privacy is not for its own sake

I have often had to explain librarians’ knee-jerk protection of privacy, because it can seem like such a peculiar passion. Is it such a big deal to know who read what? How can that impact identity theft, or anything else important? But it’s not about privacy. It’s about the freedom to read whatever you want without fear of penalty. Privacy is not important in itself, simply as a necessary condition for intellectual freedom.

Julian Sanchez has a great piece in the LA Times making a similar shift in the terms of argument. The battle over warantless wiretapping isn’t about privacy, per se. It’s about having the freedom to dissent, about having a society in which lawful dissent is not penalized or threatened by those in power.

Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can — and repeatedly have — abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters.

The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a thorough congressional investigation headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts — and the presidents they served — had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices — even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often “collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action.” . . .

Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won’t turn its “national security” surveillance powers to political ends — well, it would be a first.

I’ve heard from officials, so many times “oh, come on. We don’t care if you’re reading the latest James Patterson.” Of course you don’t. But that’s NOT THE POINT! You’re simply trying to trivialize the issue and appeal to “common sense.” We don’t care about your phone calls. You only need to worry if you’re a terrorist. Or if you’re opposed to the war, or concerned about the environment, or planning to offer sanctuary to undocumented workers in your church. It’s worthwhile to read the Church Committee Report – because it is a perfect predictor of what’s going on today, describing illegal activities uncovered after Watergate that lead up to the FISA laws that officials today are trying to overturn.

Trust us? No, I don’t think so.

we had to destroy the constitution…

Mark Fiore has a fun animation on the current warrantless wiretapping debate – featuring Snuggly, the Security Bear, who explains spying is all about love, and that, in order to preserve democracy, we have to destroy it. Giggle.

I just wrote to thank my House member to thank him for not caving on the immunity issue. We’ll see if the House keeps its backbone. (The Senate obviously has none.)

27 million . . . what?

In the “thank you for mindless statistics” category, we have this winner.

At the end of 2006, the FBI’s Telecommunications Intercept and Collection Technology Unit compiled an end-of-the-year report touting its accomplishments to management, a report that was recently unearthed via an open government request from the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Strikingly, the report said that the FBI’s software for recording telephone surveillance of suspected spies and terrorists intercepted 27,728,675 sessions.

Twenty-seven million is a staggering number given that the FBI only got 2,176 FISA court orders in 2006 from a secret spy court using the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.

If you think wiretapping is A Good Thing, this is probably reassuring. Those terrists are too busy yakkin on the phone to do their evil deeds. If you think wiretapping as it is currently being done is on tenuous legal ground – you have to wonder: have we changed the definition of terrorist, just like torture? (We do not torture; therefore, if we do it, it’s not torture. What’s your problem?) New definition: It’s okay to watch anyone who’s a terrorist suspect; therefore, everyone we watch is a terrorist suspect. QED.

Kafka on the Potomac

Whitehouse issued a statement earlier this week…

Wait, that’s confusing. Senator Whitehouse, who seems to have a lot more on the ball than the Whitehouse these days, made a terrific speech in which he clearly points out the Kafkaesque legal strategy that basically boils down to “the president can do whatever the hell he wants and it’s perfectly legal because the president can do whatever the hell he wants.” Here’s a snip from his excellent speech that examines documents that we’re not allowed to see because it’s dangerous for the electorate to know what the president’s legal strategy is.

In a nutshell, these three Bush administration legal propositions boil down to this:

1. “I don’t have to follow my own rules, and I don’t have to tell you when I’m breaking them.”

2. “I get to determine what my own powers are.”

3. “The Department of Justice doesn’t tell me what the law is, I tell the Department of Justice what the law is.”

When the Congress of the United States is willing to roll over for an unprincipled President, this is where you end up. We should not even be having this discussion. But here we are. I implore my colleagues: reject these feverish legal theories. I understand political loyalty, trust me, I do. But let us also be loyal to this great institution we serve in the legislative branch of our government. Let us also be loyal to the Constitution we took an oath to defend, from enemies foreign and domestic. And let us be loyal to the American people who live each day under our Constitution’s principles and protections.

We simply cannot put the authority to wiretap Americans, whenever they step outside America’s boundaries, under the exclusive control and supervision of the executive branch. We do not allow it when Americans are here at home; we should not allow it when they travel abroad. The principles of congressional legislation and oversight, and of judicial approval and review, are simple and longstanding. Americans deserve this protection wherever on God’s green earth they may travel.

Senator Whitehouse not only has a JD, he served as a US Attorney and was elected to serve as Rhode Island’s attorney general before joining the US Senate. I think he knows a bit more about the law than King George. And I have a feeling he’s read Kafka.