Nat Hentoff - The Village Voice
January 7, 2009
Barack Obama will be in charge of the biggest domestic and international spying operation in history. Its prime engine is the National Security Agency (NSA)—located and guarded at Fort Meade, Maryland, about 10 miles northeast of Washington, D.C. A brief glimpse of its ever-expanding capacity was provided on October 26 by The Baltimore Sun’s national security correspondent, David Wood: “The NSA’s colossal Cray supercomputer, code-named the ‘Black Widow,’ scans millions of domestic and international phone calls and e-mails every hour. . . . The Black Widow, performing hundreds of trillions of calculations per second, searches through and reassembles key words and patterns, across many languages.”
In July, George W. Bush signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, which gives the NSA even more power to look for patterns that suggest terrorism links in Americans’ telephone and Internet communications.
The ACLU immediately filed a lawsuit on free speech and privacy grounds. The new Bush law provides farcical judicial supervision over the NSA and other government trackers and databasers. Although Senator Barack Obama voted for this law, dig this from the ACLU: “The government [is now permitted] to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to spy on, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, why it’s conducting the surveillance or whether it suspects any party to the communication of wrongdoing.”
WHY DO WE ALLOW THIS?
1 comment:
Who are you talking about when you say "We"? Clearly you and I aren't allowing it. It's the three branches of government who are allowing it.
We've gone through a paradigm shift in the US on three fronts: on matters of individual liberty, on representative government, and on interpretation of the US Constitution by our courts. In the past, an upside down pyramid clearly defined the hierarchy of power within the US system of government. The voters formed the broad base of the pyramid and authority funneled from the voter base down into our national leadership at the lower tip of the pyramid.
Today we have a near reversla of that dynamic. We still elect our representatives, but their mission has changed from protecting and preserving the Constitution and the liberty of US citizens to the pursuit of special interests on corporate domestic and global affairs. In the process, the voice of the people has little or no impact on our representatives or upon their agenda. The end result, by virtue of default if not by design, is that the pyramid has been overturned. Rather than a leadership who responds to the authority of the citizens, the citizens must now respond to the authority of the leaders.
Now then, getting back to your question of "Why do we allow this?" the answer is readily apparent. We don't allow it. It's forced upon us by a government who no longer cares about liberty or Constitutional law.
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