Revealed: Spying Abuses 'Systemic' In Recent Months -- Which Is Exactly What the 2008 FISA Law Was Designed to Do

By Glenn Greenwald, Salon. Posted April 16, 2009.

Several other points to note about these new revelations:

(1) The abuses which Risen and Lichtblau report last night are far from comprehensive. These are just isolated slivers that they are able to describe as a result of individuals leaking portions of what they know.  Indeed, while the article emphasizes that the abuses are "significant and systemic" and "went beyond the broad legal limits," there are exceedingly few specifics in their story detailing exactly what the abuses were. In other words, most of the information about the NSA's abuses remain concealed. We have learned only a small fraction of what took place.

(2) Note the wall of extreme secrecy behind which our Government operates. According to the article, various officials learned of the NSA abuses and then secretly told some members of Congress about them, and those individuals have been secretly discussing what should be done. The idea that the Government or Congress should inform the public about the massive surveillance abuses doesn't seem to have occurred to anyone other than the whistleblowers who leaked what they knew to The New York Times.

(3) Since being elected President, Barack Obama has done everything in his power to block judicial proceedings that would examine allegations that the NSA has been abusing its eavesdropping powers and illegally intercepting the telephone and email communications of Americans. Put another way, Obama -- using radical claims of presidential powers of secrecy -- has been preventing disclosure of the very abuses disclosed by this article and preventing legal scrutiny, all by claiming that even George Bush's illegal NSA spying programs are "state secrets" that courts must not adjudicate. That's what the "state secrets" controversy is about -- Obama demanding that courts be barred from examining or ruling on any of these abuses and imposing consequences, based on his claim that these activities are so secret that they must never see the light of day.

(4) In addition to destroying most of the FISA oversight framework, the 2008 bill also sought to terminate all lawsuits that were brought against telecoms for eavesdropping abuses. Those lawsuits would have examined and led to judicial rulings on past NSA abuses, but the Democratic Congress and the Bush White House instead retroactively immunized the lawbreaking telecoms and thus ensured that there would be no consequences for any of it.

It's true that the Times article claims that these abuses were uncovered as part of the DOJ's preparation of the semi-annual report which the 2008 FISA law requires be submitted in secret to the FISA court. And, once they knew that the Times had learned of and was preparing to write about these abuses, Obama officials claimed in response that the abuses are being corrected and that eavesdropping activities are now in compliance with the safeguards of the law. The problem, however, is that "the law" -- thanks to the Democratic Congress -- now has exceedingly few safeguards in it. It allows massive domestic spying without meaningful oversight, and renders these eavesdropping abuses inevitable. That was true in June, 2008 when the FISA-gutting law was passed, and it is just as true now.

See more stories tagged with: new york times, dick cheney, barack obama, fisa, nsa, jay rockefeller, steny hoyer, eric lichtblau, cass sunstein, national security agency, james risen, greg craig, micheal mcconnell, nancy soderberg

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