By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 4:46pm
Secret law exists inside the United States.
As we wrote a few weeks ago, one of the main issues discussed on the Senate floor during the FISA debate was secret law. Under the law, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court makes secret interpretations and secret rulings about something that should never be secret: our constitutional rights. Sen. Jeff Merkley (D-OR) fought for an amendment that would have required the administration to release the court’s opinions, to provide unclassified summaries of them, or to certify how many there are and why they can’t be released.
When Congress enacted and the President signed into law the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, some of the nation's largest telecommunications companies were given an extraordinary gift: full-scale immunity from the pending lawsuits brought by their customers, who had alleged that their privacy and other rights were violated by the telecoms' participation in the Bush administration's illegal spying program. There are, however, several reasons for believing that this telecom immunity provision is unconstitutional, violative of several different constitutional guarantees.
By Robyn Greene, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:35pm
How many different ways does Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) have to ask the government the number of Americans it has spied on under its warrantless wiretapping program before he can get a straight answer? So far, it’s at least three and counting.
Today, we filed our brief with the Supreme Court in our lawsuit challenging the FISA Amendments Act, the 2008 law that ratified and expanded the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program. (You can read our brief here.)
The Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act – FISA – is a post-Watergate statute that was meant to rein in and regulate domestic surveillance undertaken in the name of national security. In 2008, Congress amended the statute, giving the National Security Agency unprecedented power to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international communications. The ACLU immediately challenged the law, but the government has tried to keep our case out of court.
The Supreme Court has just agreed to consider whether plaintiffs represented by the ACLU have the right to challenge the constitutionality of a controversial law that authorizes the National Security Agency to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international emails and phone calls.
At issue is an appeals court ruling that allowed the ACLU’s challenge to the law – called the FISA Amendments Act of 2008 – to move forward. Responding to today’s news, ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer said:
By Michael German, Senior Policy Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:10am
The Bipartisan Policy Center published a report last week called, “Countering Online Radicalization in America,” which strongly endorsed First Amendment principles in rejecting censorship as an appropriate tactic for addressing violent extremist content on the Internet. The report evaluated the many methods governments around the world use to censor the Internet – including filtering or blacklisting online content, taking down websites (either through legal means, cyber attacks or appealing to private sector providers), and prosecuting Internet content producers – and rejected them all as both ineffective in stopping the spread of undesirable ideas, and an affront to American values: “For the United States, the cost-benefit analysis would be even clearer: with its long and cherished tradition of free speech, the creation of a nationwide system of censorship is virtually inconceivable.” But the BPC’s positive recommendations are potentially undermined by its continuing embrace of a radicalization theory that draws too close a causal connection between “radical” ideas and violent action.
By Michelle Richardson, Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 10:28am
Remember the George W. Bush warrantless wiretapping program? The one that was so illegal that Congress had to pass a special law to ensure that no one was prosecuted for it or sued by their customers for facilitating it? And was found by independent reviewers to be pretty pointless anyway? And was then brilliantly codified and written into stone by Congress? And which almost immediately went off the rails, being used to collect all sorts of stuff it wasn’t supposed to? It’s back!
By Barbara Flynn Currie, Illinois House of Representatives, Majority Leader at 2:08pm
As we near the tenth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 9/11, we can expect to see a number of retrospective pieces in print and broadcast offering commentary on changes to America in the decade since that shocking day.
Today, the House of Representatives passed a reauthorization of the 2008 FISA Amendments Act, an unconstitutional domestic spying law that gives vast, unchecked surveillance authority to the government. The law, passed in July of 2008, authorizes the National Security Agency to conduct dragnet surveillance of Americans’ international emails and phone calls.
