USA PATRIOT Act, Domestic Security Enhancement Act, C-7 (see), etc. It just never seems to stop, does it?
My thoughts, I’m pretty sure, can’t top the supposed Franklin quotation about people who would trade liberty for security. I’ll quote someone else, just as concise and valuable, for the sake of diversity:
“Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficent. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greatest dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”
— Justice Louis D. Brandeis in Olmstead vs U.S. (1928)
The process still continues. For example, the U.S. Government is explicitly making it legal to do more spying on it’s own people–by the military in this case–as described in this story. [via]
The Pentagon would be granted new powers to conduct undercover intelligence gathering inside the United States—and then withhold any information about it from the public—under a series of little noticed provisions now winding their way through Congress.
Citing in part the need for “greater latitude” in the war on terror, the Senate Intelligence Committee recently approved broad-ranging legislation that gives the Defense Department a long sought and potentially crucial waiver: it would permit its intelligence agents, such as those working for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), to covertly approach and cultivate “U.S. persons” and even recruit them as informants—without disclosing they are doing so on behalf of the U.S. government. The Senate committee’s action comes as President George W. Bush has talked of expanding military involvement in civil affairs, such as efforts to control pandemic disease outbreaks.
Canadians, sadly, are no better. We’re doing the whole “force the providers to make things tappable” hussle. Here’s the Globe & Mail story on it:
The federal government is demanding that the telecommunications industry build a wiretapping capacity into their networks that would allow authorities to conduct round-the-clock surveillance on the e-mail, Internet or phone use of more than 8,000 people at a time, sources say.
Our own Public Safety Minister (and for the record, I find that title just as Orwellian and creepy as ‘Homeland Security’) explains that this change is necessary to fight organized crime…
“At the end of the day, we cannot let technological change stand in the way of, for example, law enforcement agencies dealing with organized crime. They use technology to conceal what they do, to move their laundered money, to traffic in humans, to traffic in drugs, to traffic in guns, and we have to be able to intercept their communications to break up those kinds of networks.”
I find it interesting that the proposed changes seem more suited to finding people who are swapping movie files than to ongoing investigations of organized crime. On the plus side, at least the taps themselves still require judicial review… at least unless and until that whole “interim order” thing gets passed.
Even with judicial review though, there are concerns…
Privacy watchdogs have argued that building a larger interception capacity paves the way for abuses and say far greater public scrutiny is needed.
“All you need is the ability to do something and it will be abused if there’s not enough scrutiny, and Canada has failed in that regard,” said Darrel Evans, executive director of the Freedom of Information and Privacy Association. “And the more you have this kind of increased power, the more you need to increase the power of your watchdogs.”
And speaking of the need for watchdogs as powers expand, check out this story about Hamdan v. Bush:
…
Last November, a federal judge ruled that the new military commission procedures are unlawful because they violate Hamdan’s rights under the Geneva Conventions. This summer, disagreeing, a federal appeals court ruled that the President may deny an individual the protections of the Geneva Conventions and that his denial of those protections is not subject to judicial review.All agree that Hamdan’s case raises profound questions about the scope of presidential power and the role of the federal courts in reviewing presidential action and enforcing treaties. The government has urged the Justices to wait to take up these questions until Hamdan has been tried, but a distinguished group of retired generals and admirals, whom I represent, has told the Justices that these questions cannot wait.
…
That’s a link to a PDF of the actual amicus curiae brief. These guys are not just some random generals. Check this out:
Brigadier General David M. Brahms served in the United States Marie Corps from 1963 through 1988, with a tour of duty in Vietnam. He served as principal legal advisor for POW matters at Marine Corps Headquarters in the 1970s and was directly involved in issues realting to the return of American POWs from Vietnam. From 1985 though 1988, he was senior legal adviser fpr the Marine Corps. General Brahms is a member of the Board of Directors of the Judge Advocates Association.
And that’s just one guy from the list. Others were the Chief Judge of the Army Court of Criminal Appeals, the Judge Advocate General of the Army, Inspector General of the Navy, the Judge Advocate General of the Navy, and so on.
The brief is worth reading–career military men have a different perspective on these things than tinfoil hat privacy/civil liberty/checks-and-balances guys like me, but when we agree that something is wrong, that’s a pretty good sign that it might actually be wrong.
