Obama administration defends NSA against civil liberties lawsuit

US District Judge William H. Pauley, III heard more than two hours of oral arguments in American Civil Liberties Union v. Clapper. (James Clapper is the director of national intelligence). At issue were both the Obama administration’s request to dismiss the case and the ACLU’s motion for a preliminary injunction to suspend the metadata collection program pending a trial on its legality. “If you accept the government’s theory here, you are creating a dramatic expansion of the government’s investigative power,” Jameel Jaffer, lead attorney for the ACLU, argued. Calling the NSA program “a general warrant for the digital age”—a reference to the written authorizations for indiscriminate British searches that were a primary catalyst for the American Revolution—the ACLU claimed that the government surveillance had a “chilling effect” on its ability to communicate with “whistleblowers” and others, a violation of the First Amendment’s right to free speech. The civil liberties organization also maintained that the program violated the “subjective expectation of privacy that society recognizes as reasonable,” a right protected by the Fourth Amendment. The First and Fourth amendments are part of the US Constitution’s Bill of Rights. “Generalized surveillance of this kind has historically been associated with authoritarian and totalitarian regimes,” the ACLU argued, “not with constitutional democracies.” This statement is absolutely correct.

Tom Carter: NSA strategy document envisions unrestrained global surveillance ■ The five-page document dated February 23, 2012, which was published by the New York Times on Saturday, is entitled “SIGINT Strategy 2012-2016.” The name of the author does not appear on the document, nor is it clear who was responsible for it. Among the document’s central themes is that the law has “not kept pace” with the NSA’s “mission.” Translated into plain English, this means that the NSA is knowingly engaged in illegal activity. The NSA’s strategy is to remedy this situation by campaigning for what amounts to the abolition of basic constitutional rights. Existing law must be “adapted,” the document states, in order to facilitate unlimited spying. “For SIGINT [signals intelligence] to be optimally effective, legal, policy, and process authorities must be as adaptive and dynamic as the technological and operational advances we week to exploit.” In fact, the NSA’s spying activities—as well as the activities of the numerous other government agencies engaged in domestic spying—are in flagrant violation of the letter and spirit of the Fourth Amendment, part of the Bill of Rights.

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