News-Record.com

What with my real job and all, I've been a little too busy to blog any more about the government's vast, and pretty plainly illegal, electronic-surveillance programs. But at the moment, while I'm awaiting callbacks from sources on a couple of stories, I'll try to get us caught up.

• The government wants Internet companies to keep records on users' activities for two years, USA Today reported June 1. The government says it's to assist in investigating child-porn cases and terrorism cases.

  I don't know for sure whether this is a good idea or a bad idea, but I've got to question giving a blank check to an administration that can't even obey the laws we've already got. Moreover, if gun dealers aren't required to keep records that long, why should ISPs be? Are computers any more likely to be used in child porn than guns are in violent crime?

  The Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney is also quoted as worrying that this measure could make ISPs "an arm of the government." That argument resonates with me because news organizations have to resist precisely that pressure from time to time. Independence doesn't just make our news report more trustworthy, it also makes us better able to do our jobs.

• Even many conservatives understand that fact. One is Mark Corallo, formerly spokesman for then-Attorney General John Ashcroft, who called current AG Albert Gonzalez' subpoenaing two newspaper reporters over the crime of steroid use in baseball "the most reckless abuse of power I have seen in years."
• A federal judge in Detroit will hold a hearing Monday to rule on a motion by the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights to rule the National Security Agency's warrantless domestic-spying program illegal. That seems pretty clearly to be the case from the plain meaning of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but up 'til now, primarily because the administration has been claiming "state secrets" rather than let a case go to a judge, there has been no court ruling either way, even in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court. Any ruling, one way or the other, likely would be appealed and would lead to more questions that the administration appears most reluctant to answer.
• Meanwhile, the government is more commonly -- and more broadly -- asserting the "state-secrets" privilege to keep from having to defend its actions in court. Ostensibly, it is doing so to protect legitimate national-security secrets, particularly those pertaining to antiterrorism efforts. (It is attempting to do so in the ACLU/CCR lawsuit I just mentioned, for example.) As the article points out, the privilege used to be used to keep particular documents or witnesses out of a legal proceeding, but it is being used increasingly to "to try to snuff out lawsuits at their inception." I think it's valid to ask, if the government says what it's doing is legal, why it appears so afraid to test that claim in a court of law -- even the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court.
• The American Bar Association has appointed an all-star commission to look at the president's use of more than 750 "signing statements" since taking office to indicate that he would not be bound by parts or all of some bills he has signed into law. Members include Among them are former Rep. Mickey Edwards, R-Okla. (1977-93), Bruce Fein, a Justice Department official under President Reagan, and former FBI director William H. Weld, who served under Reagan and the first President Bush. This is good news. As a layman, I can't see how this president or any other can simply tell Congress that he gets to decide what the law is, so I'm glad that some high-powered lawyers, including prominent Republicans, will be looking at this issue.
• Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., who chairs the Judiciary Committee, apparently thinks he's back in fifth grade, to judge from this letter to Vice President Dick Cheney:

  TO: Dick
  FROM: Arlen
  RE: You are such a butthead.

  Hey, I walked right in front of you at the caucus luncheon twice yesterday and you didn't even talk to me. Why won't you talk to me?

  OK, that's not quite what he said, but, boy howdy, it's closer than you'd like to think a United States senator would be capable of getting in a letter intended for public consumption.

  And it would be funny if it weren't about so serious a subject: Specter, who has threatened to use his committee to actually try to hold the administration accountable for its illegal surveillance, is complaining that Cheney has gone behind his back to other committee Republicans in an attempt to shut that effort down. Now, I'm just a journalist in a middle-sized market and not a United States senator or anything, but I'm pretty sure that if I had Specter's gavel and a sitting vice president pulled a stunt like that, I'd be doing a lot more than sending out a whiny letter.

• OK, in fairness to Specter, he is doing more: He's backing down:

  A prominent Republican senator backed away on Tuesday [June 6] from his pledge to question executives from telecommunications companies that have allegedly been cooperating with the government's secret wiretapping program.

  Arlen Specter said that after discussions with the Bush administration and Senate Intelligence Committee colleagues who had been more fully briefed on the National Security Agency program, he was "prepared to defer on a temporary basis" requiring representatives from AT&T, Verizon Communications and BellSouth to testify before the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he leads.

  The Pennsylvania senator, who had emerged as one of the few vocal Republican skeptics of the warrantless surveillance, had promised to organize such a hearing after USA Today reported last month that the nation's three leading telecom companies had opened up their lines to the NSA. (Some of those companies have since denied their participation.) He said Tuesday that the companies voiced willingness to discuss the topic in a closed session but wouldn't be able to reveal classified information, a stance he found "insufficient and unacceptable."

  Specter said he was willing to suspend the inquiry largely because Vice President Dick Cheney had provided assurances that the White House would be more receptive to pending legislation -- including a proposal chiefly backed by Specter himself -- that would send the existing NSA program and all future surveillance plans to a special court for review of their constitutionality.
  

• But that's not all Specter's doing. No, he's also actually proposing to effectively eliminate the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and retroactively legalize the activities of all, up to and including the president, who violated it. Well. That will show them, huh?

So that's where we are on all this stuff: It looks the judge in Detroit wants to take a hard look at this. But Congress appears not to mind that the NSA is illegally wiretapping Americans or that the vice president is trying to snuff out Congressional oversight. Well, most of Congress -- Sen. Patrick Leahy is complaining: "Why don't we just recess for the rest of the year ... and simply say we'll have no more hearings, and Vice President Cheney will just tell the nation what laws we'll have -- he'll let us know which laws will be followed and which laws will not be followed."

It's as if the two houses of Congress have morphed into Alphonse and Gaston, stumbling over one another in their attempts to hold open the door of lawlessness for the administration.