Surveillance Bill Prompts ACLU Suit
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On the same day President Bush signed new surveillance legislation, a wide-ranging group of international aid organizations, writers, defense lawyers, and others filed suit yesterday in federal court in New York, seeking to have the eavesdropping provisions in the new law declared unconstitutional.
“A law like this is fundamentally inconsistent with the Constitution and with the most basic democratic values,” an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who helped prepare the suit, Jameel Jaffer, said in a conference call with reporters. “It permits the government to conduct intrusive surveillance without ever telling a court who it intends to surveil, what phone lines and e-mail addresses it intends to monitor, where its surveillance targets are located, or why it’s conducted the surveillance.”
The plaintiffs in the suit include Amnesty International, the Service Employees International Union, and the Nation magazine. All argued they would have trouble gathering information because of fears generated by the law’s broad authority for surveillance of calls between America and foreign countries.
“The power of this surveillance can essentially shut down the ability of whistleblowers, human rights activists, dissidents, truth tellers, people with a conscience, to rise up and speak against the mendacity of those in power,” a former New York Times correspondent who now writes for the Nation, Christopher Hedges, said. “Frankly, with that gone, we take a giant step towards fascism.”
Mr. Hedges complained that one of his Jordan-based sources with close ties to Hamas may now refuse to speak by phone because of fears that the conversation will be intercepted by America and turned over to Israel.
Senator Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, opposed the legislation during the party’s primary battle, but this week he voted for the measure, even though it effectively grants telecommunications companies immunity for allowing government surveillance at a time when it was not authorized by any court. The bill passed the Senate, 69-28.
The ACLU’s legislative director, Caroline Fredrickson, called Mr. Obama’s reversal disheartening. “It’s obviously a disappointment, but I think at the end of the day, if you look at the vote outcome, Obama didn’t really take any other Democrats with him. Senator Clinton stood strong in her position. And I think there were a majority of the Democrats who voted no,” she said.
The ACLU’s suit does not take on the so-called telecom immunity provision, which is expected to be challenged in pending lawsuits over warrantless wiretapping.