In case you missed it: https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct...EwJEEWiMHPz6X267j4NIA&bvm=bv.1355534169,d.aWM Congress gives intelligence agencies the freedom to eavesdrop and spy on any U.S. citizen, without a warrant, without giving a reason. And Congress rejected amendments to require at least minimal accountability, such as having to share with an oversight committee who they spied on. Phone calls, emails, whatever the hell they want. WTF? Before you say, well, no one wants to be seen as soft on terrorism, the people who vote for Obama and most Democrats are not going to boot out their rep because they required some form of warrant or reason or restrictions or reasonable oversight. Is there some bogeyman out there that has been shared with Congress and the President that has them so scared they think it is a good idea to allow limitless and uncontrolled spying on U.S. citizens with no accountability of any kid?
Yeah, this is hugely concerning to me. The good news: it's manifestly unconstitutional no matter what Congress says. The bad news: that isn't going to matter one bit. We are really fucked up as a country.
There's probably some interesting work to be done on the subject of why one issue becomes a political hill to die on, vs. why one issue becomes bipartisan consensus. If I had to hazard a guess on this specific issue, I'd say the reason it's not controversial any more boils down to: 1) The political incentives point toward continuing the program (this is not a new authorization; it's just continuing existing authorizations). Right now there's no organized political opposition to the surveillance state so there's no upside in opposing it. On the other hand, imagine a world where this ends up blocked (perhaps by a minority of senators mounting a successful filibuster, or via presidential veto). What happens to them if, a year later, there's a successful mass-casualty terrorist attack on the US? Probably their political career comes to an end. 2) It's a fairly abstract issue that doesn't touch on people's day to day experience. This is probably why there's not much organized political opposition to it. Contrast with say Obamacare, which was a moderate revamp of the healthcare system we all interact with on a daily basis, or the current negotiations over taxes, the day-to-day relevancy of which should be obvious. 3) To a certain degree the surveillance state has been mainstreamed in our culture. TV shows like 24, Homeland, and Person of Interest and movies like The Dark Knight portray this sort of mass surveillance state as a net positive (though, to be fair, the Dark Knight offered some token moralizing against it). Of course there's the question of the degree to which pop culture reflects vs. shapes our attitudes, but either way this sort of thing is certainly mainstream and relatively uncontroversial. That's not to excuse this stuff on the merits; it's awful. But at this point the surveillance state is pretty well entrenched and the political incentives align toward keeping it in place.
What jeff said. I think it's going to be years before the 9/11 paranoia dies down; for the moment you practically have to hope for a huge scandal to check them.
Given the history of such things, I think this is the only option. The incentives will always point in the direction I identified; barring some sort of huge scandal this kind of thing will just remain in place. The trend has been toward increased executive power in this country; the only thing that represented any kind of a road bump was the post-Watergate years.
I'm curious from the language used - "without following an open and public warrant process" - whether there's an in-camera, unaccountable system of judicial review? or just a bureaucratic ruleset within the authorities doing the wiretapping.
I haven't read it yet, but if it's the old stuff there is a warrant system, it's just entirely secret. The whole drama from the Bush years was that the intel folks didn't even want to bother with that and kept trying to get it killed off. The old system was really permissive, too. You could wiretap anyone at any time, you just had to go back and file the paperwork within two weeks of starting the wiretap or something silly. You'd get yelled at if when filing they found out you were totally just tapping your ex-wife's phone. I was sort of fine with that system for intel folks. As long as there's some thin level of accountability up the chain it seems to be the best setup we can get to accomplish the goal of covert surveillance. It would also be nice to have some form of short term sunshine laws on such things where the list becomes public after X years for verification by outside sources that nobody's stalking civil rights groups and shit.
Yeah, knew it was a renewal of the bill, the reason I said "gives" is because they had the choice to not renew, modify and review, or simply rubber stamp renew.. "It all depends on what the definition of "Is" is." ;)
The big problem is getting it into the courts. The law is mind-bogglingly unconstitutional, but since anyone that has standing to challenge it (i.e. someone directly affected by the law) can be whisked away into a secret prison and deprived of the right of habeus corpus for all eternity, there really isn't anyone that can bring a challenge to the USSC. The ACLU has tried to challenge various surveillance laws enacted since 9/11, and the cases repeatedly get thrown out because they can't prove that they have been directly affected by the law, and thus lack standing. It's kind of a catch-22, and it's going to persist until we first address the issue of making sure that all terrorism suspects are afforded due process.
