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Big Brother is muscling Founding Fathers aside Pensacola News Journal | May 16 2006 When the subject of wiretaps was raised in 2004, during a speech in Buffalo, New York, President Bush soothed concerns over government snooping by assuring us the government needed, and got, legal warrants. When that proved not to be true, the president assured us that only suspected terrorists were targeted, and that only international calls were tapped. Officials said the National Security Agency "still seeks warrants to monitor entirely domestic communications," The New York Times reported in 2005. That assurance was weakened when it was reported that the FBI asked the NSA to stop giving it so many "leads," because the agency literally didn't have enough agents to investigate them all. That gave many people pause -- surely there couldn't be that many suspected terrorists in the United States, making suspicious phone calls. Now that the "suspected terrorist" and "international calls only" stories have folded -- USA Today reported last week the NSA is creating a database of every phone call made in the United States, to analyze resulting "patterns" -- the government is assuring us it isn't actually listening to the calls, or identifying the names of the callers. Call it the P.T. Barnum method of government: Sell the suckers whatever they'll buy. Congress, unfortunately, appears to have bought the whole package. Unless it remembers its constitutional role in coming weeks, Congress has already abdicated its co-equal role in government. The Bush administration has used its declaration of an open-ended war on terror, and its expansive view of "wartime" executive power, to cow Congress, which has watched the administration openly neuter congressional oversight. As it is, Congress can't even rouse itself to contest the president's use of bill signing statements to reshape any law Congress sends him by imposing a unilateral "interpretation" of the law and the Constitution. Too many American corporations, meanwhile, already wedded to Washington through the corrupt system of lobbying and campaign "contributions," are ready to sell out Americans' rights without a warrant: While BellSouth, Verizon and AT&T were willing to hand the government private telephone records, only Qwest had the integrity to refuse, citing concerns that it would violate federal law. (At the moment, we don't know if Internet and cable companies have been asked to turn over records, and if so, if they complied.) As for the American people, the administration keeps repeating "trust me." Unfortunately, despite this administration's untrustworthy track record, significant numbers of the people are buying in. Worse, they appear to prefer being ignorant about what is being done to them. The threat is that government -- including past U.S. administrations -- always abuses unchecked power. Even if we assume the Bush administration hasn't -- what about the next one? How soon before an administration succumbs to the temptation to use such power for its own purposes? The Founding Fathers understood this all too well and designed the Constitution as a system of checks and balances designed to prevent any one branch of government from attaining too much power. The American people used to understand this, too. But fear has made "security" the new watchword, and Big Brother is muscling the Founding Fathers aside. ---------------------------------------------------
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