Saturday, December 17, 2005

NSA spying on U.S. citizens

It was revealed this week that President Bush authorized the National Security Agency to spy on U.S. citizens, and he’s been doing so since 9/11.

Now, I’m not one of these naïve people who think “If you’ve got nothing to hide, you shouldn’t be worried about your government spying on you,” but I do wonder why everyone thinks this is significant. The FBI and the local police spy on Americans every day, right? That’s okay but when the NSA does it it’s wrong?

Or are people mad because the NY Times sat on this story for a year and it could've changed the 2004 election?

2 comments:

Unknown said...

I think the difference in what Bush has admitted to authorizing, and what local police, the FBI, and the NSA may or may not be doing every day is that there is some oversight by the courts.

When the FBI or local cops want to do a wiretap, they have to get a judge to authorize it. The judicial branch checks the executive branch.

What Bush did was to bypass that check all together and do the spying anyway. That's bad. No judicial oversight, no nothing. This is a clear violation of the seperation of powers. Even congress it ticked off about this clear abuse of power.

Michelle Pessoa said...

Ah! Good explanation, FV.