Surveillance without limits

With the passage of the Protect America Act of 2007, Congress has given President George W Bush virtually unlimited power to conduct electronic surveillance on emails and telephone calls entering and leaving the United States.
It is difficult to see why any president, especially this one, should be given such powers. The development is particularly strange considering all the rhetoric and widespread condemnation by Democrat leaders and civil liberties groups alike over Bush's past disregard for the rules on electronic surveillance. It would seem that the Protect America Act gives a sort of retroactive approval for the Bush administration's previous actions, which a secret court created by the 1978 Foreign Surveillance Intelligence Act (FISA) ruled were illegal earlier this year.
Under FISA, administration officials are required to present reasonable cause for surveillance operations to secret courts set up under the act. Historically, authorisation has been practically automatic.
When news became public on July 31 that the FISA court had declared certain of the Bush administration's surveillance activities illegal, Mr Bush immediately began pressuring Congress to revise the FISA law to allow warrant-less interception of communications routed through America, and to do it before the annual congressional recess in August. First the Senate, and then the House, complied in passing the act as written by the White House, discarding an alternate bill by some of the Democrat opposition which would have placed more limits on such surveillance. To urge passage, Mr Bush left little doubt that those who opposed it would be branded as soft on terrorism, a mantra that was taken up even by some Democrats. Said Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein: ''The intelligence community is deeply concerned that chatter among suspected terrorist networks is up. I am concerned as well. We are living in a period of heightened vulnerability and must give the intelligence community the tools they need.''
The senator from California is right, of course. But does this mean there should be no limits on what governments are allowed in the name of stopping terrorism? As mentioned above, approval for surveillance by FISA courts has in the past been almost automatic, but it does require that a rationale be given. In pushing the ''revision'' of FISA, Mr Bush also said that the act was passed nearly 30 years ago and had not kept up with new technological developments. As the American Civil Liberties Union noted after the passage of the act, Mr Bush neglected to mention that FISA had been updated 50 times over those last 30 years, and 20 times since 9/11.
Apparently a large part of the administration's insistence on having total freedom in this regard is because the need for specific court authorisation would prevent the practice of ''data mining'', in which all incoming and outgoing emails and telephone calls are monitored for certain key words or phrases. It has been pointed out that such a practice is highly intensive in terms of intelligence manpower that might be better put to use elsewhere. At some point real agents must be employed in sifting through mountains of information to get to something that might be useful, or might also be planted as a decoy.
As well, it is widely believed that al-Qaeda operatives consider that all of their phone calls and emails are being watched, and therefore all important contact is person-to-person.
It is somewhat ironic that the Bush administration wants to be able to look into the private lives of its citizens and anyone who comes into contact with them without restriction, but they themselves take secrecy to an unprecedented level by claiming executive powers that would cause the US founding fathers to turn in their graves. True, the founding fathers never had to worry about anything like al-Qaeda. It may be necessary to surrender some freedoms, not only in the US, but in Thailand and elsewhere, but there is no reason that this should be done without judicial oversight.
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