Bush legalizes NSA progam

The New York Times today reported that Bush has signed into law a new bill that "broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants." Basically, it puts the Attorney General (As Cory Doctorow would say, Chief Torturer and Selective Amnesiac Alberto Gonzales) the power to approve international surveillance. It turns out those secret courts that were set up to approve this kind of stuff just were getting in the way too much! Funny, even they felt some obligation to defend American liberties, something that this president clearly does not value.

How did he ever get away with this? What was that whole wiretapping scandal about? Wasn't there enough of an outcry that the President knew that he could never get away with something like this again? Well, apparently not because he just did.

This development is troubling, but another disturbing revelation comes towards the end of the article:

In January, the administration placed the N.S.A.’s warrantless wiretapping program under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, and subjected it for the first time to the scrutiny of the FISA court.

Democratic Congressional aides said Sunday that they believed that pressure from major telecommunications companies on the White House was a major factor in persuading the Bush administration to do that. Those companies were facing major lawsuits for having secretly cooperated with the warrantless wiretapping program, and now wanted greater legal protections before cooperating further.

But the change suddenly swamped the court with an enormous volume of search warrant applications, leading, in turn, to the administration’s decision to seek the new legislation.

So you're saying that 1) the only reason that the wiretapping thing ever became such an issue was because the telcos were playing a big game of lobbyist-CYA and 2) that following due process just became too troublesome to deal with? WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON WITH THIS COUNTRY???