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On Domestic Spying
by Aaron F.
Most of you have seen my posts having to do with domestic spying, where I said that I did no think it should be news, since it has always gone on and will probably continue to go on without our knowledge. While I still believe this to be true, there were some facts that I was not aware of until recently that make me feel somewhat differently about the issue.
First of all, domestic spying DID occur in our past, and in fact it was rampant during the McCarthy era of the red scare, and during J. Edgar Hoover's reign in general. There are well documented cases as recently as the 1970s of 60s activists like Abbie Hoffman, for example, being surveilled and harassed by US intelligence agencies. What I was not aware of was that in 1978 during the Carter administration, the US citizens got sick of being spied upon and there was a law put into place that prohibited the government from spying on its citizens without getting approval from a judge.
A process was set up whereby the President can very quickly (within minutes) obtain the authority to spy on citizens from the judge. This controversy has surfaced because apparantly the judge resigned in protest to the fact that the Bush administration was no longer following the process set up in 1978 to obtain the authority to spy on citizens. I have heard Cheney, in interviews, say that they are only spying on those who are engaged in conversations with Al Qaeda and that they have been acting within the law.
The fact that they have not been following the process seems to refute Cheney's statement. And it has also since come to light that the Bush administration has been spying on organizations that have nothing to do with terrorists, such as PETA. PETA, though they are a reprehensible group of wannabe activists who don't really know what's good for animals and what is not, are not engaged with Muslim extremists. It may very well be that members of PETA could be considered environmental terrorists. They do sometimes break the law by harassing veterinary clinics, municipal animal control (after all, animals should not be "controlled" by us humans and should be allowed to multiply and starve to death in our alleyways) and people that like to eat meat. But this seems to me like the sort of thing that local law enforcement should be handling, instead of the FBI, the CIA, or the Bush administration.
I still believe that domestic spying always has and always will occur in secret by our government. One can only hope that it is done only to keep us safe from real, credible threats to national security. But recent events have left me wondering: why is the Bush administration sidestepping the process put into place to obtain the proper authority to spy on its citizens? And why are they spying on people and organizations that do NOT pose a real, credible threat to national security. And lastly, what can we do about it?
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