Today the New York Times, in a page one article by reporters James Risen and Eric Lichtblau, revealed for the first time that President George W. Bush, shortly after 9-11-2001, signed a scrap of paper authorizing the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on you and me without a search warrant in violation of the Fourth Amendment, which provides that no general searches are permitted. There may only be individualized searches based on probable cause to believe that the person to be searched is guilty of having committed a criminal offense or in possession of contraband, which is the same thing, or of evidence of a crme.
Well, this executive order is intended to go after terrorists only, right? Why should we be concerned if government counter-spies, the equivalent of James Bond, break a few rules like eavesdropping on telephone conversations to get the goods on the bad guys like those who dropped the World Trade Center in New York, killing close to three thousand innocent people like you and me who were simply going to work that day?
Let me put it to you this way? If it's okay for counter-terrorist agents to spy on terrorists, why isn't it okay for the local police to monitor all your telephone calls in the hope of catching you when you have a discussion with your accountant over whether its okay to claim a deduction or not?
The National Security Agency, or NSA, sometimes known as No Such Agency, is a wholesaler in the collection of electronic intelligence. It operates satellites and huge radio antennas capable of picking up radio waves from all over the world. The U.S. was able to monitor cell-phone conversations in Moscow before the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989. In 1983 we monitored the air-to-ground communications when Soviet fighters downed Korean Air Lines flight 007, killing all the civilians aboard, when it overflew part of the Soviet Union, apparently due to some mistake in navigation. Basically what NSA does, is to collect huge amounts of data and force it through its computers where sophisticated algorithms scrub it for useful data. Radiotelegraph data is sent using packets ended and led by a series of numbers that allow receivers to reassemble the packets into readable messages. By searching for identifiable strings of data, NSA can detect telephone numbers, and messages of interest, such as from certain individuals. I suppose that if someone starts talking about Osama Bin Laden and which cave he's in, NSA can pick that out as well.
As long as NSA confined itself to operating overseas, meaning to phone calls originating overseas, it did not violate U.S. law, meaning the protection afforded by the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution to Americans located in the United States. Foreigners abroad don't enjoy Fourth Amendment protection, do they? But we, here, do.
So when the president signed a paper telling NSA that it was okay to spy on Americans living here, that was a violation of the Fourth Amendment. If the local police eavesdropped on Mafia telephone conversations without a search warrant, the resulting haul of information would be held inadmissible in court and any conviction based on illegally obtained information would be overturned.
But NSA isn't in the business of building criminal cases, is it. It's in the business of protecting us from attacks such as 9-11. It really doesn't matter whether the evidence it collects illegally is admissible in court because there isn't going to be a trial. There's only going to be another 9-11, or not.
So why should we care?
Until now, or more precisely, until Pres. Bush signed the order permitting NSA spying on our telephone conversations, you and I could talk on the telephone about private and personal matters with no concern that Big Brother might be monitoring. Now we cannot do that. Big Brother is monitoring. And if you and I talk about Osama and that cave, you can expect this conversation to be run through the NSA wringer. The next time we talk on the telephone, the Big Ear may be focused in because our number is now in its computer. So watch what you say.
Americans are not used to watching what we say. Self-censorship is honored in the breach.
But the NYT self-censored itself, sitting on this sensational story for a year in the interests of national security. It was willing to publish the stolen Pentagon Papers in 1971, over a claim of national security, but not the president's executive order. The newspaper that fought all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court for the right not to be subjected to government imposed prior restraint on publication, subjected itself to a year's worth of prior restraint by withholding some highly newsworthy news, out of concern for national security. I guess the Times, on 42nd Street, is just a little too close to the site of the former World Trade Center down around Cortlandt Street in lower Manhattan.
Somehow, I don't think the Times should've withheld this story, and the president shouldn't have signed that order. Not if the press, as it likes to claim, is fundamental to providing the real government in this country, the people, with the necessary information to ride herd on the bureaucrats, and not if the Fourth Amendment really means what it says as protection for you and me and our kids and grandkids, and is not just a charade to make it look good, like saying we don't commit torture of prisoners when we do. The McCain Bill passed yesterday, over the opposition of the president. And we still have prisoners in Guantanamo who have not been afforded either POW status and protection or the due process rights given routinely to those accused criminally. Why? Because the Bush Administration either invented or merely applied a third category called 'enemy combatant,' that comes with no rights.
I don't think history will look very kindly on this era, where America surrendered so many of its rights that men, and now women as well, died face down in the mud fighting for.
We give up these rights too readily when we become excessively apprehensive. That's the definition of paranoia, incidentally. Excessive fear, leading to irrational exercises.