Is the military skirting the law to spy on Americans?

The Associated Press

Ann Beeson, the American Civil Liberties Union attorney for the plaintiffs challenging the government's wiretapping policy, addresses the media in Detroit.

Featured Topic | Posted 20 weeks 6 days ago

Is the military skirting the law to spy on Americans?

The Pentagon is using the FBI to skirt legal restrictions on domestic surveillance to obtain private records of Americans' Internet service providers, financial institutions and telephone companies, the ACLU alleged Tuesday.

The American Civil Liberties Union based its conclusion on a review of more than 1,000 documents turned over by the Defense Department after it sued the agency last year for documents related to national security letters, or NSLs, investigative tools used to compel businesses to turn over customer information without a judge's order or grand jury subpoena.

Is the war on terrorism a reasonable justification for spying on American citizens? Should Congress or the restrain the Pentagon from using domestic surveillance? Or should Congress establish more safeguards and regulations to help protect national security? And what should the next president do?

Ben likes: The case for telecom immunity

Andrew C. McCarthy/National Review Online

Democrats continue to charge that the administration wants “blanket immunity” for the telecoms (much the way they misleadingly repeated that warrantless eavesdropping on cross-border al-Qaeda communications was “domestic spying”). In fact, the proposed immunity is very limited. It applies only to telecoms that either did nothing to help the government or that helped only on the basis of a written representation by the government that the program had been reviewed by the president and determined legal.

Thus, the immunity would not protect, say, a telecom that permitted surveillance on an informal request from a rogue agent without a written assurance of lawfulness -- which, in fairness, is the only type of conduct over which it might be appropriate to hold them liable.

Joel likes: Unchecked government powers get abused

Glenn Greenwald/Salon

Ever since the Patriot Act was enacted, Russ Feingold had been almost single-handedly (at least among members of Congress) trying to warn of the potential for abuse of NSLs. Finally, a couple of months prior to the time the Patriot Act was to be renewed in early 2006, Feingold got some help in his crusade, when The Washington Post's Barton Gellman published a superb investigative article which detailed the FBI's increasingly frequent and broad use of NSLs, and surveyed the obvious dangers from these unchecked surveillance instruments.

It seems there are a few brand new lessons that we can perhaps draw from these revelations ... Allowing government officials to engage in surveillance on American citizens with no warrant requirement ensures that surveillance will be used for improper ends, against innocent Americans.