14 DAY TRIAL // The highly controversial FISA Amendments Act of 2008 (FAA), proposed as far back as 2001 by former president George W. Bush, has allowed the US National Security Agency (NSA) to collect extremely large amounts of data from American citizens, and centralize them into a massive database, which is constantly expanded. According to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the “over-collection” of communication data has been “significant and systemic.”
Even before the Congress passed the spying act, which gave the NSA the right to indiscriminately survey phone calls and Internet activities of all American citizens without a warrant or founded suspicions, the ACLU warned that this type of things might happen. However, no one in the past administration wanted to hear this, as everyone was under the impression that the “threats on national security” that were advocated at the time were real.
One year later, reality showed that this was just another step in the downhill path that America had taken since 9/11. Civil liberties are going down the drain, and the government is resembling more and more an Orwellian regime, with the state involved in all aspects of its citizens' lives. The federal lawsuit that ACLU initiated just after the FAA was passed is, naturally, still pending, and will probably remain pending until the NSA decides otherwise.
“Congress was repeatedly warned that this type of abuse would be the obvious outcome of passing the FISA Amendments Act. Congressional leadership promised after this law's passage that it would be reexamined along with the Patriot Act. It's time to fulfill that promise and restore the checks and balances of our surveillance system. Warrantless surveillance has no place in an America we can be proud of. These revelations make it clear that Congress must now make a commitment to rein in government surveillance,” ACLU Washington Legislative Office Director Caroline Fredrickson said, as quoted by Cellular News.
“These revelations are as alarming as they are predictable. The FAA set virtually no limits on the government's eavesdropping authority, but it appears that the NSA has disregarded even what minimal limits existed. The new law should have ensured that the government's surveillance powers would be subject to meaningful judicial oversight,” ACLU National Security Project Director Jameel Jaffer shared.
“Instead, the new law allowed the NSA to operate without the safeguards that the Constitution requires. The Bush administration argued that the law was necessary to protect national security, but in fact the law implicates all kinds of communications that have nothing to do with terrorism or criminal activity of any kind. The law was ill-advised, and today's report only underscores that the law should be struck down as unconstitutional,” he added.
In the lawsuit, ACLU rightfully argues that the First and Fourth Amendments to the Constitution are constantly and methodically breached. The very concept of democracy in the US is currently in question, even if the country takes pride in being the “beacon” of light for the globe, and is currently engaged in two wars to protect the very freedoms it's suppressing between its borders.