Defending the Fourth Amendment

In Monday's New York Times, Studs Terkel defends the integrity of the Fourth Amendment. Studs understands more than most how unchecked surveillance of Americans can evolve into political investigations and blacklists. Terrorism is the new Communism for those who attempt to rationalize blanket wiretapping without probable cause. Now, instead of blacklisting and COINTELPRO, we have politicians playing the fear card at every turn, the terrorism watch list and extraordinary rendition, or kidnapping.

I was among those blacklisted for my political beliefs. My crime? I had signed petitions. Lots of them. I had signed on in opposition to Jim Crow laws and poll taxes and in favor of rent control and pacifism. Because the petitions were thought to be Communist-inspired, I lost my ability to work in television and radio after refusing to say that I had been “duped” into signing my name to these causes.

By the 1960s, the inequities in civil rights and the debate over the Vietnam war spurred social justice movements. The government’s response? More surveillance. In the name of national security, the F.B.I. conducted warrantless wiretaps of political activists, journalists, former White House staff members and even a member of Congress.

When Nixon claimed that, "when the President does it, that means that it is not illegal" he revealed his support for the unitary executive that Dick Cheney has spent the last few decades trying to restore. But public opinion was with the Church Committee hearings, not Nixon. Congress managed to restore some checks and balances to the secret government by passing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) of 1978.

The Bush administration, however, tore apart that carefully devised legal structure and social compact. To make matters worse, after its intrusive programs were exposed, the White House and the Senate Intelligence Committee proposed a bill that legitimized blanket wiretapping without individual warrants. The legislation directly conflicts with the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, requiring the government to obtain a warrant before reading the e-mail messages or listening to the telephone calls of its citizens, and to state with particularity where it intends to search and what it expects to find.

Compounding these wrongs, Congress is moving in a haphazard fashion to provide a “get out of jail free card” to the telephone companies that violated the rights of their subscribers. Some in Congress argue that this law-breaking is forgivable because it was done to help the government in a time of crisis. But it’s impossible for Congress to know the motivations of these companies or to know how the government will use the private information it received from them.

That is the crux of the matter. How can we trust the executive branch to never spy on people for political reasons which have nothing to do at all with safeguarding America's security? The answer is, we can't and shouldn't. Now we just need Congress to do their jobs and defend our rights from the abuse of our most partisan and incompetent unitary executive.