Sticking to first principles
The FISA Amendments Act comes up for a vote tomorrow in the Senate. For those not in the know: FISA extends the 4th Amendment so that wiretapping or electronic surveillance requires a warrant. The Amendments Act coming up tomorrow guts FISA so that the executive branch can listen to your phone conversations without a warrant. At issue here too is whether or not the telecoms who allowed warrantless wiretaps (even before 9/11!!!) should be granted immunity.
Here’s a really interesting video that describes many issues and actually changed my mind on a few things:
Regardless of whether you’re for or against this, time is of the essence to influence your senators. EFF has made it easy to find your senators & call them; just type your zip code in here.
Myself, I think that if electronic surveillance were around in 1789, they’d have written it straight into the 4th Amendment. Further, in this world where information is power, keeping FISA keeps a balance of power between government & citizens as well as between the branches of government. As all the identity theft problems have shown: information is more important nowadays than physical belongings - if it takes a warrant to search my physical belongings, why should it not take a warrant to search or tap my information?
I used to think that we should give the telecoms immunity if it means we can keep FISA strong. The video above changed my mind. Immunity means no lawsuits, which means no investigations into what the government did, which means no way to hold the government accountable. We have to hold everyone accountable to hold the government accountable.
I just called my senators and it takes only about 60 sec. Pretty amazing when you can defend your constitution in only 60 seconds (and a whole lot easier than what soldiers in Iraq have to do).
