The seemingly inexorable drift by the United States into incipient totalitarianism continues. Yesterday, President Bush signed into law legislation that increases the federal government’s authority to place surveillance, without warrant, on international telephone calls and e-mail messages made from and to US citizens.
What is worrying many is that the legislative change, that has the most profound implications for the rights and privacy of the individual in what is supposed to be the world's most open and democratic nation, was rushed through both the House and the Senate in the last couple of days before the long summer holiday (that is the long holiday traditionally enjoyed by US politicians if not those that they represent) when few were in the chambers to debate the matter properly.
Analysts in Congress say the impact of the new law goes "far beyond" beyond the "few and small" changes that the Bush administration had said were necessary to glean information about alleged or suspected foreign terrorists. The result is a big change in the latitude the US government now has to eavesdrop on tens of millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the US.
The new law also provides a necessary but highly contentious legal framework for the bulk of the surveillance without warrant that already was being undertaken in secret by the National Security Agency (NSA) in defiance of the terms of the US Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. This law, in existence since 1978, is/was supposed to determine just how when and why the federal government can eavesdrop on the private communications of US citizens.
Hitherto, to place surveillance on telephone calls being made between individuals within the US and others overseas, the government was required to apply for individual search warrants that were granted (or refused, but not very often) by a special court. The new law effectively alters the definition of what constitutes "electronic surveillance" and thus allows the US government to eavesdrop on conversations or email traffic without warrants as long as the target is “reasonably believed” to be overseas.
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