Submitted by burnsdt on Tue, 2006/02/07 - 8:30am.
Yes
9% (2 votes)
No
91% (20 votes)
Unsure
0% (0 votes)
Total votes: 22
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I believe the wiretaps are illegal...
Submitted by burnsdt on Tue, 2006/02/07 - 9:26am.

I added this poll to the site to see what other DAA members thought about the NSA wiretaps.

I personally believe that the Bush administration is overstepping its legal authority by authorising these warrantless NSA taps (an impeachable offense). I mean, wasn’t that why FISA was created? I read that since the creation of FISA there have been in the neighbourhood of 20,000 warrant requests by various administrations/organisations, and of these requests only 5 had been denied.

I hear people arguing that the NSA doesn’t have time to request a warrant before actually listening in on these conversations. Well, built into the FISA procedures is a provisions that allows up to three days after the tap was conducted to submit paperwork for a warrant to be issued post haste.

This tells me that in most cases there is not enough credible evidence to warrant a court approved wiretap. This is why the Bush administration decided to side step the law (and proper procedure) in order to do what it wanted to do… a complete violation of privacy.

I am all for ‘spying’ on suspected terrorists, but I believe that we should conduct the spying according to the rule of law. We should not sacrifice one of our most cherished freedoms for this. If the law needs to be changed, then change the law. We can not allow the Executive Branch to continue to pick and choose which laws it is going to follow and which it is going to ignore.

Framing the Argument
Submitted by galtreuter on Tue, 2006/02/07 - 2:10pm.

As of at least the State of the Union, the NSA wiretaps are being spun as "terrorist surveillance," putting the focus on the stated purpose of the illegal actions of the Bush administration, rather than on their actual operation or effect. All the intercepts by the NSA forwarded to the FBI - the key cooperative result of the Homeland Security cabinet post - turned up false leads or innocents, nothing substantive. It also effectively blurs the distinction between what the NSA has been doing and what they are allowed to do, even with a warrant, which is conducting surveillance of foreign communications or those by citizens from a foreign location (including embassies and the like), whereas what has apparently actually happened has been that non-foreign communications have been included for surveillance.

Some of the bedwetters (a term coined by James Wolcott to describe those who would allow the government to strip away their civil liberties in exchange for being kept safe) argue that these aren't even wiretaps, because they are computer-driven sweeps of emails and other communications to which selection criteria is applied to cull messages using key words and phrases, rather than a direct listening by a human agent. This is, of course, the silliest argument, and displays a thorough lack of understanding of modern intelligence operations, even given the apparent constraints that may exist in laws governing surveillance.

Bush's wiretaps
Submitted by Judith C. Tuggle on Wed, 2006/02/08 - 3:54pm.

Two of the administration's arguments defending the wiretaps are very unsettling. First, the argument that there are so many communications to monitor that it would be procedurely burdensome to do the minimum procedures that FISA requires. This would indicate that thousands of Americans are talking to overseas terrorists all the time. That is just ludicrous. Then the idea that anytime someone is talking to alqueda "we want to know". All the alqueda agents need to do to twist us in knots is to telephone or e-mail perfectly innocent people in America and suddenly these innocents are on a suspect list--and don't even know it. The "enemy" could easily have the government chasing its tail in nothing flat. As if it wasn't doing that already...

Sounds like the TIA project
Submitted by Bukko on Thu, 2006/02/09 - 4:41pm.

Remember Admiral James Poindexter, convicted Reagan-era thug and then spokes-weasel for the Total Information Awareness data-mining project? Remember how in 2002, after a shite-storm of bad PR, it was announced that the project was being scrapped? Looks like it's still on. This is one of the many Orwellian evils of the Cheney administration. They say they will suspend an illegal program, then just keep doing it all along. Everything they say is the exact opposite of the truth.

Bush's View of NSA a Realistic Post 9-11 View? Nah...
Submitted by Roger Lamb on Wed, 2006/02/08 - 10:50am.

Russ Feingold (D-WI) said, "The real problem is that the president seems to have a pre-1776 view of the world."

the imperial presidency
Submitted by julio on Thu, 2006/02/09 - 1:45am.

Even if, for argument's sake, we were to concede that the FISA procedures are overly cumbersome, it's very telling that the Bush administration would choose then to simply ignore the law (and use the Constitution for toilet paper) rather than try to correct the problem in a legal manner.

I'd be interested to hear from the person who voted yes why he or she believes that this surveillance is legal.