That's OK, I Wasn't Using My Constitutional Rights, Anyway

Chicago's been hot (boy, has it been hot), and August is a slow month anyway, so I'm a bit tardy getting to this. If you've already seen it elsewhere, I'm sure you'll agree that it deserves as many airings as we can give it.

In The New York Times on Monday, James Risen explains how the surveillance legislation Congress rolled over and passed on the weekend is actually worse than we thought. Writing that the new law "broadly expanded" government surveillance power, Risen continued:

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government's ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

So if a foreign country is involved, it doesn't matter who might be involved in the conversation (or e-mail correspondence), the government just needs to determine if "the target of the government's surveillance is 'reasonably believed' to be overseas." And up until now, this surveillance required a court-approved search warrant--from an extremely lenient court, but a court, nonetheless. Who needs to approve it now? The attorney general or the director of national intelligence. That's right, that tower of moral authority, Alberto Gonzales, gets to decide what's necessary to monitor and what's not. Yeah, I can see him ending surveillance left and right.

If Alberto decides he needs to monitor certain communication, it only stands to reason that he'd be able to order the telecommunications industry to bend to his whims. Of course, it might also make sense that that same telecommunications industry doesn't want to be at Alberto's beck and call to do his bidding, so that sets up another bit or irony in all of this: we're depending on the phone company to defend out constitutional rights.

We've got friends and relatives in Canada, and right at the moment, we've got relatives traveling in Japan and France. Although I can't imagine why anyone would want to monitor any calls I might have with any of them, I guess from now on we've got to assume that the government may be monitoring any or all of those calls. No more George W. Bush jokes, I guess. For the time being, though, let's just hope that the people at the phone companies keep their focus on our civil rights and protect us from the authoritarianism our Democratic Congress invited into our living rooms.