Bush’s warrantless wiretaps whacked

By Michael Fraase

Friday, 04 July 2008 10:45AM CDT

Section: Law

Bush listeningChief Judge for the Northern District of California, Vaughn Walker, ruled Wednesday that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) is the exclusive means by which the president may eavesdrop on Americans. In brief, President Bush’s assertion that his constitutional authority as commander in chief superseded that law was found to be totally invalid.

The Justice Department has maintained for more than two years that the illegal warrantless wiretapping ordered and carried out by the Bush administration were state secrets and that the US Constitution granted the president the authority to order such wiretaps without a warrant. Not so, ruled Judge Walker. Walker ruled that the surveillance rules were clearly established under FISA in 1978. Those rules require the government to get a warrant from a secret court for all foreign surveillance activities.

Walker’s ruling was clear:

“Congress appears to have intended to—and did—establish the exclusive means for foreign intelligence activities to be conducted. Whatever power the executive may otherwise have had in this regard, FISA limits the power of the executive branch to conduct such activities and it limits the executive branch’s authority to assert the state secrets privilege in response to challenges to the legality of its foreign intelligence surveillance activities.”

The timing of the ruling is interesting, coming as it does as the US Senate is reworking FISA, part of which would grant retroactive immunity to the telephone companies that cooperated with the executive branch’s illegal warrantless wiretap program. The US House of Representatives has already passed such legislation.

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Has Boing Boing jumped the shark?

By Michael Fraase

Friday, 04 July 2008 10:41AM CDT

Section: Media

Jumping the sharkBoing Boing was one of the first things I read every day, and not just because it was near the top of my RSS aggregator. It really was a “directory of wonderful things.” Now I’m not so sure. The group publication has disappeared some of its writings. The Boingers call it “unpublished,” but any reference to a former friend of theirs has been purged from the website.

On first glance, this seems like a petty personal dispute that got out of hand. But let’s bracket that part of the issue for the moment. The reasons behind the unpublishing appear to be trivial and petty, even silly. But the unpublishing itself is a much more serious matter. So let’s separate the the why from the what, ignoring for now the former and focusing on the latter.

Unpublishing, self-censorship, external censorship, and redaction all have serious implications for the still-emerging internet media space. Call it the blogosphere, citizen journalism, little-j journalism, amateur journalism, or whatever you like. Attempts to codify the ethics of the medium have been made—most notably by Rebecca Blood in 2002—and are the generally accepted consensus.

This is especially problematic for a website like Boing Boing who has collectively and individually outspokenly championed the causes of freedom of expression, transparency, fairness, and openness in all media and business in general, and online publishing in particular.

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Last ditch plans to derail FISA bill in US Senate

By Michael Fraase

Thursday, 26 June 2008 08:19PM CDT

Section: Privacy

WiretapLast week the US House of Representatives voted to retroactively legalize warrantless wiretaps and grant immunity to US telecommunications corporations that cooperated with the program.

This week, Christopher Dodd (D-Connecticut) and Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) are leading opposition to a companion bill working its way through the US Senate. Dodd successfully derailed a similar bill last December with a filibuster. On Tuesday he delivered an exceptionally well-reasoned speech from the Senate floor, promising another filibuster for this version of the legislation. Dodd cited allegations by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) in his address:

“Clear, first-hand whistleblower documentary evidence [states] ... that for year on end every e-mail, every text message, and every phone call carried over the massive fiber-optic links of sixteen separate companies routed through AT&T’s Internet hub in San Francisco—hundreds of millions of private, domestic communications—have been ... copied in their entirety by AT&T and knowingly diverted wholesale by means of multiple ‘splitters’ into a secret room controlled exclusively by the NSA.”

Dodd goes on to cite Judge Vaughn Walker, the judge overseeing EFF’s lawsuit against AT&T, who wrote, “AT&T cannot seriously contend that a reasonable entity in its position could have believed that the alleged domestic dragnet was legal.”

The point is, according to Dodd, that the issue needs to be decided in a court of law, not the US Congress.

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