Warrantless Wiretaps Ruled Illegal
Federal Judge Finds N.S.A. Wiretaps Were Illegal – New York Times
On Wednesday, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, which allowed the agency to monitor Americans’ phone calls and email messages without court approval, was illegal. The New York Times writes:
The judge characterized that expansive use of the so-called state secrets privilege as amounting to “unfettered executive-branch discretion” that had “obvious potential for governmental abuse and overreaching.” That position, he said, would enable government officials to flout the warrant law, even though Congress had enacted it “specifically to rein in and create a judicial check for executive-branch abuses of surveillance authority.”
This decision marks the strongest legal repudiation of the Bush-era surveillance program to date.
When it comes to breaking laws in the name of expediency, whether it be warrantless wiretapping, indefinite detentions, or torture, letting the genie out of the bottle seems to be a far quicker and easier process than putting it back in. Given the difficulty inherent to critical re-evaluation, the inertial tendency has been to ignore, continue, or codify questionable past behaviors rather than to expose and challenge them; rather than wrangling the genie back into the bottle, we’ve developed a habit of shrugging our shoulders, leaving the genie out to do what he pleases, and forgetting about the bottle altogether.
The fact that legal challenges to the NSA wiretapping program are just now gaining significant traction is a testament to how painstakingly difficult it is to re-evaluate and challenge some of the legally – and often morally – questionable decisions made in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. It is encouraging to see, however, that at least some of these issues are still being grappled with and that untangling the legal and moral messes so easily entered into in the past is, at least in some quarters, still considered a pursuit worth undertaking.
