Agreement on Spying

I sometimes wonder precisely what the purpose was of electing a Democrat-led congress, considering their track record. I’ve gotten a couple of notes from the ACLU on this, and also got it from the Washington Post today.

My problem here is not that [tag]surveillance[/tag] does not need to occur in some cases. Rather, my question is how, even with emergency powers to get surveillance going immediately at need, it should be seen as soft on terrorism to require warrants to spy on U. S. citizens? You have a secret court to oversee this, but they would rather not even have them involved, and they certainly don’t want to go to an ordinary judge.

If the problem was their ability to respond quickly, then I would have sympathy. They need to be able to respond quickly. But the law provides that they must get approval within a certain period of time. That is a good idea. It’s accountability. The rhetoric of the administration does not sound to me like that of people zealously carrying out their tasks and being held back by the law. Rather, it sounds like people who don’t want accountability no matter when in the process it occurs.

When we connect this with problems already identified in various agencies using their new powers, the questions become even greater.

How much freedom do we want to give up in the name of fighting terror, especially when giving up that freedom does not actually help the battle against terror?