Vol. 77/No. 11      March 25, 2013

The court rejected a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Amnesty International and other groups and individuals charging the tapping of international telephone and email communications violates the First and Fourth Amendments of the U.S. Constitution.

The majority of Supreme Court justices in the 5-4 decision argued plaintiffs failed to show they had directly been harmed by the law and therefore had no basis for suing.

Following the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, the George W. Bush administration secretly instructed the National Security Agency to conduct a program of spying on international communications, circumventing the usual judicial rubber-stamping procedures.

In 2005, the New York Times revealed aspects of the warrantless spying, which Congress “legitimatized,” with the overwhelming bipartisan passage of the FISA Amendments Act in July 2008.

The 2008 law was appended to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, to “provide the intelligence community with additional authority to meet the challenges of modern technology and international terrorism,” the Feb. 26 ruling says.

FISA was adopted in 1978 following the Watergate scandal and lawsuits filed by the Socialist Workers Party and others that revealed widespread spying and disruption against unionists, Black rights fighters and other political activists by the FBI and other government spy outfits. (See Militant 25, 50 and 75 years ago column on page 5.) It was promoted by liberals and civil libertarians as a way to restrain “illegal” spying, opening the door to ongoing use of FBI snoops within a new legal framework.

Under FISA, the government set up secret courts empowered to approve wiretaps and search warrants requested by spy agencies. In its first 26 years, FISA courts turned down only five of the 19,000 requests from federal cops, according to the Times.

In long, complex circumlocution, the Supreme Court argued that plaintiffs can’t prove anything unconstitutional is being done because it is being done in complete secrecy.

Even if plaintiffs could somehow prove that they are personally harmed by specific instances of secret spying, there is no way they can know if any of that spying is authorized through FISA or some other channel. “The Government has numerous other methods of conducting surveillance, none of which is challenged here,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote in the majority opinion.

Meanwhile, senators were coming up with a way to deal with contention around the administration’s legal rationalizations for targeting U.S. citizens for assassination.

Following congressional hearings on John Brennan, President Barack Obama’s nominee for CIA director, Senate Intelligence Committee chairwoman Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), Senate Judiciary chairman Pat Leahy (D-Vt.), and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) called for setting up a new special court—modeled after the secret FISA courts—to review administration kill list proposals.  
 
 
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