FISA vs. 4th Amdendment. Round 2

Congress is locked in a battle with the white house. At stake, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the Fourth Amendment rights of U.S. Citizens. Unfortunately, there is a trade off between safety and freedom, and a price must be paid either way.

A little background: FISA (Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Ace) was originally passed in 1978 to provide oversight for legal wiretapping. There were additions made to the bill through the Patriot Act of 2001, and the Protect America Act of 2007. Specifically, the Protect America Act authorized the president to issue wiretaps on foreigners without a warrant or judicial oversight, so long as the Attorney General (also a member of the executive branch) approved. So why is this issue back in the hot seat? The Protect America Act expired February 2008.

Still, the same congress passed the law last year, why the hold up? Because there is a new provision in this bill, giving retroactive immunity from lawsuits to telecommunication companies who cooperated with the government. See, the government wanted to look at phone records, but they did not have probable cause to get a warrant. So they just asked nicely. And some companies, for example AT&T, turned over that information. So if you have a phone through AT&T, the government knows what calls you’ve made, what time you made them, and who you made them to.

Understandably, some people were a little upset, so they filed a lawsuit, claiming these companies violated their privacy rights. Now, if the FISA provisions Bush would like are passed into law, these companies would get immunity. It’s turned into a very controversial issue. Some people applaud the telecoms for cooperating with our government to catch terrorists; others are appalled that their information was so callously given away, when there was no legal reason nor just cause to do so.

Why didn’t AT&T demand a subpoena for this private information? That’s why we have a court system and judicial oversight, requiring law enforcement to provide just cause before demanding personal/privileged documents. In fact, that would be the responsible action for a business concerned with its customer’s wellbeing (thank you Google); happy to cooperate as long as you have some kind of reasonable suspicion. But now, after acting irresponsibly, the government is trying to protect them from the consequences of their own actions. If consumers can’t hold companies accountable, we lose our voice in the market.

So the question is, did the U.S. Government violate the 4th amendment rights to protection against unreasonable searches and seizures? I hear the argument over and over, ‘what does it matter if I have nothing to hide?’ That’s always an easy argument to make if you are not being accused of a crime. But we have these rights for a reason. The framers of the constitution came from a time when a corrupt government could storm through your house on a whim, searching everything, leaving you with absolutely no privacy whether you had committed a crime or not.

Our freedoms that we sometimes take for granted erode away just a little at a time. If we have no protections from our government when it comes to the phone calls we make, what websites we view online, or even what we are searching through search engines like AOL (all of which the U.S. government has requested to see information on), then how long is it until we have no protections in our own homes. Our rights erode away a little at a time, so you may not have something to hide, but you do have something to lose.