(The cartoon image above is by Dave Granlund at davegranlund.com.)After the tragic happenings on September 11th of 2001, the United States government acted out of fear, and with no regard for the constitutional rights of American citizens -- rights that the Founding Fathers considered important enough to put into writing. They passed the Patriot Act -- a law that allowed government agencies to bypass the "probable cause" safeguards that required a court order before invading the privacy of any person in this country.
Of course, the government assured citizens that the new law would not be used to spy on American citizens. They said those new powers would only be used to keep track of foreign terrorists, and Americans would only be spied on if they were in contact with those foreign terrorists. They lied! As is usual with government, any government, they abused their new powers -- taking them to the extreme, and spying on millions of American citizens (who were not terrorists, and had no contact with terrorists).
And they did it in secret. Although many of us on the left (along with many Libertarians) had expected this, and had warned our fellow citizens that abuses would occur and the Constitution would be violated, the enormous extent of the government spying was not known until Edward Snowden exposed it to the world. The government tried to label him a criminal (as did many on the right), but the truth is that he was just a whistleblower, who loved his country enough to risk his own safety and freedom to expose the massive and unconstitutional spying on citizens by the government.
Once this spying was exposed, one would have expected that our elected officials would act to curb it. But they didn't. They did nothing except to make excuses (out of fear that speaking out for constitutional rights would end their political careers). Personally, I consider them cowards, who violated their oath of office by harming instead of defending the Constitution.
Fortunately, there is at least one federal judge with the integrity and political courage to defend and uphold the Constitution. Judge Richard J. Leon, a George Bush appointee to the United States District Court in the District of Columbia, declared the massive NSA spying program to be unconstitutional yesterday, and issued a restraining order to stop the spying (although he stayed that order to allow the government time to appeal). Judge Leon said:
"I cannot imagine a more 'indiscriminate' and 'arbitrary invasion' than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval. Surely, such a program infringes on 'that degree of privacy' that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment."
The judge is right. Of course this is not the end of the fight for our constitutional right of privacy. The government will undoubtably appeal (since no government willingly gives up any power it has seized). We just have to hope now that there are more judges (at the appeals level and on the Supreme Court, where this will eventually go) with the integrity, intelligence, political courage, and love of country demonstrated by Judge Leon.
