And we haven't been...
In Spying and Lying by Katrina vanden Heuvel points out how the media has been complicit in the recent spying scandal and how the government convinced the New York Times sit on the story for about a year before making it public.
And it would be bad enough if it were just an action of the government, but according to Tom Daschle, who was Senate Majority leader after 9/11 Congress Never Authorized Spying Effort and so the spying was actually illegal.
As a protest against these revelations Judge James Robertson resigned from the Foreign Intelligence Surveilance Court or FISA. In "normal" circumstances, FISA is the body set up to approve eavesdropping and last year out of 1,758 requests for warrants, they approved all but 4. FISA even has the ability to approve warrants after the fact. Nevertheless, the administration still wanted to bypass even this much oversight. And gave rather weak reasons for doing so.
Initially it was claimed that only communications between US citizens and foreign nationals were subject to surveilance, but in reality there are indications that the scope of the surveilance was much more extensive than admitted to at first. [2]
Looks like the country is getting coal this year.
No comments:
Post a Comment