Last night Thom Hartmann interviewed Ron Paul in his Conversations with Great Minds segment. Paul's take on all of this is that what's happening is already illegal according to the constitution, but that we aren't able to enforce the law because corporations, special interests and political lapdogs write their own laws. I'm still not sure what my stance on Paul is but I like his core political belief of nonintervention. It's similar to the golden rule but for politics, so for example if you spy on americans, you infringe their property right, in this case by stealing their privacy. An individual should be able to sue the NSA for that and win, setting a precedent for the rest of the population. The fact that they can't shows just how corrupt the system truly is. I'm not a libertarian but he made me stop and think:
The efforts aren't illegal, in the Constitutional sense (U.S.), so long as the searches are deemed reasonable. Two branches of government (Executive and Judicial) have generally been in agreement that searches for the purposes of National Security (very broadly defined) are reasonable. And Congress has not passed laws to the contrary. In fact, Congress has been exceedingly pliant on these issues. They've been passing laws that not only make these searches legal, but exempting Telecoms from any lawsuits for their cooperation. A different Executive (say, Rand Paul) could effect many changes on his own. But history suggests that, when given War Powers, Executives of both parties have been very careful to relinquish that authority. And Rand Paul will have a hard enough time in his own party.
> And Congress has not passed laws to the contrary.
Congress did, in fact, pass the original Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 "to the contrary", expressly prohibiting (and criminalizing) many of the types of searches (both physical and electronic) for the stated purposes of "National Security" that had been done prior to the Act.
Of course, the executive was successful in getting Congress to remove many of the restrictions in FISA in the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, including retroactive immunity for private firms that had cooperated in the executive's violations of FISA, but then, if the scope of the surveillance in violation of FISA was as broad as current surveillance appears to be, it may well have been the source of the leverage to get the change through Congress.
Sorry, by "Congress" I wasn't referring to the version in place 35 years ago in the post-Watergate Era.
As you note, the Congress of today has rolled back FISA and added new, more pliant laws (e.g., Patriot Act).
We are in a different era where all three branches are gladly pushing the reasonable clause far beyond the intended use. That's the result and it is Constitutional because all three branches say so.
> Sorry, by "Congress" I wasn't referring to the version in place 35 years ago in the post-Watergate Era.
I am not sue that the "version" of Congress has changed as much as the attitude of the people toward the government. While abstract anti-government rhetoric is perhaps even more common now than in the post-Watergate Era, specifically directed outrage at particular abuses like the (far more pervasive today than in the Watergate Era) use of national security resources for surveillance of the population (and not just foreign communication) is far more muted.
So why can't, let's say, German citizens sue Google and alike in Germany? I am pretty sure many foreigners feel that some NSA programs are unconstitutional according to other countries' constitution.
What if many foreign citizens from many countries sue internet companies for assisting the Big Brother in spying on these foreign citizens?
http://www.thomhartmann.com/bigpicture/full-show-81913-ron-p...