Warrantless Wiretapping Law Lapses

Temporary revisions to the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lapsed over the week-end. It is now illegal once again for the American government to wiretap its own citizens without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment, comatose just a few days ago, is now recovering. The heroes of the day are the Democrats in the House of Representatives who simply let this bad law die.

Naturally, the Busheviks played the terror-fear card right away. The president himself said, “American citizens must understand, clearly understand, that there still is a threat on the homeland. There’s still an enemy which would like to do us harm, and that we’ve got to give our professionals the tools they need to be able to figure out what the enemy is up to so we can stop it.” This is only a partial truth.

Yes, there are Fascislamists in the world who would dearly love to harm the US and its allies in the secular western world. That is as much of the truth as Mr. Bush allowed, though. There is no reason to presume US citizens’ phone calls and e-mails should be reviewed by government authorities, however, without a warrant. The 1978 FISA law even allows ex post facto warrants up to 72 hours after the surveillance has begun, and they are valid for a full year after being issued.

Even the gutless House Majority Leader Nancy “Petain” Pelosi said Thursday, “He [George “LBJ” Bush] knows that the underlying ‘intelligence’ law and the power given to him in the Protect America Act give him sufficient authority to do all of the surveillance and collecting that he needs to do in order to protect the American people.”

Oddly, the warrantless wiretapping program makes it harder for the intelligence community to do its job. If every communication is subject to intercept and review, the haystack in which the needle may or may not be hiding grows by several orders of magnitude. If the intelligence community has to prove to a judge that there is a good reason to invade a citizen’s privacy, it will force them to focus on the most likely suspects.

And for the record, there is no evidence that the warrantless wiretapping program has prevented a single terrorist attack. Meanwhile, America’s colleges remain potential shooting galleries.

© Copyright 2008 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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