Boztopia.com

I haven’t written much in recent months about the ongoing battle to end the illegal spying conducted by the NSA, and the effort to grant the telecom companies who enable the program amnesty from prosecution, because much of the dealings have been cloaked in secrecy and hidden in backrooms. Well, it’s all coming out now, and it’s worse than I feared. Not only is the so-called “compromise” on the table a worthless rubber-stamp to justify retroactive immunity for huge lawbreaking, but the architect of this comity is a Democrat–Steny Hoyer, come on down:

Speaking to reporters in his regular weekly briefing, Hoyer said that legislation renewing the wiretapping program could be on the floor of the House as soon as Friday.He wouldn’t divulge specific details of the compromise solution other than to say it “would be better” than the version of the legislation passed by the Senate last year.

As I wrote back in January, any of the new “compromises” suggested to supplant FISA only succeed in granting the government massive new surveillance powers with absolutely no oversight or control of any kind. I’m mystified as to why Steny Hoyer is selling out his party, his leadership, and his principles to broker this deal. He hasn’t even gotten a huge amount of money from telecoms for his campaigns over the years–he received double the donations from the cable industry than he did from AT&T. So what’s his angle? Does he really hate the rule of law and the Constitution that much? As Glenn Greenwald put it:

Hoyer spends his time in Washington expending enormous amounts of his political capital and energy working to obtain amnesty for the nation’s richest and most powerful telecom corporations which, for years, broke far more serious laws in enabling the Bush administration illegally to spy on Americans. Hoyer is working to perpetuate a two-tiered system of justice in America where rich corporations with lobbyists and big campaign contributions are literally allowed to break our most serious laws and receive retroactive amnesty, while ordinary citizens have their lives destroyed over the pettiest offenses, as America turns itself into the world’s largest prison state.

It disgusts me to think that the same people who so vociferously opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants as legitimizing lawbreaking are nowhere to be found for this, one of the largest “retroactive pardons” I’ve ever seen. There’s no indication that it even works to actually capture suspected terrorists, and that was never the point. Unsupervised, unlimited warrantless wiretapping is but one facet of the massive intelligence dragnet envisioned by people like Mike McConnell, where the business of intelligence gathering is completely outsourced to the private sector,without any checks or balances to stop it.

What good is the Fourth Amendment when all the work is being handled by big corporations, against which (as we are regularly reminded) rules such as free speech do not apply? How can your emails, your phone calls, your text messages, and the like have any reasonable expectation of privacy? Either laws apply to everyone, or they don’t. If they don’t, then let’s stop pretending the Constitution has any meaning anymore and that laws are meant for anything other than oppressing the masses to protect the wealthy and powerful.

Worse yet, Barack Obama–who has strongly opposed any expansion of surveillance or telecom immunity in the past–is not only AWOL in this fight, but he’s busy cutting radio endorsements of House candidates that support the very same surveillance expansion. If this disgrace passes the House, the Senate is the only place to stop it. Chris Dodd, who magnificently led the fight against the surveillance expansion last year, is going to be conveniently sidelined this time because of his entanglement with Countrywide. But Obama has the power to step up and make even the most blissfully unaware supporters of his realize how serious this is, and what they need to do to fight it.

But we can’t wait for him to make up his mind–we have to get out there and let Congress know that the rules by which our country abides by still matter. If this goes through, it will be a dark day in our history, and one which we will feel the repercussions from for a long time.