The "liberal" position on the surveillance state.

This is from Salon. The drift towards the Big Brother state of Orwell in the U.S. is made transparent in this article. The so-called leftist Liberals are reduced to defending what years ago was regarded as great leap backward into Soviet style spying on citizens. The KGB probably never had it so good!

Glenn Greenwald
Sunday March 2, 2008 08:10 EST
The "liberal" position on the Surveillance State
It's periodically worthwhile to take note of just how far to the Right our political establishment has shifted over the last couple of decades, and few issues reveal that shift as clearly as the debate over warrantless government spying. The absolute most "liberal" viewpoint that can be expressed is that the FISA court is a wonderful and important safeguard on civil liberties and that it strikes the perfect balance between freedom and security.

But for decades, the FISA court -- for obvious reasons -- was considered to be one of the great threats to civil liberties, the very antithesis of how an open, democratic system of government ought to function. The FISA court was long the symbol of how severe are the incursions we've allowed into basic civil liberties and open government.

The FISC is a classically Kafka-esque court that operates in total secrecy. Only the Government, and nobody else, is permitted to attend, participate, and make arguments. Only the Government is permitted to access or know about the decisions issued by that court. Rather than the judges being assigned randomly and therefore fairly, they are hand-picked by the Chief Justice (who has been a GOP-appointee since FISA was enacted) and are uniformly the types of judges who evince great deference to the Government. As a result, the FISA court has been notorious for decades for mindlessly rubber-stamping every single Government request to eavesdrop on whomever they want. Just look at this chart (h/t Arthur Silber) for the full, absurd picture.

Yet now, embracing this secret, one-sided, slavishly pro-government court defines the outermost liberal or "pro-civil-liberty" view permitted in our public discourse. And indeed, as reports of imminent (and entirely predictable) House Democratic capitulation on the FISA bill emerge, the FISA court is now actually deemed by the establishment to be too far to the Left -- too much of a restraint on our increasingly omnipotent surveillance state. Anyone who believes that we should at the very least have those extremely minimal -- really just symbolic -- limitations on our Government's ability to spy on us in secret is now a far Leftist.

But it was not always so. When FISA was first unveiled at the height of the Cold War, it was publicly supported by what a May 23, 1977, pro-FISA Washington Post Editorial described as "leaders of the intelligence community and Congress." Upon passage of FISA, a 1978 World News Digest article reported (via LEXIS): "All of the U.S. intelligence agencies [including the CIA and NSA] were on record in favor of the final bill." And in the wake of revelations of decades of eavesdropping abuses, FISA was supported both by the Carter and Ford administrations. It passed the Senate by voice vote.

But opposition to FISA -- in many civil libertarian and even conservative circles -- was fierce, not on the ground that it imposed too many restrictions on Government eavesdropping but on the opposite ground: that FISA gave legal sanction to sweeping, excessive, unchecked government power to spy on Americans. Here is what William Safire wrote on June 26, 1978 in his New York Times column opposing FISA, largely on the grounds that by requiring phone companies to cooperate with government spying, FISA transformed the telecom industry into an arm of the police state:

. . . .
Even more revealingly, the telecoms themselves -- now the most eager co-conspirators in broader government surveillance powers -- were back then among the most vocal opponents of FISA, as they objected to the provisions which required them to participate in Government spying and thus forced them to violate the privacy rights of their own customers. From a June 27, 1978 Washington Post article headlined: "AT&T Hits Wider Role in Wiretaps; Ma Bell Shuns Wider Wiretap Role":

Ma Bell could become simply a slave for Big Brother under a little noted section of important foreign intelligence surveillance legislation being considered by Congress.

At issue is basic privacy of telephone communications. A business and service for which American Telephone & Telegraph Co. has had a virtual nationwide monopoly over the past century.

Despite cases in recent years that have involved sometimes illegal telephone wiretapping, AT&T long has emphasized privacy as "a basic concept" of its business.

"We believe our customers have an inherent right to use the telephone with the same privacy they enjoy when talking face to face," states company policy. . . .

In the wake of Watergate, it has been difficult to find company employees who would violate AT&T policy. And some members of Congress have been convinced that telephone companies should be ordered to play a more active role.

As a result, provisions have been added to the proposed Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act that would allow courts and federal officials to require that AT&T become the wiretapper of the future.