At the same time, the fact that these actions, which fall very clearly under the jurisdiction of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, are not being monitored by the legally-empowered court (the aforementioned Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, hereafter abbreviated FISC) implies that there is something to hide there.

FISC is a secret court; all proceedings within that court are closed to public scrutiny in the first place as a measure to prevent the leakage of sensitive information. That measure is effective. It is also extremely permissive about warrants.

What is it that the Bush Administration doesn’t want FISC to see, then? There haven’t been any moves to change the relevant legislation. That would have been the proper response, not ignoring it. The Executive Branch’s power is limited to that necessary to carry out the duties assigned to it by the Constitution and Congress. They explicitly did _not_ assign the power to unilaterally disregard the Fourth Amendment or the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (hereafter FISA).

I’m not comfortable with a government that believes that flat-out unconstitutional action, in plain violation of statutory law and the Fourth Amendment as well as the intentions of the legislators, is permitted. The federal government explicitly does not have the power to do that. The issue here is not just the privacy of American citizens, it is the fundamental violation of the Constitution. It’s the fact that someone seems to think that, when it’s inconvenient, the Constitution doesn’t apply, which is, frankly, bullshit.

Benjamin Franklin once said, “Those who would sacrifice a little liberty for security deserve neither liberty nor security.” Those Constitutional protections are not in place as a pleasant peacetime idea but as protection against crimes that have been committed in the past. The statutes relating to them, including FISA, have been changed over the years in response to government abuses of power against the innocent, even against those who had nothing to hide in the first place. FISA itself was enacted to cover this particular gray area and is one of the simplest, most black-and-white pieces of statutory law on the books. What is not clear about this?

By engaging in these actions, the Bush Administration is very clearly and explicitly violating FISA and the Fourth Amendment. This is not a violation of the right to privacy (and I will note that all powers not specifically granted the government are reserved to the states or the people, as appropriate, under the Tenth Amendment). This is a violation of the Fourth Amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure, as clarified and laid out in FISA. The Bush Administration is unilaterally claiming that it has the power to do this, a power it explicitly lacks. For that matter, members of the Congressional leadership on both sides of the aisle have stated that the Authorization to Use Military Force did not authorize these actions (and without changes to statutory law, that authorization’s ability to do any such thing would be debatable).

Are you familiar with the concept of rule of law? Or perhaps the intentions of the Founding Fathers? Maybe, perhaps, the social contract? I don’t know how to make this any clearer than this statement: the government is subject to the law just as its citizens are, _if not more so_. Under FISA and the Fourth Amendment, the federal government must go to FISC for authorization to perform the sorts of surveillance the Terrorist Surveillance Program reportedly conducts. It isn’t, a fact that both NSA officials and FISC itself have confirmed.

Search and seizure without warrants based on reasonable proof is explicitly illegal and unconstitutional in this country and has been for over two centuries. There have been past arguments similar to yours, arguments at times where the United States was, if anything, in more peril than it is today from Islamic extremists (nuclear annihilation via Russian weapons comes to mind). Those arguments have been consistently rejected by the courts, the legislature, and, most importantly, the people, which the government is to serve and protect. The government does not decide what is right and wrong, the people do, as expressed in their choice of legislators, and they have continually decided that this act, search and seizure without the supervision of a judge, is wrong.