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Civil Liberties: 1, NSA: 0

SCOTUS Blog reports on U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker’s rejection of the government’s plea to dismiss a lawsuit challenging the legality of the “Terrorist Surveillance Program”. You’ll remember that program as the one where the NSA was given power to monitor all calls and e-mails by U.S. citizens (and if you think for one second it was limited to contacts with terrorist suspects you live in a dream world).

From the ruling:

While the court recognizes and respects the executive’s constitutional duty to protect the nation from threats, the court also takes seriously its constitutional duty to adjudicate the disputes that come before it,” the judge wrote. (At that point, he inserted in his opinion a quotaton from the Supreme Court’s 2004 decision in Hamdi v. Rumsfeld saying “Whatever power the United States Constitution envisions for the Executive in its exchanges with other nations or with enemy organizations in times of conflict, it most assuredly envisions a role for all three branches when individual liberties are at stake.

The EFF has a good take on the whole situation, including a PDF link to the full decision.

The fight is not over, however. The Bush Administration is working with Specter to have FISA (that secret court that rules over these secret endeavours) handle all approvals of anything like this in the future, and Congress looks to be on target to giving them a full pass.

A few days ago, we finished watching (one more time) the end of season two of Babylon 5 (episode entitled “The Fall of Night”). The “Ministry of Peace” is really starting to show it’s true colors by that point and it might not be a bad idea for you to take a look at how that whole movement progressed and how it ultimately turned out.

We need to be very careful at the amount of power we just hand over to the Executive branch and how much we put our trust in them to have all of our best interests at heart.
And, the next time you criticize someone (internally or out loud) for speaking their minds on their opinions of the current conflict and how related domestic affairs are being handled you might want to stop and think about just how far you are willing to go to have peace here at home.


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