Sep
18

Sarah Palin’s Leaked Emails and Right Wing Hypocrisy

jeff civil liberties, Election 2008, Republicans Add your comment

So the big story today is the uproar over Sarah Palin’s Yahoo account being hacked and a couple emails subsequently being leaked to the internet.  It appears nothing terribly damaging will likely come of the affair.  The McCain campaign released a statement calling the hacking “a shocking invasion of the Governor’s privacy and a violation of law.”  It certainly was an illegal act for which the perpetrators should be prosecuted.  But as usual, Glenn Greenwald does a masterful job exposing the outrage being expressed by the Right as little more than self-righteous sanctimony.  I recommend reading his article on the matter in full, but here are a few excerpts:

[I]t’s really a wondrous, and repugnant, sight to behold the Bush-following lynch mobs on the Right melodramatically defend the Virtues of Privacy and the Rule of Law. These, of course, are the same authoritarians who have cheered on every last expansion of the Lawless Surveillance State of the last eight years — put their fists in the air with glee as the Federal Government seized the power to listen to innocent Americans’ telephone calls; read our emails; obtain our banking, credit card, and library records; and create vast data bases of every call we make and receive and every prescription we fill and every instance of travel and other vast categories of information that remain largely unknown — all without warrants or oversight of any kind and often in clear violation of the law.

[. . . .]

As despicable as I personally find the Palin hacking to be, it pales in comparison to the Bush crimes, because when someone runs for President or Vice President, they voluntarily cede vast amounts of their personal privacy, which is why they’re required to disclose things like their medical records, tax returns, assocational history, and other financial documents — all information that private Americans, at least in theory in the pre-Bush era, had the right to keep private. Those subjected to Bush’s illegal surveillance programs have done nothing to cede their privacy — other than live in a country which has decided to abolish most privacy protections.

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Jul
10

Senate Passes New FISA Bill, Grants Telecom Immunity

mediainfidel civil liberties, Democrats, FISA, Republicans 2 comments

With the president’s approval ratings at an all time low, the US Senate passed new FISA legislation which legalizes spying on American citizens and legitimizes Bush’s secret wiretapping program. The bill passed 69-28 and the president is expected to sign it into law shortly. An important area of contention is that it grants retroactive immunity to all the telecom companies that participated in the program. As Senator Russ Feingold noted in his opposition remarks during the Senate debate:

The bill the Senate is considering would grant retroactive immunity to any companies that cooperated with a blatantly illegal program that went on for more than five years – and that the administration repeatedly misled Congress about.

If Congress short-circuits these lawsuits, we will have lost a prime opportunity to finally achieve accountability for these years of law-breaking. That’s why the administration has been fighting so hard for this immunity. It knows that the cases that have been brought directly against the government face much more difficult procedural barriers, and are unlikely to result in rulings on the merits.

These lawsuits may be the last chance to obtain a judicial ruling on the lawfulness of the warrantless wiretapping program. It’s bad enough that Congress abdicated its responsibility to hold the President accountable for breaking the law. Now it is trying to absolve those who allegedly participated in his lawlessness. Mr. President, this body should be condemning this administration for its law-breaking – not letting the companies that allegedly cooperated off the hook.

Such lawsuits were our best chance at finding out the true extent and scope of this program. And furthermore, while administration officials say it was instituted in response to the terrorist attacks of 9-11, other information suggests it predates those events by as much as six months and possibly longer. A tool like this was ripe for abuse, with the focus easily shifting from security matters to political ones. But now we may never know.

So one has to ask the question, Why did so many Democrats – including Barack Obama who originally pledged to filibuster any bill that included retro-active immunity – vote for the legislation? Well one part of the answer might lie in that well-known but too-often unexamined phrase “Follow the money.” But the good people over at American New Project have done just that:

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