Those who remember their Shakespeare may recall the sleepwalking Lady Macbeth, hallucinating the blood stains of a murdered Scottish King Duncan on her hands, and crying, “Out, damn’d spot! Out, I say!” Similarly, in trying to cover up their attempts to murder the Constitution for the United States of America, government goons are trying to erase the blood on the Bush administration’s hands by crying, “Out, damn’d NSA spying case! Out, I say!”
Enter the Wayback Machine with me, as we travel to the month of May 2006. USA Today has recently exposed a secret spying program undertaken by the National Security Agency, aided and abetted by AT&T, Verizon and BellSouth. It seems that the three giant communications companies, scoffing at the need for court orders, search warrants or probable cause, have turned over massive computer databases containing the phone records of tens of millions of innocent Americans to the NSA. On Capitol Hill, Democrats and Republicans alike express outrage. Quickly moving into excuse, spin and blame-it-on-terrorism mode, President Bush states, “Al-Qaeda is our enemy, and we want to know their plans.” “Are you telling me tens of millions of Americans are involved with al-Qaeda?” fumes Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vermont). “Why are the telephone companies not protecting their customers?” questions Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa). “They have a social responsibility to people who do business with them to protect our privacy as long as there isn’t some suspicion that we’re a terrorist or a criminal or something.”
Many self-righteously indignant Democrats seem oblivious to the fact that warrantless electronic government spying and wiretapping also received a huge boost when then-President Bill Clinton signed into law the 1994 Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act. Clinton also signed off on the FBI’s illegal Internet snooping program known as Carnivore (renamed DCS1000 and reburied in response to public outcry).
Fast-forward through the year. Groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation are suing AT&T, BellSouth and Verizon over their cooperation with the NSA’s illegal spying program. In a weirdly incompetent security blunder, AT&T attorneys file an electronic court brief with certain “sensitive” portions obscured by thick black lines. Computer geeks quickly discover that copying and pasting the brief into various document readers causes the black lines to disappear, revealing the text beneath, which details secret Internet and telephone surveillance rooms being built at AT&T facilities. The Department of Justice intervenes in the lawsuits, seeking their dismissal.
The DOJ then issues a report detailing how the FBI engaged in widespread and serious misuse of its authority under the deceptively named “Patriot Act” by illegally collecting information about countless innocent Americans. “From the attorney general on down, you should be ashamed of yourself,” said Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif). “We stretched to try to give you the tools necessary to make America safe, and it is very, very clear that you’ve abused that trust.”
Finally, in May 2007, a new spying bill that would give blanket immunity to companies like AT&T for illegally assisting the NSA spying program is being ramrodded through Congress.
Congress needs to know that you oppose this legislation and demand immediate investigations into warrantless spying programs. Both conservatives and liberals should be outraged at these attempts to turn our country into a police state. Visit www.stopillegalspying.org to make your voice heard.
Meanwhile, the un-Constitutional spying continues.