Yesterday Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.), a longtime critic of the surveillance state and the "secret law" undergirding it, gave a sobering speech at the Center for American Progress. "If we do not seize this unique moment in our constitutional history to reform our surveillance laws and practices," he said, "we will all live to regret it." Wyden warned that "the combination of increasingly advanced technology with a breakdown in the checks and balances that limit government action" threatens to give us "an always expanding, omnipresent surveillance state that—hour by hour—chips needlessly away at the liberties and freedoms our Founders established for us, without the benefit of actually making us any safer." Here are six points Wyden made that you should keep in mind during the debate over the National Security Agency's mass collection of data on law-abiding Americans:
[...]
The secret rulings of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court have interpreted the Patriot Act, as well as section 702 of the FISA statute, in some surprising ways, and these rulings are kept entirely secret from the public. Americans recognize that intelligence agencies will sometimes need to conduct secret operations, but they don't think those agencies should be relying on secret law...It is a fundamental principle of American democracy that laws should not be public only when it is convenient for government officials to make them public. They should be public all the time,open to review by adversarial courts, and subject to change by an accountable legislature guided by an informed public. If Americans are not able to learn how their government is interpreting and executing the law, then we have effectively eliminated the most important bulwark of our democracy....Without public laws, and public court rulings interpreting those laws, it is impossible to have informed public debate.
President Obama claims to welcome the debate about NSA surveillance while treating the man who made it possible as a criminal and doing everything in his power to prevent ordinary Americans from learning enough to decide for themselves whether they want to exchange their privacy for his promise of safety. It is therefore hilarious that the White House, in yesterday's statement urging members of Congress to vote against an amendment that would bar the NSA from spending money on the indiscriminate collection of Americans' phone records, complained that the measure was "not the product of an informed, open, or deliberative process."
