modified to allow authorities
that felt it had to be done quickly to move ahead and do the tapping, then
get secret court review after the fact.
Phone calls
coming into the country from other lands are allowed to be wiretapped
already. No court needed on foreign calls. Of course the difference is that
people talking with one another within this country are exercising their
civil rights and are not supposed to be spied on by the government.
Well, says
this president, technology has gotten too advanced and phone calls can start
and end in the United States but still go out to other countries. Therefore,
Mr. Bush wants to strip away a basic freedom for all Americans, a freedom
that protects their conversations. He wants to be able to intercept what he
asserts will be a tiny number of calls that some unknown executive branch
workers deem potentially dangerous.
But whether
it’s a small number or a vast net of wiretaps, only those executive branch
employees, invisible to the rest of the public, will have any idea who is
being spied upon, why they are suspects or what the executive officers
involved plan to do with the information. Remember, no court at any point
reviews any of the information; the judicial branch is simply not involved.
Bur the courts
are essential here, as in all such instances involving the adjudication of
the government’s interest in skirting the Constitutional rights of its
citizens. The judiciary, and the legislative branch, traditionally keep an
eye on the executive branch, maintaining a balance.
If executive
branch operatives go too far, trample over any Americans’ rights or violate
the Constitution, the court is supposed to put a stop to it. Luckily, the
Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISA) has resumed its power, but it
is enlightening to realize that calling a secret court ‘lucky’ on behalf of
the public only underscores how far the Bush Administration has pushed a
dictatorial, right-wing agenda.
And Bush is
still pushing for a no-court wiretapping protocol. He says it is crucially
important, but what is Bush selling here?
Fear!
“Americans
citizens must understand, clearly understand, that there’s still a threat on
the homeland. There’s still an enemy which would like to do us harm,” said
Bush. By blocking the no-court legislation, the national legislature, the
congress, exposes the United States to more horror, says Bush. Give me this
absolute power over phone calls and I will save the nation, he says. In
reality, he will ruin the nation if given this power.
What will
happen is that Americans will be no safer from outside attack than they ever
were before, but American’s personal security, the right to individual
privacy, will evaporate. In the end an aura of suspicion will be borne,
where no one trusts even simple conversations for fear that somehow they
will be used against them, and people will naturally become suspicious of
each other and each other’s words. What did he or she mean by that? Should a
candid response be provided, or should a careful, calculated answer be
given? This is the world of a police state.
Again and
again, Americans have heard of the enormous failures in domestic safety,
which builds an atmosphere of fear. We don’t, of course, hear of the
successes, yet we also know that the Bush Administration, for all of its
fear mongering rhetoric and vast defense and security spending has not made
the ports or the airports more secure.
Unfortunately,
under Mr. Bush and his nearly invisible vice president, or perhaps more
accurately, co-president, Richard Cheney, it seems that as a nation we
should be fearful, fearful of our own government.
The American
government under Bush has waged preemptive war in Iraq for specious reasons,
and has consistently sought to restrict traditional American freedoms at
home during the same time that it cavalierly disregards Habeus Corpus and
justifies torturing prisoners. So now we as Americans are asked to believe
that we can only be secure by allowing the executive branch under Mr. Bush
and Mr. Cheney to tap the phones of Americans randomly and at will.
Great strides
have already been made by Bush and company in terms of domestic spying; who
would have imagined secret courts deciding what Americans can be spied upon?
And who would have imagined that telephone companies would cooperate in
providing the government with files and then be shielded by “temporary”
legislation pushed through on the basis of national security.
Normally, such
scenarios could not happen. This is all part and parcel of an infringement
on one of the most basic and fundamental freedoms all Americans are supposed
to have and enjoy – the ability to talk to each other without fear of
being eavesdropped upon by the government.
The Bush
Administration, in effect, has deputized the entire phone industry, making
the free enterprise of telecommunications into a covert government agency.
And that is in addition to the massive technical abilities of the National
Security Agency, NSA, which dwarfs the FBI and CIA. Such is the reality Mr.
Bush and Mr. Cheney would like to create for America; they would make the
nation safe for freedom by removing all personal freedom. A true Catch 22.
It is time for
Americans, all Americans, to raise their voices and holler: “Stop!”
2/24/08
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