Government Spying
Just got back from a law prof conference where, not surprisingly, there was a lot of discussion about the legality of warrantless spying on U.S. citizens by the Bush Administration. Many other blogs provide far richer discussions, but it seemed worthwhile to post this reminder: Federal wiretap warrants are obtainable with simple, straightforward showings of probable cause. Secret surveillance warrants under F.I.S.A. are even easier to obtain - so easy that in 2004 there were 1758 applications for secret surveillance warrants, and NOT A SINGLE ONE WAS DENIED. See e.g. the EPIC F.I.S.A. page. So easy that according to this article the F.I.S.A court granted over 10,000 F.I.S.A. surveillance applications and rejected none over 23 years. So why the Bush Adminstration refused to obtain even F.I.S.A. warrants strongly suggests that they were spying on non-probable-cause-generating people for legally unjustifiable reasons. Or, as Digby put it:
"[T]he only logical reason that the administration believed that it had to secretly and illegally spy on Americans is because they knew that Americans would not approve of which Americans they were monitoring.... [T]he only security threatened by the revelations in the NY Times story is the Republican Party's political security."