Appeals Court Rules In Favor Of NSA Warrantless Wiretapping, Forgets Constitution Exists

Life has a funny sense of irony.  One moment you can be opening a Christmas gift from a loved one and finding a shiny brand new smart phone complete with a year of paid service, and the next moment you open a web browser to find this.

Yep, it’s the last story that anyone in America with a cell phone wants to hear: the 9^th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has given its okay over the National Security Agency’s latest foray into domestic surveillance.  The madness started way back in 2008 when Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.  The law in essence allows the federal government to tap phones of those suspected to be conducting illegal espionage missions for foreign governments.  The law extends not only to foreign nationals, but also to U.S. citizens.  In addition, it also allows the President to authorize these types of searches without a warrant or by the government itself with a warrant given by a special FISA court established to review these specific requests.

The trouble before the courts started when the NSA turned its attention to U.S. telecommunications companies, putting pressure on them to assist the government agency into wiretapping a number of the company’s customers.  This led to the filing of 33 lawsuits against these same companies, which were eventually consolidated into the case that was heard by the 9^th Circuit.

The ruling should come as a huge disappointment to privacy advocates and the public alike simply because of what it allows the government to do.  Our country’s highest court of the land has essentially given a hall pass to our country’s leaders to use the guise of national security to intrude into our private lives.  The decision gives immunity to not only government officials, but also any private companies that cooperate with their efforts.  This makes suing both the government and any private parties to the violation no longer possible.

Now the Court and NSA attorneys stress that the need for this type of lawsuit immunity is required in order to allow government agencies to effectively utilize FISA to protect our borders, as they reason that private companies likely won’t cooperate with NSA requests without the protection.  However, though this is certainly a very compelling argument in favor of the ruling, the fact remains that the negative consequences of it are so much greater.

For instance, the Court creates a strong anti-privacy precedent here that can be potentially abused to great lengths by any governmental agency looking to conduct searches that would otherwise normally be protected under the Fourth Amendment.  That amendment has long established our right to be protected from warrantless searches in places where we have a reasonable expectation of privacy.

It’s now easier than ever for the FBI or some other federal agency to cite FISA to tap into any of the public’s private conversations.  Scarier still is that these same agencies could very well choose to carry out a warrantless search and have the evidence not be excluded in court by citing this horrible precedent.  It’s sad to see the protections guaranteed by our Constitution and cultivated by cases like Katz v. United States and its progeny be slowly eroded away like this.

Hopefully with the election coming up soon, one of the nominees or at least our current President will broach the subject of privacy.  But chances are with all the mudslinging going on they probably won’t get a chance to drop a legitimate point without an extramarital affair or two being brought up.  Que Sera, Sera, thus is the world of politics.