Yesterday saw a huge setback for Americans hoping for an end to massive government programs to of electronic surveillance of Americans’ personal communications, which were unleashed by the FISA Amendments Act. District Court judge Vaughn Walker dismissed the lawsuit Jewel vs. NSA, in which the Electronic Frontier Foundation sought to gain information about, and to move toward overturning, National Security Agency’s mass seizure of Americans’ emails, telephone calls and other electronic communications.
The judge’s reasoning: Because the allegation is that the government is violating the constitutional rights of virtually all Americans, no particular Americans have the right to challenge these violations in a court of law. Kevin Bankston, the Senior Staff Attorney for EFF, explained the terrible absurdity of the ruling: “The alarming upshot of the court’s decision is that so long as the government spies on all Americans, the courts have no power to review or halt such mass surveillance even when it is flatly illegal and unconstitutional.”
Think about it this way: It’s as if the government sent armies of agents to secretly search through the homes of every family in the United States of America while the families were out of town, but a judge said no one could sue to stop the unreasonable search and seizure because complaints about the action were a general grievance and not a particularized injury.
The lesson we can take from Judge Walker: Big Brother is above the law just because he’s big.
I am agog at Americans’ blase attitude about this.
the american people just don’t think this is anything new. they assumed this has been going on all along. since it was exposed that j. edgar hoover started spying on anyone he felt like, since the IRS has been gathering information on all taxpayers and all those who try to avoid taxes, and since advertising agencies have broken us into demographic charts and graphs, we have grown accustomed to having no where to hide. and unless we have something to hide, we don’t care.
if you could show americans what’s at stake for them; maybe if there were a class action suit, where every citizen would get a cut of the settlement…
wait a minute, the settlement would come out of tax dollars, we would have to pay ourselves for illegally spying on ourselves to save us from ourselves. this is getting pretty convoluted. what are we talking, oh, yeah, getting americans interested in what is flatly illegal and unconstitutional surveillence. yeah, like that’s gonna happen.