Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake, and William Binney on the surveillance state
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On a vote of 301-118, the House of Representatives on Wednesday moved to reauthorize the Bush administration's warrantless spying bill of 2008 (called the "FISA Amendments Act" or FAA) for another five years, through December 31, 2017.
We don’t know much about what the NSA is doing. What we do know – and what we suspect - is featured in today’s New York Times.
Image: ACLUm/DonkeyHotey
“Sunlight,” wrote Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis in 1933, “is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman.”
Above: ACLU attorney Jameel Jaffer, author Jim Bamford, ACLU attorney Alexander Abdo, and NSA whistleblower Bill Binney at DefCon 20 in Las Vegas, July 2012.
The sprawling, secretive intelligence bureaucracy has admitted that it violated the Fourth Amendment rights of some unspecified number of US persons -- once.
Jacob Appelbaum and William Binney in NYC, 20 April 2012. Photo: Aaron Muszalski/ACLUm
Now that President Obama has fully bought into the broad surveillance powers that Senator Obama had first vowed to filibuster and then supported, Congress seems bent on doing its bipartisan best to trash the Fourth Amendment.
Let’s go back to school for a minute. Remember learning that the United States had three separate branches of government and a system of checks and balances to prevent any one branch from becoming too powerful?